Fun With The LSAT!

Testmakers have a sense of humour too!


In an attempt to improve my living conditions, this humble author is taking a test this weekend that will be used to determine whether or not he'd make a decent lawyer. Hopefully this will lead to the acquisition of a job in the future, but at the very least it should help improve the living situation somewhat. Romantic improvements are totally absent from the proceedings, and will be for the foreseeable future.

What kind of test is this? Well, it's a test that looks at how well you read, how well you can parse arguments, and how well you can figure out the ordering of different computer programs that you update in some specific order, with different priority levels that are assigned without consideration for the order in which you update said programs*, and hope your brain doesn't explode in the process. That last section is appropriately titled "Logic Games", because that's exactly the kind of thing that any normal young kid would sign up for in an instant, and is also of course perfectly relevant because of the little-known fact that lawyers regularly engage in a 90-minute session of Logic Games every Thursday Afternoon, before the Hobo Riots occur that night. I would offer you the location of the store where you could purchase the home version of these games, but that's only disclosed to those who have earned a fancy law-talking degree.


The test will be the reason that you shouldn't be seeing any post from me on either Thursday or Friday, since I will be continuing my preparation for a test in which there's really no good preparation (stupid, non-knowledge-based test!). But I thought I'd let you in on the fun of the preparation by reprinting an anecdote that serves as a helpful hint in analyzing different arguments.

It is reprinted below:

What is an assumption? An assumption, both in life and on the LSAT, is a leap of logic that we make to get from one piece of information to another. For instance, if you see a friend of yours wearing a yellow shirt and you conclude that your friend likes yellow, you would be making the following assumptions:

1. Your friend is not color-blind and does not actually think he's wearing purple.
2. Your friend was not threatened by a madman who said that, unless he wore a yellow shirt for one month straight, his house would be burned to the ground.
3. Your friend was not down to his last clean shirt, the one that he wears when everything else needs to be washed.
4. Your friend...

I'm especially looking forward to using the "Yellow Shirt Madman" defense in a trial in my future. That's going to be a helluva case.



*actual problem