LSAT Workout

The LSAT Workout is like a chaser to the nastiest tequila that you've ever tasted: it is necessary. This book takes everything you think you learned in Cracking the LSAT and really extends on it. Remember: Cracking the LSAT is like liquor and LSAT workout is like beer. Liquor before beer and you're in the clear. Beer before liquor and you'll get sicker. Don't do the LSAT Workout until you have fully completed Cracking the LSAT. Once you get done with these two books, you are ready to start hammering away at the LSAC books and LSAT practice tests. I noticed that one person found this review not helpful, so let me elaborate: This book has a ton of practice problems. It is meant to sharpen your LSAT skills. However, you can't improve your LSAT skills if you haven't acquire them yet (meaning that this book is not for beginners). This book is an advanced book. I completed the book and got a good bit of questions wrong, but I did get some right. The questions are probably the hardest you'll ever find, so it can provide a good assessment of where your weaknesses are. The questions that trip you up are where you need to improve. It doesn't matter if these are the hardiest questions in the world. If the Princeton Review can confuse you, the LSAC can too. I think this book is similar to the Kaplan 180. I just got Kaplan 180 a few days ago and... after looking at it, the format is similar to the LSAT Workout. The LSAT Workout has a few more pages and maybe more questions. The LSAT Workout focuses on three things in the Args: Drawing Conclusions, Language Shifts, and Interpretation of Evidence. These sections are organized so that you can address why get questions wrong. For example, the Language Shifts sections gives you every type of Arg where the question they ask uses a different word than the word in the argument. This book doesn't really explain anything. The little information it has is meant to be a review. The LSAT Workout is solely meant to be used for the problems. The Princeton Review calls this book the gap between learning the material (ex. Cracking the LSAT) and taking actual LSATs. If you are looking for advanced explanations, this book is not it. I would recommend Kaplan's LSAT 180 (although that's the only Kaplan product I would recommend. The Kaplan Comprehensive Program and Kaplan Logic Games Workbook are inferior to Cracking the LSAT).

I recently decided to take the LSATs (and possibly apply to Law School). I have virtually no prior knowledge about anything related to LSAT but just went out and purchased this book b/c it was published recently and the Princeton Review's familiar name. Let me just say that I was in for a shock. This book starts you off w/ several drill sections starting w/ logical reasoning. Like any good future lawyer, I just started working through these w/o reading any of the prefaces and/or tips section. I scored above 95% in my GRE verbal section so I did not think the LSAT would be that hard. I was throughly shocked because I could not even get 1/2 of drill questions right. The explanations did little to help me see the "right" answer. I've since taken a practice exam (a real test from prev years) and was surprised once again to find that the questions are indeed much easier(I can't stress this enough) than the ones found in this book. At this point, I'm not sure this book will help b/c some of questions are so convoluted (I'm convinced some of the questions deliberately try to mislead you which supposedly LSAT questions are not) that you will scratch your head for days.

This book reminds me of high school baseball. Let me explain. I'd always warm up and practice using a bat that weighed about 8 pounds. My game bat weighed 30 ounces, a little less than 2 pounds. I'd hit cage balls with the heavy bat, pitched nearly full speed. After this routine, hitting with the regular bat was as easy as reality evasion for a schizophrenic. In fact, it took a little while to adjust to game conditions. It's the same way with this book, except the bat would equate to about 25 pounds. After the reaming you experience trying these args and games, the actual test will feel like falling off a log. Even if you, like I, disagree with several of the correct answers presented herein, the fact remains that you have to devote so much of your cpu to consideration of every possible nuance. It's like playing Warcraft III and Everquest at the same time while watching the first two LOTR dvds (LSAT workout) and running a graphics editor using an old Intel Celeron and 256 MB of RAM, and then playing beginner minesweeper (the actual preptests) on a machine with dual 3GHz and a gig. Get this book, but not before Oct. 1, 2005. Dig?

The toughest collection of LSAT questions I've ever seen. Not for the faint of heart, but if you're shooting for a top score, this is definitely the book to get. If you can work these logic games, then anything you see on the real LSAT will seem tame by comparison.