LSAT Tips: The Importance of Active Reading

Quick Tip

Flaw Questions

When attempting flaw questions, your job isn’t to identify the ‘biggest flaw’, just to find ‘a flaw’. The LSAT will never give you two flaws in the answer choices. If an answer choice identifies a flaw that happens in the stimulus, it’s the correct answer choice. LSAT writers can sometimes make questions hard by giving students a stimulus with two flaws: one will be very apparent and obvious, and the other will be sneaked in there and hard to spot. Unaware students will be searching for only the obvious flaw in the answer choices, missing entirely the second flaw that was committed. Tricky! 

Discussion

The Importance of Active Reading

Have you ever read a page of text, only to forget everything you just read? Unfortunately, when I was studying for the LSAT, this was happening to me too many times to count. I knew I had to do something about it before test day. To address this problem, I employed a concept called active reading. 

When I’m actively reading, I try to be engaged with the text as much as possible. So engaged, that by the end of the text, I’m able to turn it over and summarize all the ideas. Active reading means taking charge of what you are reading to draw your own opinions about the text, so you can come up with your own conclusions and inferences. 

Compare this to passive reading. Passive reading is reading without trying to understand the essential details that make the argument work. Passive reading is reading ‘uncritically’.  If you passively read through the stimulus, you’ll miss key information you need to answer the question. Passive reading is letting the stimulus think for you, instead of you taking charge and making your own opinions about the stimulus. “Oh, that’s persuasive!” is not something you want to be thinking to yourself when you’re attempting most LSAT questions. The more you are able to employ active reading, the better you will be at eliminating wrong answer choices and picking correct ones. 

Here are a few things to get you started with active reading: 

• Change your perspective and the way you take in information based on the type of text you’re reading. For example, when you read premises, you take them as true. But when you read conclusions, you should be questioning them. 

• Imagine pictures and/or examples of complex ideas in my head to fully grasp the concepts that I’m reading. When I’m reading about a scientific study, I like to think of scientists in lab coats huddled together taking notes. 

• Stop and pause to monitor your understanding of the text as you read. I ask myself after I read every sentence, “Do I really understand what I’m reading?”

• Read with questions in mind, like “How do these premises support this conclusion?”

The authors of LSAT questions have doctorate degrees in psychology and psychometrics. They know how to exploit the biases of the human brain to create questions that students will get wrong. For example, LSAT writers will use complex grammar structures and unfamiliar words to keep your brain from absorbing the information you’re reading. However, by employing active reading, you can defend yourself against the tricky strategies these writers are using and learn how to read well on the LSAT.