I'm right there with you (obviously). Making peace with the idea that sometimes the right answer is still pretty objectively hard to choose made a big difference for me. While it didn't make complex stimuli any simpler to sift through, it DID allow me to focus on managing eliminations, which helped a lot.

172 diagnostic 😭

@@Logan-zv4xgit’s the internet. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt

My diagnostic was 179 and no videos will help me get that last point

Glad to be of assistance! There's certainly a difference between "this answer IS correct" and "this answer FEELS correct." I feel like too many instructors focus exclusively on the former, which means students are often derailed by the latter.

That's the right call, and is probably exactly how the exam writers intended you to do it. I believe this still represents a dumb cheating of logical standards on the LSAC's part. The presence or absence of the term 'viable' in an argument seems to make no difference to the LSAC most of the time. I'd have to take some time to pull up a number of examples, but I seem to recall that many necessary assumption Qs that *do* demand that we question baseline viability... don't actually have the arguer mention possibility/feasibility/viability at all. In other words, the explicit presence or absence of the 'viable' concept doesn't impact whether or not the LSAC thinks an argument is exposed to questions of baseline viability. On the other hand, most other arguments have viability hard-coded into them. If an arguer assumes that premise P is sufficient to prove C, they don't have to explicitly tell us that P is a 'viable' explanation for C. In the case of this question, we're assured that the recommendation is a way to address the problem. Sure, they add that it's a 'viable' way to address it, but think of it this way; if Q26 remained otherwise identical but simply removed the word 'viable' from the recommendation, would that change our response? I answer is clearly no. Sure, the *presence* of the word viable *can* be used as a crutch in this case, but given that its absence means so little, I find it disingenuous for the LSAC to pretend that its presence means so much. There's of course a formal-logic-y analysis that disagrees with me. In a formal logic setting, the presence of a sufficient condition is NOT the same as the absence of that same sufficient condition. So in that sense we can say that the presence of 'viability' may in fact lead to a different set of conclusions than the absence of 'viability'. But... how fucking stupid is this conversation? From a plain English commonsense perspective (which makes more sense to use since this argument isn't even formal logic at all), if the LSAC treats the absence of 'viable' the same as the presence of 'viable'... 'viable' is not really a logically important word at all.

Wait so I’m writing the lsat oct 14 2022, how many sections will be on the exam? It’s my understanding there will be 5 sections (2 LR, 1 RC, 1 AR, and 1 experimental). Is this correct? 😅

@@deedawg5389 That is incorrect. The exam now consists of only 3 graded sections (1 LR, 1 RC, and 1 LG). On test day, you will take a total of 4 sections (1 LR, 1 RC, 1 LG, and 1 experimental that can be any of the 3 types). This change happened with the pandemic/switch to the online format.

Quite frankly, you're not alone - this sort of thing is one of the few places where I depart quite sharply from the conventional wisdom of the teaching establishment. But to reiterate the point of the video, yes, while the argument is identifiably about the viability of the proposal, viability (in my opinion) is arguably considered a baseline/acceptable assumption for so much else in LR it takes a necessary assumption Q to bring the issue to center stage. Now I can sit here and be like everyone else and say "ahem as usual there are 4 terrible answers, and only one good answer. Here's how to sift through this stimulus and interpret the key words to match the correct answer." I unfortunately did exactly that early in my teaching career, and the results were unacceptable by my standards. Instead, acknowledging that the exam seems to shift the goalposts has given my students the edge over many of the most difficult Qs over the years.

@@lsat180minimalist Do you have any other examples to illustrate what you're describing? I'm genuinely curious.

In the About section, you should see a "For business inquiries" with a big "show email address" button. Click on it, and it should tell you. I personally wouldn't mind dropping it in the comments here, but I've heard tell that's a great way to get some comment-trawling bot to add that email to a spam list.