Insight LSAT Prep Course - Lesson 1

all right hello welcome welcome to the insight LSAT mini LSAT prep course you have now taken the first step to mastering the Law School Admission Test this is the first of eight lessons in a course that will give you about 10 hours of comprehensive instruction for the LST throughout the course we're going to focus on every part of the LSAT all the different sections all of the major question types and expert strategies and advice for making yourself the best possible LSAT test taker that you can be you've started on the road to making improvements that you could not imagine are even possible so again welcome we're going to try to have a little fun along the way we're going to do a lot of work and we are on our way to mastering this test in this first lesson we're going to be introducing you to what the LSAT is and we're going to be introducing you to the insight approach to the LSAT that we use at inside LSAT we're going to give you an overview of the rest of the course so you know what to expect and also if you're only looking for a particular type of instruction you can go right to the lesson that best suits your needs and we're going to tell you how to use this course to maximize the gains and get yourself on the right foot for preparing for this huge and extremely important test but first allow me to introduce myself hello there my name is Alvin I'm going to be your instructor for the course and since we're going to be spending the next 10 or so hours together I figured this is a good time to say hello and give you a bit of my background I have been tutoring now for a few years I've worked with students from all across the world and of course I'm looking forward to working with you I developed and used what we're now calling the insight approach to the LSAT to improve a diagnostic score of 161 to a final official score of 179 so I know this test pretty well and I know how to improve move your performance on it through good preparation recently I received a master's in philosophy from NYU and I also have a bachelor's in philosophy from NYU philosophy the great discipline it's a lot of fun to do it and I think that the questions that we ask they're really important but why this matters for you is philosophy is all about arguments creating arguments evaluating arguments challenging arguments and the philosophers main tool is logic so philosophy teaches you the exact skills that you need for the LSAT evaluating arguments evaluating logic this is what the LSAT is all about the correlation is actually so strong between the skills you learn in philosophy and the skills that are tested on the LSAT that statistically philosophy majors do the best of anyone on the LSAT so if you didn't major in the philosophy you know you get the next best thing you can learn from somebody who did but anyway I just wanted to put a face to the voice for the course and I really hope that this course is extremely helpful to you I hope it sets you on that path to great LSAT glory enjoy the course alright let's talk a bit about the basics of this test the LSAT or Law School Admission test is the test that you're going to have to take in order to secure admission to a US law school the outside of a self-contained skills exam and what I mean by that is we don't need to study outside material or really learn any subject matter in order to do well on the LSAT this is very different from for instance the MCAT the test that you take to get into Medical School for the MCAT you need to know biology you need to know chemistry and you can't just practice taking the MCAT and learn this stuff that's why you have to take pre-med courses in college in order to get that subject material so you understand what the test is testing the outside is nothing like that there is nothing to learn outside of the test the LSAT is a test of your skills and particularly it's a test of your skills relating to argumentation and reasoning it is a logic test and really I think it's better to think of the LSAT not as something you study for but something that you practice the whole thing is like this big game this big game of logic that you can learn the rules to you can understand how it works and you keep practicing and practicing doing this by taking and working with real practice else that's from the past until you're really really good at playing this game and then you go there on test day and you play it and if you're prepared well enough you win the LSAT is usually weighed more than all of the other application elements combined for your admissions package to law school yes you heard that correctly the LSAT is more important than your GPA your personal statement your letters of recommendation your extracurricular activities all of that combined the reason is it's a standardized measure law schools know what the LSAT is like better than they know what your college was like so they don't know what the a in your particular class mean necessarily they assume it's good they compare it with the reputation of your school they compare your letters of recommendation to the reputation of your professors but the law school admissions test is something that they know is a standard measure that they can use to compare applicants and for that reason it is worth sometimes up to 70% of your admissions package and almost always more than the other elements combined so this is a very important exam it is also a major major factor in scholarship decisions how much financial assistance is the law school going to offer you to attend these decisions are made very largely based on your LSAT score you can head over to inside LSAT comm slash score to see how my own LSAT score translated into scholarship money and how it helps me in my own law school admissions process there's even an example there where I received a scholarship package worth over $200,000 from the University of Chicago so check that out do not underestimate how important the LSAT is for your admission to law school now the test itself consists of six thirty five minute sections and there's a ten minute break in the middle this is for a total of three hours and 40 minutes of examination the LSAT is a mental marathon you could know how to do it you can know how to do each individual question type but you also need to know how to sustain this high level of cognitive functioning for almost four hours this is why we prepare for the LSAT for a long period of time usually about two months maybe more and we think of it holistically it's like training for a marathon a regular marathon you need to be in top physical and mental shape in addition to being really good at the LSAT in order to perform at your best for this test now the six sections can be broken down they're always the same six sections with one little exception so there will always be two logical reasoning sections and these are what are typically called the argument section we have a lesson on them and I'll talk about that in a little bit but this is where you're given short arguments you have to answer questions about them there is one analytical reasoning section and this is the famous logic game section on the LSAT and that is something that is really particular to the LSAT there's nothing quite like it that you might have been exposed to already but this is a section where they all side gives you a set up for a certain game and you have to understand how that game works and you have to answer questions about that game we have two long lessons on that in this course so that will all be very clearly explained there is one reading comprehension section and this is fairly self-explanatory there will be four passages of about 450 to 500 words in that reading comprehension section and you'll need to read it understand it and answer questions about each passage there's always an experimental section on the LSAT and this can be any one of the previous sections it could be a third logical reasoning section a second analytical reason or a second reading comprehension and you're not going to know ahead of time what it's going to be and you're never going to be told which section it actually was so it presents as just another section you don't know if it's the experimental or not and you just have to take it like a fifth section of the test that being said in actuality it's not scored but I wouldn't think too much about this I wouldn't try to guess which one it is that's a bad test taking practice so these first five sections the two LRS the one AR so one RC in the experimental you don't know what order they're going to be in on your LSAT it can be in all different orders there's no way to figure out what you're going to get first second it's random but the sixth section the writing section which is also an unscored but not completely unimportant section is always last so you can count on having the rest of the stuff before that and the writing run will be last but we also have a lesson on the writing section so we'll talk about that more then an important point that you need to know from the very beginning there is no penalty for guessing incorrectly on the LSAT so you never ever leave anything blank that's a guaranteed incorrect answer if you run out of time you are better off just putting in a bunch of random bubbles because at least then you have a chance of getting it right but if you leave a question blank you will lose points for missing that question this is different than the SAT when there was a penalty for guessing incorrectly so there was a strategic choice about whether or not to guess or to leave it blank here no blanks whatsoever no penalty for guessing correctly your score there's a range of 120 to 180 or 180 is a perfect score on the LSAT generally speaking you want to score at least 150 especially in today's legal market in order to secure admission into a decent law school 160 or above is going to make you competitive at some of the top tier schools 170 or above is going to make it possible at any school but now putting you in the range of the top ten schools with higher probability of scholarship money at lower ranked schools and 175 or above is going to make you competitive at any law school including Harvard Yale and Stanford and it's going to probably at a 175 or above make you competitive for pretty serious scholarships at everything but those three schools because Harvard and Stanford actually only offer need-based scholarships they don't do any merit based financial aid and you can sign up for the LSAT @l sax org that is the Law School Admission Council dot org and there you can learn more about the LSAT make your el sac account and sign up for the test all right now a bit about the inside approach the inside approach is both the teaching philosophy and the actual methods that we use at inside LSAT to prepare students to do really well on the LSAT with our private tutoring students the tutor works with the student and they both use the inside approach to gain a better understanding of how the student takes the test and how the student can improve but it's something that can be used by anybody in more self-directed study the first part is that there's a heavy practice test focus what I mean by that is sort of what I said before because there's no outside material that's necessary to study for the LSAT and because there are so many past prep tests available for you tests that have already been given and are now released there is no reason to deal with any other material than official LSAT prep tests like I said before preparing for the LSAT is about practicing playing a certain kind of game so we recommend right from the beginning rooting your preparation in this game in real examples of this game taking questions from real al sets practicing real LSAT and in totality and keeping the test as the major focus of your preparation beyond this we focus really on emphasizing self-knowledge and being very very personalized about this process each person is going to approach the LSAT with a different mental style we're all very unique so the way that we're going to interact with this test is going to differ from the way other people interact with the test and it's important to understand that relationship now what I mean by this is sure we want to know what your strengths and weaknesses are for particular sections but we also want to know what strengths and weaknesses are for particular question types and we want to keep going deeper and deeper we want to know what your strengths and weaknesses are for particular types of answer choices that you might be falling for we want to know how you react to time pressure we want to personalize approach to logic games we want to personalize approach to reading comprehension at insight we really believe that this sort of personalized knowledge should be at the forefront of preparation and this is something that you really can't achieve when you take a prep course and there are students from all different levels in the course and there's no way to focus the instruction most effectively for each and every one of them because they each need individualized attention so the insight approach focuses on building your best practices for taking the LSAT building your skills building your methods telling them to your own style and making you the best test taker that you can be as a result of this reviewing your own work is extremely important you can't just take practice LSAT or do practice problems look at the answer say that you got it right or wrong and move on from there hope you do better next time that is a really limited way of preparing it is important to go back to the questions that you got right and wrong and find out why that happened once you get this better understanding of how this process is occurring you know how to change it and you know how to get more answers right and fewer wrong so if you want to do is understand why correct answers are correct what is it about these particular answers that makes them correct not just the feeling that you had and what is it about the wrong answers that are wrong and how are they trying to look like right answer the deeper your knowledge of the LSAT and the way it works and the way you work with it the better off you're going to be so the inside approach is a mix of expert knowledge both through this course and through tutoring and highly highly individualized personalized skill and method building and you can learn more about it at inside-out comm where you also can sign up for tutoring if you're interested all right and now an overview and an outline of what we're going to be doing in the course and all eight lessons so you are here right now in Lesson one and we're just introducing it to the LSAT the insight approach and the course in the second lesson we're going to be talking about the basics of LSAT logic we don't actually jump into any section right away because there are foundational skills that transcend section there are skills for dealing with arguments dealing with logic that are needed for all of the sections they are the skills that you are really bringing to bear on the tests throughout it they're the skills that are being tested and so the skills you're going to need in law school so we talked about these skills in a more conceptual removed way from the test at first before we start applying them to particular sections now the second lesson may have some familiar material for a lot of people we use logic all the time it's a basic part of human interaction and human thought but I still think this lesson is extremely helpful for everyone even those who find it somewhat familiar because it's helpful to see the particular aspects of logics that are relevant for the LSAT and to see them in a systematized way the way they're presented in the lesson there are also some weird LSAT specific ways of doing things that are a little bit counterintuitive so it's best to understand how the LSAT understand and uses certain concepts in logic so that's what we'll do in lesson two in lesson three we will apply this stuff well begin to apply it in the logical reasoning section and there we're going to present strategies for dealing generally with questions in that section but also we're going to go through major question types and strategies for dealing with each of those we're going to have plenty of examples we're going to have homework questions for you to drill and that's what we'll be doing in lesson three in lessons four and five we're going to be dealing with the analytical reasoning or logic games section in 4 we'll introduce you to the section generally and also go over the first major type of game sequencing games in lesson 5 we do the second major type of game sorting games so in these two lessons I'm going to show you what's probably the most important piece of your LSAT preparation and that is how to deal with logic games and specifically how to diagram these games how to turn the words into a picture and then work with the picture like a game board this is something that students never know how to do when they first approached the logic game section it's something that I had no idea about when I first took my diagnostic test and as a result students almost always bomb this section at first and continue to bomb it until they learn this very particular way of playing this section out so if you do only one part of this course I recommend you do lessons 4 & 5 because it can mean the difference between getting out of 23 questions two or three of them right or 20 of them right so you're definitely going to want to tune in for lessons 4 & 5 lesson 6 is where we move on to the reading comprehension section and we talked about how you can approach these passages we go over a sample passage we talk about question types and generally we talk about strategies for improving at the reading comprehension section in lesson 7 we work on the writing section it's a shorter lesson but we go through a sample writing prompt and I actually present to you an example of a full essay that's a response to that prompt we give you a formula for dealing with this section so that you understand how to approach the prompt structure your argument and write an essay that is sure to impress the admissions councils and finally in lesson 8 we tell you how to move from the course to getting prepared for test day how to set up a preparation schedule make a plan and give you lots of advice for structuring your time going forward we also talked in the beyond the test portion about things that you can do outside of just practicing else that's that improve your score now I'm not talking about outside material remember we don't do that I'm talking about that mental marathon stuff how you get yourself physically and mentally ready for this incredibly demanding undertaking and now some advice for how to use this course this is a great way to start your LSAT prep but you need to have the right mindset going into it it's different than a lot of your other prep options especially since if you're not working with somebody like a tutor this is all self-directed the course is also really dense we do a lot we cover a ton of material in a relatively short amount of time so it's important that you know how to navigate this material and get the most from it that you can along those lines you should be thinking of this as an interaction I know that it's in some ways a one-way street me talking and you listening but to the greatest extent possible you want to think of this as an interaction so feel free to interact with the videos pause the videos I'll give you a specific instruction on when you should pause the videos but you should you can follow them anytime you want they're your videos go back review things again ask questions of me in your mind and think about what I might say in return challenge the things I'm saying challenge your understanding of the things I'm saying really interact with the video and along those lines have interacting answer my questions it's a little bit harder to do it now than it is in private tutoring but a major part of my teaching style is to ask you questions and the reason is that there is ample research that shows and in my own experience I've seen that you learn better when you're interacting with material not passively absorbing it that's a larger point we should be you should be active throughout this entire process engage and it's my job of course to help you stay engaged but if you just sit back and passively let this information wash over you that's not going to be nearly as helpful as if you are constantly interacting thing with the information so I will ask questions I'll give you a little bit of time to answer them and try to answer them say them out loud totally okay nobody's watching you have a pencil handy and paper there are a lot of exercises that we do there a lot of diagrams that we make and I give you a chance to make them beforehand or to copy how I do it afterward stay engage with the material interact with the material and take it seriously so that you can do well and along the same lines there's homework for this course and you should do it and review it the way the homework works is I've gone through real LSAT practice tests and pulled out questions of certain types for you to drill and focus in on in particular this is the book here and I do recommend getting it before going through this test I mean you do the first two lessons this one in the next one without this book but by lesson three you're going to want this one it's available on Amazon and you know they can ship very quickly but this is a book put out by the law school admissions councils an official book and it is called the next ten actual official LSAT prep tests it looks like that it's part of a larger series of practice LSAT books and I actually do recommend getting pretty much all of the rest of them because once you're done with this course you're going to want to pull from these real practice L sets for practice problems but also to take practice tests that's a very important part of preparation is taking real simulated practice tests so but for now at least for this course I really highly recommend grabbing this book here the next ten actual official LSAT prep tests because the homework is pulled from actually only the even-numbered tests in this book those five tests I pull all the practice problems from and I give you the actual page numbers to go to so you can very quickly get to the homework problems so this is a companion book for the course so that you can take advantage of the homework you don't need to do the homework I guess but you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you do not next point do not worry about timing in the beginning timing is an extremely important part of Yale set it is a difficult part of the offset you may be able to do all this stuff well if you're given all the time in the world but you're not you're given 35 minutes in each section and that is a serious serious constraint that being said do not worry at all about timing for the first half or so of your preparation time that will come later there is time for that we're not forgetting about it but right now your focus should be on learning how this game this LSAT works and honing your methods developing your skills and really getting a sense for how to take this test once you get that once you understand how to play the game you'll naturally be able to do this more quickly because you understand you'll be figuring it out during the test but then we can also start to focus on timing strategies that will allow you to improve upon your timing and also to think about timing when you're taking the test next consider pairing this course with private tutoring and like I said before you can sign up for private tutoring at inside LSAT comm the course is designed to be self-sufficient you definitely do not need a tutor to get a lot from this course that being said it's a great parent because we can focus in private tutoring sessions really on your individualized responses to the test and how you interact to test if the major instruction is taken care of when you watch the course so it's a good pairing but again the course is designed to be self-sufficient and to give you a comprehensive introduction to the test and major strategies with or without tutoring and finally after you're done with the course use the free insight worksheet which you can find at inside offset comm / worksheet to track your progress and develop your own LSAT insight let's talk a little bit more about this in lesson 8 and just flagging it for now but it is a helpful thing that you can do after you finish the course and finally expect uneven progress you'll see the progress represented on the worksheet that's how you track your progress but expected to even you may hit a bit of a plateau and then you need to work on certain strategies and then all of a sudden understanding will be unlocked and you'll make huge progress in a certain section or your score will go way up and that is just the nature of practicing this test you learn certain things you get better at certain skills and then you need to move on to other things and you'll reach those plateau points and then you need to change things up and then you make more progress and more progress but it will be uneven so expect that ahead of time all right I think that's enough introductory stuff let's get right into the material next lesson lesson 2 we're going to be talking about the basics of LSAT logic and I will look forward to seeing you there [Music]

all right hello welcome welcome to the insight LSAT mini LSAT prep course you have now taken the first step to mastering the Law School Admission Test this is the first of eight lessons in a course that will give you about 10 hours of comprehensive instruction for the LST throughout the course we&#39;re going to focus on every part of the LSAT all the different sections all of the major question types and expert strategies and advice for making yourself the best possible LSAT test taker that you can be you&#39;ve started on the road to making improvements that you could not imagine are even possible so again welcome we&#39;re going to try to have a little fun along the way we&#39;re going to do a lot of work and we are on our way to mastering this test in this first lesson we&#39;re going to be introducing you to what the LSAT is and we&#39;re going to be introducing you to the insight approach to the LSAT that we use at inside LSAT we&#39;re going to give you an overview of the rest of the course so you know what to expect and also if you&#39;re only looking for a particular type of instruction you can go right to the lesson that best suits your needs and we&#39;re going to tell you how to use this course to maximize the gains and get yourself on the right foot for preparing for this huge and extremely important test but first allow me to introduce myself hello there my name is Alvin I&#39;m going to be your instructor for the course and since we&#39;re going to be spending the next 10 or so hours together I figured this is a good time to say hello and give you a bit of my background I have been tutoring now for a few years I&#39;ve worked with students from all across the world and of course I&#39;m looking forward to working with you I developed and used what we&#39;re now calling the insight approach to the LSAT to improve a diagnostic score of 161 to a final official score of 179 so I know this test pretty well and I know how to improve move your performance on it through good preparation recently I received a master&#39;s in philosophy from NYU and I also have a bachelor&#39;s in philosophy from NYU philosophy the great discipline it&#39;s a lot of fun to do it and I think that the questions that we ask they&#39;re really important but why this matters for you is philosophy is all about arguments creating arguments evaluating arguments challenging arguments and the philosophers main tool is logic so philosophy teaches you the exact skills that you need for the LSAT evaluating arguments evaluating logic this is what the LSAT is all about the correlation is actually so strong between the skills you learn in philosophy and the skills that are tested on the LSAT that statistically philosophy majors do the best of anyone on the LSAT so if you didn&#39;t major in the philosophy you know you get the next best thing you can learn from somebody who did but anyway I just wanted to put a face to the voice for the course and I really hope that this course is extremely helpful to you I hope it sets you on that path to great LSAT glory enjoy the course alright let&#39;s talk a bit about the basics of this test the LSAT or Law School Admission test is the test that you&#39;re going to have to take in order to secure admission to a US law school the outside of a self-contained skills exam and what I mean by that is we don&#39;t need to study outside material or really learn any subject matter in order to do well on the LSAT this is very different from for instance the MCAT the test that you take to get into Medical School for the MCAT you need to know biology you need to know chemistry and you can&#39;t just practice taking the MCAT and learn this stuff that&#39;s why you have to take pre-med courses in college in order to get that subject material so you understand what the test is testing the outside is nothing like that there is nothing to learn outside of the test the LSAT is a test of your skills and particularly it&#39;s a test of your skills relating to argumentation and reasoning it is a logic test and really I think it&#39;s better to think of the LSAT not as something you study for but something that you practice the whole thing is like this big game this big game of logic that you can learn the rules to you can understand how it works and you keep practicing and practicing doing this by taking and working with real practice else that&#39;s from the past until you&#39;re really really good at playing this game and then you go there on test day and you play it and if you&#39;re prepared well enough you win the LSAT is usually weighed more than all of the other application elements combined for your admissions package to law school yes you heard that correctly the LSAT is more important than your GPA your personal statement your letters of recommendation your extracurricular activities all of that combined the reason is it&#39;s a standardized measure law schools know what the LSAT is like better than they know what your college was like so they don&#39;t know what the a in your particular class mean necessarily they assume it&#39;s good they compare it with the reputation of your school they compare your letters of recommendation to the reputation of your professors but the law school admissions test is something that they know is a standard measure that they can use to compare applicants and for that reason it is worth sometimes up to 70% of your admissions package and almost always more than the other elements combined so this is a very important exam it is also a major major factor in scholarship decisions how much financial assistance is the law school going to offer you to attend these decisions are made very largely based on your LSAT score you can head over to inside LSAT comm slash score to see how my own LSAT score translated into scholarship money and how it helps me in my own law school admissions process there&#39;s even an example there where I received a scholarship package worth over $200,000 from the University of Chicago so check that out do not underestimate how important the LSAT is for your admission to law school now the test itself consists of six thirty five minute sections and there&#39;s a ten minute break in the middle this is for a total of three hours and 40 minutes of examination the LSAT is a mental marathon you could know how to do it you can know how to do each individual question type but you also need to know how to sustain this high level of cognitive functioning for almost four hours this is why we prepare for the LSAT for a long period of time usually about two months maybe more and we think of it holistically it&#39;s like training for a marathon a regular marathon you need to be in top physical and mental shape in addition to being really good at the LSAT in order to perform at your best for this test now the six sections can be broken down they&#39;re always the same six sections with one little exception so there will always be two logical reasoning sections and these are what are typically called the argument section we have a lesson on them and I&#39;ll talk about that in a little bit but this is where you&#39;re given short arguments you have to answer questions about them there is one analytical reasoning section and this is the famous logic game section on the LSAT and that is something that is really particular to the LSAT there&#39;s nothing quite like it that you might have been exposed to already but this is a section where they all side gives you a set up for a certain game and you have to understand how that game works and you have to answer questions about that game we have two long lessons on that in this course so that will all be very clearly explained there is one reading comprehension section and this is fairly self-explanatory there will be four passages of about 450 to 500 words in that reading comprehension section and you&#39;ll need to read it understand it and answer questions about each passage there&#39;s always an experimental section on the LSAT and this can be any one of the previous sections it could be a third logical reasoning section a second analytical reason or a second reading comprehension and you&#39;re not going to know ahead of time what it&#39;s going to be and you&#39;re never going to be told which section it actually was so it presents as just another section you don&#39;t know if it&#39;s the experimental or not and you just have to take it like a fifth section of the test that being said in actuality it&#39;s not scored but I wouldn&#39;t think too much about this I wouldn&#39;t try to guess which one it is that&#39;s a bad test taking practice so these first five sections the two LRS the one AR so one RC in the experimental you don&#39;t know what order they&#39;re going to be in on your LSAT it can be in all different orders there&#39;s no way to figure out what you&#39;re going to get first second it&#39;s random but the sixth section the writing section which is also an unscored but not completely unimportant section is always last so you can count on having the rest of the stuff before that and the writing run will be last but we also have a lesson on the writing section so we&#39;ll talk about that more then an important point that you need to know from the very beginning there is no penalty for guessing incorrectly on the LSAT so you never ever leave anything blank that&#39;s a guaranteed incorrect answer if you run out of time you are better off just putting in a bunch of random bubbles because at least then you have a chance of getting it right but if you leave a question blank you will lose points for missing that question this is different than the SAT when there was a penalty for guessing incorrectly so there was a strategic choice about whether or not to guess or to leave it blank here no blanks whatsoever no penalty for guessing correctly your score there&#39;s a range of 120 to 180 or 180 is a perfect score on the LSAT generally speaking you want to score at least 150 especially in today&#39;s legal market in order to secure admission into a decent law school 160 or above is going to make you competitive at some of the top tier schools 170 or above is going to make it possible at any school but now putting you in the range of the top ten schools with higher probability of scholarship money at lower ranked schools and 175 or above is going to make you competitive at any law school including Harvard Yale and Stanford and it&#39;s going to probably at a 175 or above make you competitive for pretty serious scholarships at everything but those three schools because Harvard and Stanford actually only offer need-based scholarships they don&#39;t do any merit based financial aid and you can sign up for the LSAT @l sax org that is the Law School Admission Council dot org and there you can learn more about the LSAT make your el sac account and sign up for the test all right now a bit about the inside approach the inside approach is both the teaching philosophy and the actual methods that we use at inside LSAT to prepare students to do really well on the LSAT with our private tutoring students the tutor works with the student and they both use the inside approach to gain a better understanding of how the student takes the test and how the student can improve but it&#39;s something that can be used by anybody in more self-directed study the first part is that there&#39;s a heavy practice test focus what I mean by that is sort of what I said before because there&#39;s no outside material that&#39;s necessary to study for the LSAT and because there are so many past prep tests available for you tests that have already been given and are now released there is no reason to deal with any other material than official LSAT prep tests like I said before preparing for the LSAT is about practicing playing a certain kind of game so we recommend right from the beginning rooting your preparation in this game in real examples of this game taking questions from real al sets practicing real LSAT and in totality and keeping the test as the major focus of your preparation beyond this we focus really on emphasizing self-knowledge and being very very personalized about this process each person is going to approach the LSAT with a different mental style we&#39;re all very unique so the way that we&#39;re going to interact with this test is going to differ from the way other people interact with the test and it&#39;s important to understand that relationship now what I mean by this is sure we want to know what your strengths and weaknesses are for particular sections but we also want to know what strengths and weaknesses are for particular question types and we want to keep going deeper and deeper we want to know what your strengths and weaknesses are for particular types of answer choices that you might be falling for we want to know how you react to time pressure we want to personalize approach to logic games we want to personalize approach to reading comprehension at insight we really believe that this sort of personalized knowledge should be at the forefront of preparation and this is something that you really can&#39;t achieve when you take a prep course and there are students from all different levels in the course and there&#39;s no way to focus the instruction most effectively for each and every one of them because they each need individualized attention so the insight approach focuses on building your best practices for taking the LSAT building your skills building your methods telling them to your own style and making you the best test taker that you can be as a result of this reviewing your own work is extremely important you can&#39;t just take practice LSAT or do practice problems look at the answer say that you got it right or wrong and move on from there hope you do better next time that is a really limited way of preparing it is important to go back to the questions that you got right and wrong and find out why that happened once you get this better understanding of how this process is occurring you know how to change it and you know how to get more answers right and fewer wrong so if you want to do is understand why correct answers are correct what is it about these particular answers that makes them correct not just the feeling that you had and what is it about the wrong answers that are wrong and how are they trying to look like right answer the deeper your knowledge of the LSAT and the way it works and the way you work with it the better off you&#39;re going to be so the inside approach is a mix of expert knowledge both through this course and through tutoring and highly highly individualized personalized skill and method building and you can learn more about it at inside-out comm where you also can sign up for tutoring if you&#39;re interested all right and now an overview and an outline of what we&#39;re going to be doing in the course and all eight lessons so you are here right now in Lesson one and we&#39;re just introducing it to the LSAT the insight approach and the course in the second lesson we&#39;re going to be talking about the basics of LSAT logic we don&#39;t actually jump into any section right away because there are foundational skills that transcend section there are skills for dealing with arguments dealing with logic that are needed for all of the sections they are the skills that you are really bringing to bear on the tests throughout it they&#39;re the skills that are being tested and so the skills you&#39;re going to need in law school so we talked about these skills in a more conceptual removed way from the test at first before we start applying them to particular sections now the second lesson may have some familiar material for a lot of people we use logic all the time it&#39;s a basic part of human interaction and human thought but I still think this lesson is extremely helpful for everyone even those who find it somewhat familiar because it&#39;s helpful to see the particular aspects of logics that are relevant for the LSAT and to see them in a systematized way the way they&#39;re presented in the lesson there are also some weird LSAT specific ways of doing things that are a little bit counterintuitive so it&#39;s best to understand how the LSAT understand and uses certain concepts in logic so that&#39;s what we&#39;ll do in lesson two in lesson three we will apply this stuff well begin to apply it in the logical reasoning section and there we&#39;re going to present strategies for dealing generally with questions in that section but also we&#39;re going to go through major question types and strategies for dealing with each of those we&#39;re going to have plenty of examples we&#39;re going to have homework questions for you to drill and that&#39;s what we&#39;ll be doing in lesson three in lessons four and five we&#39;re going to be dealing with the analytical reasoning or logic games section in 4 we&#39;ll introduce you to the section generally and also go over the first major type of game sequencing games in lesson 5 we do the second major type of game sorting games so in these two lessons I&#39;m going to show you what&#39;s probably the most important piece of your LSAT preparation and that is how to deal with logic games and specifically how to diagram these games how to turn the words into a picture and then work with the picture like a game board this is something that students never know how to do when they first approached the logic game section it&#39;s something that I had no idea about when I first took my diagnostic test and as a result students almost always bomb this section at first and continue to bomb it until they learn this very particular way of playing this section out so if you do only one part of this course I recommend you do lessons 4 &amp; 5 because it can mean the difference between getting out of 23 questions two or three of them right or 20 of them right so you&#39;re definitely going to want to tune in for lessons 4 &amp; 5 lesson 6 is where we move on to the reading comprehension section and we talked about how you can approach these passages we go over a sample passage we talk about question types and generally we talk about strategies for improving at the reading comprehension section in lesson 7 we work on the writing section it&#39;s a shorter lesson but we go through a sample writing prompt and I actually present to you an example of a full essay that&#39;s a response to that prompt we give you a formula for dealing with this section so that you understand how to approach the prompt structure your argument and write an essay that is sure to impress the admissions councils and finally in lesson 8 we tell you how to move from the course to getting prepared for test day how to set up a preparation schedule make a plan and give you lots of advice for structuring your time going forward we also talked in the beyond the test portion about things that you can do outside of just practicing else that&#39;s that improve your score now I&#39;m not talking about outside material remember we don&#39;t do that I&#39;m talking about that mental marathon stuff how you get yourself physically and mentally ready for this incredibly demanding undertaking and now some advice for how to use this course this is a great way to start your LSAT prep but you need to have the right mindset going into it it&#39;s different than a lot of your other prep options especially since if you&#39;re not working with somebody like a tutor this is all self-directed the course is also really dense we do a lot we cover a ton of material in a relatively short amount of time so it&#39;s important that you know how to navigate this material and get the most from it that you can along those lines you should be thinking of this as an interaction I know that it&#39;s in some ways a one-way street me talking and you listening but to the greatest extent possible you want to think of this as an interaction so feel free to interact with the videos pause the videos I&#39;ll give you a specific instruction on when you should pause the videos but you should you can follow them anytime you want they&#39;re your videos go back review things again ask questions of me in your mind and think about what I might say in return challenge the things I&#39;m saying challenge your understanding of the things I&#39;m saying really interact with the video and along those lines have interacting answer my questions it&#39;s a little bit harder to do it now than it is in private tutoring but a major part of my teaching style is to ask you questions and the reason is that there is ample research that shows and in my own experience I&#39;ve seen that you learn better when you&#39;re interacting with material not passively absorbing it that&#39;s a larger point we should be you should be active throughout this entire process engage and it&#39;s my job of course to help you stay engaged but if you just sit back and passively let this information wash over you that&#39;s not going to be nearly as helpful as if you are constantly interacting thing with the information so I will ask questions I&#39;ll give you a little bit of time to answer them and try to answer them say them out loud totally okay nobody&#39;s watching you have a pencil handy and paper there are a lot of exercises that we do there a lot of diagrams that we make and I give you a chance to make them beforehand or to copy how I do it afterward stay engage with the material interact with the material and take it seriously so that you can do well and along the same lines there&#39;s homework for this course and you should do it and review it the way the homework works is I&#39;ve gone through real LSAT practice tests and pulled out questions of certain types for you to drill and focus in on in particular this is the book here and I do recommend getting it before going through this test I mean you do the first two lessons this one in the next one without this book but by lesson three you&#39;re going to want this one it&#39;s available on Amazon and you know they can ship very quickly but this is a book put out by the law school admissions councils an official book and it is called the next ten actual official LSAT prep tests it looks like that it&#39;s part of a larger series of practice LSAT books and I actually do recommend getting pretty much all of the rest of them because once you&#39;re done with this course you&#39;re going to want to pull from these real practice L sets for practice problems but also to take practice tests that&#39;s a very important part of preparation is taking real simulated practice tests so but for now at least for this course I really highly recommend grabbing this book here the next ten actual official LSAT prep tests because the homework is pulled from actually only the even-numbered tests in this book those five tests I pull all the practice problems from and I give you the actual page numbers to go to so you can very quickly get to the homework problems so this is a companion book for the course so that you can take advantage of the homework you don&#39;t need to do the homework I guess but you&#39;ll be doing yourself a disservice if you do not next point do not worry about timing in the beginning timing is an extremely important part of Yale set it is a difficult part of the offset you may be able to do all this stuff well if you&#39;re given all the time in the world but you&#39;re not you&#39;re given 35 minutes in each section and that is a serious serious constraint that being said do not worry at all about timing for the first half or so of your preparation time that will come later there is time for that we&#39;re not forgetting about it but right now your focus should be on learning how this game this LSAT works and honing your methods developing your skills and really getting a sense for how to take this test once you get that once you understand how to play the game you&#39;ll naturally be able to do this more quickly because you understand you&#39;ll be figuring it out during the test but then we can also start to focus on timing strategies that will allow you to improve upon your timing and also to think about timing when you&#39;re taking the test next consider pairing this course with private tutoring and like I said before you can sign up for private tutoring at inside LSAT comm the course is designed to be self-sufficient you definitely do not need a tutor to get a lot from this course that being said it&#39;s a great parent because we can focus in private tutoring sessions really on your individualized responses to the test and how you interact to test if the major instruction is taken care of when you watch the course so it&#39;s a good pairing but again the course is designed to be self-sufficient and to give you a comprehensive introduction to the test and major strategies with or without tutoring and finally after you&#39;re done with the course use the free insight worksheet which you can find at inside offset comm / worksheet to track your progress and develop your own LSAT insight let&#39;s talk a little bit more about this in lesson 8 and just flagging it for now but it is a helpful thing that you can do after you finish the course and finally expect uneven progress you&#39;ll see the progress represented on the worksheet that&#39;s how you track your progress but expected to even you may hit a bit of a plateau and then you need to work on certain strategies and then all of a sudden understanding will be unlocked and you&#39;ll make huge progress in a certain section or your score will go way up and that is just the nature of practicing this test you learn certain things you get better at certain skills and then you need to move on to other things and you&#39;ll reach those plateau points and then you need to change things up and then you make more progress and more progress but it will be uneven so expect that ahead of time all right I think that&#39;s enough introductory stuff let&#39;s get right into the material next lesson lesson 2 we&#39;re going to be talking about the basics of LSAT logic and I will look forward to seeing you there [Music]

Transcript for:Insight LSAT Prep Course - Lesson 1

Transcript for:
Insight LSAT Prep Course - Lesson 1