LSAT 61, Game 4 Setup, Seven nurses, LSATHacks

Game Setup

Time on second attempt: 9:40

See “repeating games” at bottom of section. One note I’ll make is that I did this section on scrap paper. I had no printer at the time I did this section.

Boy, did it make a difference! I felt much slower and hesitant. I think there’s massive value to diagrams immediately beside the questions. I also went slower because normally I cross off eliminated answers on my page. But since I was working from a screen, I could only draw letters on my scrap paper + cross them off on paper. When I looked at the screen, nothing was crossed off.

I strongly recommend printing or photocopying copies of games so you can mark up the pages themselves. It’s much more effective, and matches test day conditions. I suspect my actual time on real paper would have been much quicker.

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I find this to be a hard game, even though I’ve done it before. There are a lot of moving parts, and not really any upfront deductions. (At least none that I could find.)

I like to draw the simplest rule first. So we can draw rule 5, which says that L isn’t second:

This is a very important rule, because it is easy to forget. Make sure to always draw it under your diagram.

The first rule is a bit unusual. It says at least two nurses come in between H and M. I drew this with a plus:

• This is reversible, and there could be as many as five spaces between them. So we can’t combine this diagram with other ordering rules.

But, we can combine rules 2 and 4, because they both mention K:

Finally, rule 3 says M is before J:

That’s all I got. I couldn’t find any deductions. This is fairly common on newer LSATs: the games become entirely rule based.

However, though I didn’t make deductions, I did note that the L – F – GK group is extremely bulky. It takes up four spaces. Often, that means another variable will split it up. Remembering this quantity constraint will help you make deductions on questions.

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Repeating Games

I’ve written elsewhere about the benefits of repeating games, to solidify your intuition for deductions. Note that the purpose of repeating games is to prove the answers right, so it doesn’t matter if you remember the right answer.

I repeated this game about three days after I first saw it, by which time I had forgotten the answers. I’ve written how long it took me on the second attempt. That time, or a couple minutes above it, is roughly the standard you should be aspiring to – a lot of people take 8-9 minutes on a repeat attempt, get everything right, and pat themselves on the back. But that’s too slow. The faster you go when repeating, the faster you’ll learn to go the first time you see a game.

(I say “a couple minutes above” my time because, after years of teaching the LSAT, I’m really, really fast. You should be almost as fast as me, but you don’t exactly need to match my pace to score -0.)

Time on second attempt: 9:40

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