Logical reasoning seems simple enough; short little paragraphs about flowers and dinosaurs and dams. Yet, as we at Blueprint LSAT can attest to, these little paragraphs give students a tremendous amount of grief. You’re asked to do some pretty hefty analytical thinking, and getting good at these takes time and effort, which is why we at Blueprint LSAT Prep place so much importance on this section.

The Main Event

Logical reasoning is so important because it makes up half of the test. Games involve roughly 22 questions, and reading comp has about 28, but you’ll be doing two different logical reasoning sections for a total of about 50 questions. So you ignore logical reasoning at your own peril. If you’re taking an LSAT class, we at Blueprint advise you to do all your logical reasoning homework.

Read the Prompt First

Every logical reasoning problem has three parts – what we at Blueprint LSAT call the stimulus, the prompt, and the answer choices. The stimulus is the first part, which has the meat of the problem. This is where you learn about the forklifts or supercomputers or cacti or whatever. The prompt is the “instruction” for the problem; it might ask you what the conclusion is, or why it’s a bad argument, or what has to be false. As anyone who has ever ruined IKEA furniture knows, it’s important to read the instructions first. Which is why we at Blueprint LSAT recommend you read the prompt before anything else.

Right Answers and Wrong Answers

It’s important in LR to spend time with the wrong answers in addition to the right answers. One of the things we at Blueprint like to stress about the LSAT is that in addition to there always being one inherently correct answer choice, there are also four inherently incorrect answer choices – they’re not “less correct,” they’re “totally wrong.” Seeing why answer choices are actually wrong will help you spot similar incorrect answer choice in later problems, allowing you to speed up going through the answer choices.

Figure it Out for Yourself

We at Blueprint LSAT have found that when you’re on a particularly rough logical reasoning problem, there often comes a point where you feel totally stuck, so you turn to the answer key to find out the answer. Once you see it, you try to work backwards from there to see why it’s right. We at Blueprint LSAT can’t say this more strongly: Try not to do this. If you can figure it out for yourself you’ll remember the lesson from that particular problem much better. Reread the prompt, making sure you understand it. Then go through the answer choices one more time trying to figure out which is definitely the correct answer choice, and which four are awful.

Article edited by Jodi Triplett and Trent Teti, founders of Blueprint LSAT Prep. Blueprint LSAT Prep was founded in 2005, and the Blueprint LSAT curriculum has been beloved by students worldwide since then.