Intro to Logical Reasoning (Aug 2024)
Transcript
Welcome to the LSAT logical reasoning section. In this lesson, we are just gonna walk through the basics of the section and give you a little bit of an introduction to what to expect. So logical reasoning, first of all, tests skills, not knowledge. What I mean by that is that, it's going to be concerned with measuring your ability to read and think critically rather than requiring you, excuse me, requiring you to have a bunch of outside knowledge on any one particular topic.
So the only exception to that might be that if you're familiar with the basics of formal logic, that's some knowledge that could benefit you. But again, really what they're after here is how well you read and how well you think. Next, the logical reasoning section makes up a full 66% of your LSAT score. This is because there are two scored logical reasoning sections on the test.
And each of those sections has about 25 to 26 questions. So this is the most heavily weighed portion of the LSAT. There's lots of variety on the logical reasoning section. You will often hear people talk about logical reasoning question types and there are more than a dozen of those. So that can seem a little bit overwhelming at first, but as you'll see from walking through the rest of these videos, a lot of those question types are relatively similar to one another and a couple of basic approaches can get you through all of them comfortably.
And lastly, the logical reasoning section overlaps reading comprehension in the skills that it measures. Logical reasoning and reading comprehension are similar because they're both testing your ability to break an argument down into its component pieces to understand its structure and to use context to make reasonable deductions. And lastly, the logical reasoning, as I've already stated, there's gonna be two of them.
But in addition to that, there's gonna be possibly one unscored logical reasoning section. And that's if, by chance, you get an experimental section that's also logical reasoning. So that might seem a little overwhelming. But I guarantee you once you become familiar with this section, it's not gonna be a big deal.
The only downside is that, you can't predict which section is the experimental one, so you have to treat all three of them equally. So what is the structure of a logical reasoning section? It is 35 minutes long just like every other section of the LSAT, so that's nice and easy to remember. I've already mentioned this briefly, but it has roughly 25 questions per section.
It's a possibility that there will be 26, there's always 25 or 26 questions in there. And that means that you usually have a total of 50 to 52 logical reasoning questions on the entire exam. The difficulty fluctuates, but it does increase on average. What this means is that, there's not gonna be a perfect progression from the easiest question to the hardest question in the section.
However, questions 1 through 5 are pretty much always, on average, going to be easier than questions 20 through 25, right? So there might be little dips and fluctuations along the way, so it's kind of shaped something like that, but as you can see, the difficulty level gets higher and higher as you go. So that's it for the logical reasoning section basics, and now we're ready to move into some of the more specifics.
Read full transcriptSo the only exception to that might be that if you're familiar with the basics of formal logic, that's some knowledge that could benefit you. But again, really what they're after here is how well you read and how well you think. Next, the logical reasoning section makes up a full 66% of your LSAT score. This is because there are two scored logical reasoning sections on the test.
And each of those sections has about 25 to 26 questions. So this is the most heavily weighed portion of the LSAT. There's lots of variety on the logical reasoning section. You will often hear people talk about logical reasoning question types and there are more than a dozen of those. So that can seem a little bit overwhelming at first, but as you'll see from walking through the rest of these videos, a lot of those question types are relatively similar to one another and a couple of basic approaches can get you through all of them comfortably.
And lastly, the logical reasoning section overlaps reading comprehension in the skills that it measures. Logical reasoning and reading comprehension are similar because they're both testing your ability to break an argument down into its component pieces to understand its structure and to use context to make reasonable deductions. And lastly, the logical reasoning, as I've already stated, there's gonna be two of them.
But in addition to that, there's gonna be possibly one unscored logical reasoning section. And that's if, by chance, you get an experimental section that's also logical reasoning. So that might seem a little overwhelming. But I guarantee you once you become familiar with this section, it's not gonna be a big deal.
The only downside is that, you can't predict which section is the experimental one, so you have to treat all three of them equally. So what is the structure of a logical reasoning section? It is 35 minutes long just like every other section of the LSAT, so that's nice and easy to remember. I've already mentioned this briefly, but it has roughly 25 questions per section.
It's a possibility that there will be 26, there's always 25 or 26 questions in there. And that means that you usually have a total of 50 to 52 logical reasoning questions on the entire exam. The difficulty fluctuates, but it does increase on average. What this means is that, there's not gonna be a perfect progression from the easiest question to the hardest question in the section.
However, questions 1 through 5 are pretty much always, on average, going to be easier than questions 20 through 25, right? So there might be little dips and fluctuations along the way, so it's kind of shaped something like that, but as you can see, the difficulty level gets higher and higher as you go. So that's it for the logical reasoning section basics, and now we're ready to move into some of the more specifics.
