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One of these people might change our world.
At Velocity Test Prep, we are acutely aware that the American legal and social systems are not now delivering, nor have they ever delivered, on the promise of equal justice that is meant to undergird the American experience. We believe it’s past time for us to do our small part to help.
Thus, we are ready to announce our new 2020 Change In Position Scholarship program. Our Change In Position (CIP) equality scholarships are LSAT prep scholarships that will guarantee that each CIP recipient will increase her/his LSAT score by 10 points or more, or else will score in the 99th% (full details on how we make the guarantee work here).
The 2020 CIP scholarships will be awarded to as many as 13 people who demonstrate a commitment to achieving a more just, more equal American society through the work they will do as a result of their admission to law school.
See what we did there?
Note: The following is Stephanie's* (a real Velocity LSAT student) story of her LSAT-Flex experience on Monday, June 15, 2020, as told to Dave Hall.
Registration for the LSAT-Flex so far has been a funny thing; since LSAC doesn't know for sure whether they're going to change a normal registration to a Flex test beforehand, I just registered for the June regular administration, then later found out it had been changed. It's not like you get to decide (at least so far) that you want to take a Flex test. [ed. note: As of this writing, the August 29th, 2020 test is still listed as a normal administration, although registration is open until July 15th. So if LSAC changes this date to Flex in the next two weeks, test-takers will have the chance to knowingly register for an LSAT-Flex test.] But, if LSAC cancels a test, and turns it into a Flex, they do give you the option of taking the Flex or else taking a rain check for any test in the next year. I wanted to do the Flex option, so I was glad they changed my test to Flex.
Yes! More digital watches!
There is justifiable tension among prospective law students---ugh. Strike that. I took a break from writing a law school paper to talk about the LSAT for a minute, and IT SHOWS. I’ve never read a more law-school-papery first clause of a sentence than that one. I’m sorry. Now where were we?
Yes: People are worried because the LSAT is going digital. That makes sense! We don’t like change. It’s probably evolutionarily programmed for us to fear change; in the primordial ancestry, change was never good. I bet none of our earliest forebears looked up to see something rushing toward them that turned out to be someone in a hurry to do something nice to them. So we don’t like it when things change. But it’s OK. This change is not going to be very much of a change.
To help reassure you, here are five ways the new digital version of the LSAT will be just like the paper version of the test we all know and love fear hate:
Yes. Exactly like this watch.
What is the Digital LSAT?
So glad you asked. As it happens, that's exactly what I wanted to talk about. The digital LSAT is the same same same as the paper-and-pencil LSAT, except on tablets instead of in paper booklets. LSAC will provide the tablets to test takers at the test center. The content, structure, and questions will all be the same as the current LSAT.
But the tablets might be cool. They're supposed to have a timer with a five-minute warning, and they'll let you highlight and flag questions to come back to (within the section you're working on).
LSAC will start the transition to the Digital LSAT in July 2019. At that administration, half of the test takers will be randomly assigned to take the test on a tablet and the other half will take the regular old paper-and-pencil test. After July, all the tests in North America will be on the tablet.
LSAC will have a free "Digital LSAT familiarization tutorial" available on their website next month (December 2018). It's supposed to coincide with the registration window for the July 2019 test and allow users to see how the tablet works (and I guess allow you to try out the highlighting and flagging features).
Very few children were harmed in the making of this chain.
This week, I want to talk about soundness. So that's what I'm going to do. YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, WORLD.
K. Got that out of my system. Let's do this:
Soundness, as a principle, is the simultaneous measure of two distinct aspects of a deductive argument: its coherence and its validity. OK. So what’re coherence and validity? We’re glad you asked!
Remember our tow-chain from two weeks ago? Let’s get that image back in our minds to continue. Got it? Excellent.
Coherence is a measure of an argument’s logical connectivity; coherence measures whether or not all the pieces link together. If all the links in our chain of evidence lead – without any gaps – to a conclusion, then our chain is continuous; it is coherent. If you remove a link from the chain, the argument ceases to be connected; if any link is missing, the argument is incoherent.
Like Stevie Wonder, you too can become an expert in LSAT Logical Reasoning.
So, you’ve heard somewhere that the LSAT is a test that demands that you successfully weigh evidence against claims. OK, sure. But what does that mean?
First, let’s establish some ground rules:
A. The LSAT is a test of reasoning, not of research. You will be asked to attack, defend, analyze, and identify the claims made in the arguments provided on the LSAT. You will never be asked to attack, criticize, or question the evidence provided in those arguments. In other words, we will stipulate the truth of everything offered as evidence on this test. Thus, if an argument claims that Melissa is from Venus on the basis of evidence that some girls are from Venus, then we may demonstrate that the claim is unproved by the evidence, but we must also happily assent to the idea that there are some girls from Venus (even if we know in our hearts that that isn’t true, really). Take as true every piece of evidence you are offered on the test.
I bet Zazie Beetz probably wants to be my girlfriend.
I have a pretty good example this week of why you should do what you want to do in college, instead of doing what you think will make you a better candidate for law school. First, because doing what you want to do will make you a better candidate for law school. But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about video editing.
This week marked the 20th anniversary of the IRS’s Low Income Taxpayer Clinic (LITC). To celebrate, they threw an absolute rager. There were keg stands, lines for the bathroom, lines in the bathroom, half of Cirque du Soleil showed up drunk and in a mood to show off, and Tobey Maguire kept challenging people to play poker until he was mauled by Zazie Beetz who came in full-on Domino formation and wasn’t taking prisoners.
Well, I mean, sort of.
I mean, I guess if I’m being perfectly honest, not all of that happened.
But one thing undeniably did; the IRS asked firms across the country that have participated in their LITC to send in short videos to commemorate the anniversary. My firm sent one in.
Initially, my supervising attorney was just going to have the receptionist walk around behind her with her phone, I think. I suggested that I might be able to help.
Pretty much what I look like when I'm filling in a form.
Here’s a thing I’ve learned this summer; DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) and USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) rival the IRS in the number, scope, complexity and inanity of their forms. I’ve become very familiar with:
Those are the raised hands of LSAT Reading Comp victory.
As you get started with your LSAT prep (or somewhere in the middle of LSAT prep, or even if you’re already well into your LSAT prep. OK, let’s just say that at any point in your LSAT prep), one of the key things you’ll need to figure out is how to find the Main Point of a Reading Comp passage.
Well, that’s where this post comes in! I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided to write a few words on identifying the main point of passages, and you are now reading those words. IT’S AN EXCITING TIME TO BE ALIVE.
Here’s one thing for you to do; every single time you read a passage, pretend that you have a friend sitting next to you. We’ll call that friend Francisco.
When you finish reading, turn to Francisco and say, “Francisco, I’ve just read a passage about [topic X].”
The words you put into those brackets are the main point of the passage.
See? The answer was in you all along! You’re just like the Karate Kid, but with less cultural appropriation.
Let’s do an example (using passage two from PrepTest 76, because that is where I opened my book while looking for an example to use).
[…reading…]
This could be the symbol of the resistance.
In the dream, our impulse was to welcome rather than to turn away. We wanted to be a shining city on a hill,1 not too far away, not impossible to reach, with a draw like an electromagnet. We were not pollyanna-ish about it. We knew that we must protect ourselves because there are always threats.
In the dream, we were smarter. We knew that families fleeing persecution are not the threats. We also knew that separating families as a deterrent against future families seeking asylum was cruel, arbitrary, immoral, and pointless from a practical point of view. In the dream we were practical.
In the dream, we judged each other on the content of our character.2 We could tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were by what they did. We didn’t make excuses for intolerable behavior. In the dream, we knew better.
In the dream, we believed it was important to be decent. We put a premium on it. We built a whole system of government to protect it against indecent men and women. In the dream, we thought that a decent majority would be an adequate backstop against the minority threat from the bad guys who are always present. In the dream, we knew enough not to give them power.