What these first few lessons are designed to do is give you an overview of the LSAT
Logic Games. We're going to give you some strategies and start seeing some immediate
improvement on your LSAT Logic Games Score. Now you are going to find much more detail
and a lot more detailed strategies in subsequent lessons in our full LSAT Prep Course online,
but this is enough to get you started and start seeing some immediate improvement now.
So they way we are going to go about this is first we will take a look at LSAT Logic
Games as a whole and how they fit into the LSAT and then we'll look at some very specific
strategies that you can use to apply to any LSAT Logic Game regardless of the category
or type of LSAT Logic Game. And then we will take those and test them so you'll get a chance
to take some quizzes and see how you are doing with those particular skills and then finally
we will go on and apply them to some actual LSAT logic games. So first of all let's look
at how the LSAT logic games fit into the test as a whole. So your LSAT is made up of four
scored sections and the logic games are one of those for four scored sections, so that
means they make up about twenty five percent of your LSAT score. Now for many students
this is the hardest twenty five percent of the test but for many of you it will also
be the easiest one that you can see some very quick improvement upon. So what is it that
our LSAT logic games are testing? Well according to the makers of the LSAT they are testing
your ability to understand complex structural relationships and that is supposed to mimic
or simulate the complex relationships that you might see in a legal problem. So let's
take a look at one of our LSAT logic games and we can break it down into its parts. So
looking at our actual LSAT logic game here you can see that at the top of the page you've
got a set of instructions and this is going to tell you some information about how to
answer these questions on the LSAT now we are going to look at this in more detail later
and see what it means but for now let's not worry about that, we'll dive right in and
take a look at the actual LSAT logic game. You can see that it is basically broken down
into three areas. First you've got an introductory paragraph and this just gives you the basic
structural format of this game. Then you've got a set of rules that tells you about the
relationships of the entities and how things work in this game and combined with your introductory
paragraph these rules are going to give you your diagram and help you set something up
so you can go forward to answer the questions. And that is the last component of the game
is the actual questions and they're just asking questions about how these entities in this
game relate to each other. Now you may be asking yourself what type of game that is?
Or what category it fits into? Well it doesn't ! Nowhere on the LSAT do they tell you what
type of game this is and that's a bit of a problem because a lot of LSAT courses and
textbooks will focus on the specific categories and types of games and while that's important
to be aware of it's not enough you need to have strategies that will approach all types
of LSAT games no matter what type they are. And a place to start without knowing what
type of game it is or what category it fits into. And that's what we are going to give
you here, we are going to give you a strategy that you can take in and approach a game no
matter what type of LSAT game it is. Now later on we will look at those specific types and
adjust our strategy accordingly and what that means is you can take this strategy move into
any game and start working on it, putting some things on the paper developing your diagram
and as you start to unlock what type of game it is or what category it fits into, then
you can adjust your strategy and add some more elements in. So let's go ahead look at
our strategy that works with any LSAT Logic Game. Whenever you look at the introductory
paragraph for your LSAT logic game, which of course they all have, you want to get three
things out of it. First you want to get out a list of entities, those are the characters
or the actors, the people, the places or things that are going to be moving around in this
game. You want to get a list of those entities. The second thing you want to get is the frequency
at which those entities occur, so do you have to use them once? Do you have to use them
twice? A minimum of twice? A maximum of five times each? Or can use them as many times
each as you want. And then finally, the third thing you need to get out of every introductory
paragraph for an LSAT logic game is placeholders and that is going to give you the basic structure
of your game. It is just going to be a set of lines, blank lines that you are going to
put your entities into. So again the three things are the Entities, the frequency at
which they occur and the place holders in which to put them.
Your entities are the actors, or the character's, or the people, the places, the things that
are moving around in your logic game. So this could be a list of clowns that are going to
be performing tricks and you've got names for them: Albert, Bob, Carrie, Doug and Egbert.
And you're going to represent them with the first letter of their name now sometimes you
can use numbers if you just are simply given numbers to represent your entities as in you've
got a code and you're generating it from a series of numbers from zero to four. You are
just going to put down the numbers zero to four. But if you're given specific names for
your entities you want to use the first letter from their name. So in the case with the clowns
we might have are clowns named A B C D and E. If more your entities has two names, so
we've got Donald Smith as one of your clowns. You only want to use one letter. It just gets
confusing when you have two letters because suddenly you're thinking Oh! is this DS going
to be one entity or two entities and once you get into the speed of the game you can
mistake it for two entities. So keep it simple, keep it consistent and just use one letter
to represent your entities. So you've got your list of names for entities and then you
are ready to go on and take a look at the frequency at which those entities occur.
Now the frequency of occurrence for entities in an LSAT logic game is something that a
lot of people miss when setting up their diagram because you don't really need it but it is
this extra piece of information they take you so much further and makes the game that
much easier. So you really want to make sure the record this information. And that is:
how many times can I use my entities? So in our previous example if I have clowns A B
C D and E, how many times can I use them? Can I use each crown exactly once or a minimum
of once or maybe I can use my clowns as many times as I want. You want to record that information.
You can put it down right next to your entities so you know exactly how many times you can
use them and then you'll be ready to go on and develop your place holders to put those
clowns or put those entities into. The place holders in a game give you the overall
structure of that game and they give you the places into which you are going to put those
entities. So it is kind of like the board game that you are going to put your pieces
on and the entities are the pieces. And you are going to lay out your place holders just
as simple lines. Just a simple blank line, like you would in a game of Hang-man where
you are going to put a letter or a number into it representing that entity. You are
always going to use simple blank lines to represent your place holders. There are really
three main ways you can setup your place holders you're either going to have them in a simple
order from left to right representing an order from first to last or Saturday to Thursday
or from the left side to the right side of or first to sixth in a race. That's your basic
way of representing your place holders so that's a basic order and you are going to
put it from left to right with some simple lines to represent where you are going to
put your entities. The second way you can represent your place holders is a little bit
more of an advanced twist on that order. Let's say you have a second element, let's say you've
got clowns performing their tracks but now we need to know exactly what type of trick
each clown is performing. So they are performing tricks in order from first to fifth but they
are also performing a certain type of trick. They are either dancing or juggling, well
you need to make note of that underneath or above each clown. So right next to each clown,
either underneath or above it, you want to have an extra line to represent what trick
it is they are performing. You can do this anytime you're given an additional level of
information that corresponds directly to each of the entities that you're putting in your
order. This gives you a bit of an advanced quarter and is used in advanced ordering games
where you've got two levels for your ordering. And this is your second way of laying out
your place holders, now you can expand this if you need three levels. Let's say we've
got each clown from order from first to fifth and they are performing a certain type of
trick that's your second line and then they are wearing a different color of clothing,
that can be your third line. So now we're just adding a third element. Now typically
in LSAT logic games you only get two lines here but you may get as many as three or more
so you can be prepared for that by just adding an extra set of lines when or an extra set
of place holders to record what's going on in this order. Now the final way the that
you can lay out your place holders for LSAT logic games is if we are putting them into
groups. So we are separating our clowns into happy clowns clowns and sad clowns or we are
separating them into clowns that can drive well, clowns that can drive poorly and clowns
that don't have their driver's licence so in that case we are creating three groups.
So you just want to do your lines now vertically for your first group, your second group, your
third group or however many groups that you have. Now you're just going to lay out your
place holders as we did before but now instead of laying them out in order from left to right
were laying them out vertically for our groups however many groups that there may be. Those
are really the three main ways that you can lay out your place holders to develop the
general structure of your LSAT logic game diagram. Now there are some subtle variations
on these that we will get into later in the course but this is going to cover off the
majority of your LSAT logic games. So now that you've seen the three main things
that you want to get out of every introductory paragraph for your LSAT logic game, let's
go ahead and apply this knowledge to some practice questions. Go ahead and try the practice
questions and remember for each LSAT introductory paragraph you want to pull out your entities,
the frequency at which they occur, and put down some place holders to put them in. And
don't worry if you're not totally comfortable with this yet, we are going to get a lot of
practice doing this and once you've done the practice questions you can come back to the
next video lesson and will show you exactly how we would have solved these problems.
For the rest of the videos in this series including practice questions and solutions
go to www.alpha-score.com and take the free trial.