Law School Discussion

I have been studying for the LSAT for about two months now. For the most part I am acing the RC and LG sections, though I am still missing about 4-5 questions for each of the two Logical Reasoning sections. Generally speaking, about two of those missed questions I should have answered correctly. Meaning I misread the question stem or just a dumb error. This still leaves me with not understanding 2-3 questions per LR section. I have gone through the PowerScore and ExamKrackers books, as well as skimming the Kaplan: Your Only Guide to a 180.

What methods can I use to eclipse those last few missed questions? Will I just begin "to get it" over these last seven weeks? I am an incremental theorist so I do not feel I am stuck in the low 170's, but I am lost as to what I can do... My goal is a +175 and acceptance at UCLA  .



Thank-you!

You don't understand why the answer is correct even when you know what it is?

That was what worked for me: the things I got wrong, I looked at the correct answer afterward and made sure that I understood why it was correct.

"professional standard" if it were a courtroom and a courtcase then YES you can and you do say "other doctors,etc do it this way" that and the "reasonable person standard" for everything else. That being said, I repeat LSD and yes people in general are idiots and bittch about how hard life is while doing a halfassed at best attempt at it.

Quote from: baby lawyer on April 23, 2010, 12:15:54 AM

Quote from: >:-) on April 23, 2010, 12:11:20 AM

retard.If that's the case then the entire legal system is flawed. Its called "circumstancial evidence" it's not the best, but you can have 12 inbred hicks sentence a guy to die based on it,so yeah it's good enough to prove a point about how people in general would prefer to bittch than get off their ass on the LSD forum.

But you know practically nothing about these people.  It's as if you got up in a courtroom and told the jury, "the defendant is guilty because people do bad stuff in general."

(I mean yeah maybe that would get some juries to convict, but it would get thrown out on appeal for lack of evidence.)

But you're not trying to establish a standard of conduct.  You're not trying to say, "they should have done this, because this is what a reasonable person (or a member of that person's profession) would have done in that situation."  You're trying to establish what these particular individuals actually did.

it's an educated guess. Even if they tell you their version of the story you don't get the "full"story.

Educated based on what?  You don't know anything about these people.  You're just generalizing based on what human interaction you've experienced thus far, and it's a pretty tiny sample of all human interaction.

All you need is a little.

But you don't have any data on how many times they tried to get an answer.

"They didn't hear anything back" doesn't necessarily mean they never did any follow-up.

Yes you should throw in common sense

Common sense is something that our intuition tells us is true, even though we can't articulate why exactly it's true.  Therefore, a poor substitute for facts.  Now when the facts and your common sense tell you things that contradict each other, maybe you need to step back and ask yourself if you're misreading the facts.  But if they tell you the same thing then it's better to rely on the facts.  They're generally more convincing when you're trying to persuade someone to agree with your version of the story.

U.S. News is not data at all.

Actually, it is data because there's actually a methodology there that they use to come up with their numbers.  You can argue about the quality of their methodology and whether it actually leads to useful conclusions, but you can't argue that it's actual data.  

they do give bar passage rate a whopping 2% consideration in the rankings.

Here for example, you're not arguing that the bar passage data is not data; you're just arguing about their methodology, i.e. you think it should be worth more than 2%.  That's different from saying it's not data.

And as I've said elsewhere, bar passage isn't all that relevant in terms of ranking schools at the very top, because they're not trying to teach people how to pass the bar, and year-to-year variations in their bar passage rate relative to each other don't really reflect year-to-year variation in their quality relative to each other.  Maybe for law schools that aren't at the very top level it would make sense to weigh bar passage more heavily, but at the top ten schools they just expect you to learn all that stuff the month or two before the bar.

other measurements are completely subjective and based on unidentified people.  

People's opinions are subjective, that's true.  On the other hand, when you aggregate a large number of opinions on the relative value of something, you're probably going to get something close to the actual value of the thing.  Or so says the theory behind the stock market, anyway.  

You are correct that they need to give a better idea of whom they're asking though.

Then acceptance and placement rates are so blatantly tweeked by every school that it is not even worth mentioning.

Every school, really?  Aren't you just generalizing based on some anecdotes you've heard?  You think that Harvard and Yale are tweaking their placement numbers?

You should use your common sense when picking a school, if you your choices are between Stanford and Williamette go to Stanford.

The only reason why this works, as I've explained before, is because common sense and the data both point in the same direction: Stanford is superior to Williamette on most measures, so the data tells you the same thing that your common sense does.  In your other example, there was some data indicating that the transfer made sense, i.e. the destination school's higher ranking, but on the other hand there was probably also data arguing against the transfer, i.e. a minimal difference in terms of job placement.