Week 2 Synthesis: Foundations Mixed Drill & First Timing Baseline
Recap: Week 2 in One Page
This week covered conditional logic (round two), causal reasoning, RC passage-mapping, and Main Point questions. Today is about seeing how they fit together — and getting your first real timed data point.
Decision Matrices
Conditional vs. causal: how to tell which kind of reasoning a stimulus uses
Conditional language ("if," "only if," "all," "requires") signals a guarantee-based argument — diagram it. Causal language ("causes," "leads to," a correlation followed by an explanatory leap) signals an attackable causal claim — look for the five standard attacks. Some stimuli mix both; identify which piece of the argument is doing which kind of work before you evaluate it.
Which foundation each family relies on
Describe-family questions (Main Point, Flaw) lean on argument anatomy. Assumption-family questions (still ahead in Week 5) will lean on both conditional and causal reasoning, depending on the stimulus. Inference questions lean almost entirely on precise reading plus conditional/quantifier logic when present.
RC map checklist
Before answering any RC question: do you know the main point? Do you know whose viewpoint is whose? Do you know where in the passage each paragraph's content lives? If any answer is no, that's the gap to close before trusting your answer choice.
Official Timed Section (First Timing Baseline)
On LawHub, pull one drill-tier LR section and take it timed at exactly 35 minutes — your first real timing data point. Afterward, do an untimed blind review of anything you were unsure of, exactly as you did after the diagnostic. Log the timed result (raw score, time used) in the Performance panel; this is the first data point on your pacing trend line, which you'll keep building all the way through Phase 4's timed sections.
Practice items on this page are curriculum-authored in LSAT style; they are not official LSAC questions. Real drilling happens on LawHub — see the assignment below.
Mixed Original Items
Q1. Which stimulus type is this: "Sales rose the same month the store extended its hours. The manager concludes the extended hours caused the sales increase."
Q2. Which stimulus type is this: "A loan is approved only if the applicant's credit score exceeds 680."
Q3. In an RC passage, a critic's objection is described in paragraph 2 and the author's response follows in paragraph 3. A question asks for the author's own view. Where do you look first?
Q4. Main point trap check: an argument concludes "the city should ban single-use plastics." Which answer choice is the premise-restatement trap rather than the main point?
Peek into Week 3
Week 3 finishes Phase 1: Role-of-a-Statement questions, finding assumptions directly, answer-choice elimination technique, and — on Day 17 — the first admissions-strategy checkpoint, where you'll pull real ABA 509 data for Georgetown, GW, American, and Scalia Law to build School List v1.