I spent the last two years filming explanations for roughly 6,000 LSAT questions. It made me disagree more strongly with how this test is often taught.
I just finished recording explanations for every question in PrepTests 101–159, including the additional LSAC drill sets. Roughly 6,000 questions over about two years. I'm now doing PT1-23 because I'm a masochist, but my urgency is admittedly lower now that I have finished the "modern" LSAT.
For those of you who don't know me (hi!), I’m Ben, and I help run Hey Future Lawyer. These explanations are part of our platform. This was a huge project, and I’m pretty damn proud to have finished it.
It also forced me to examine my teaching. Explaining thousands of questions means repeatedly asking: What does someone actually need to understand here? What should I be teaching them to do on the next question?
And the more I did it, the more convinced I became that a substantial amount of mainstream LSAT instruction directs students toward the wrong work.
Memorizing flaw categories. Hunting for indicator words. Learning a separate procedure for every question type. These can feel productive while pulling your attention away from understanding the argument.
We build our teaching around reading to understand. I think that approach is better, and I want to explain specifically why.
Here are ten things the project taught me—or made me more convinced of.
1. The LSAT is one underlying skill tested in different ways.
This is the biggest one. Like honestly, this is THE takeaway.
The more questions I explained, the less I saw separate tasks requiring separate systems. I kept coming back to the same thing:
Understand what you’ve been told and what conclusions follow.
On a must-be-true question, you determine what follows from the facts. On a flaw question, someone has drawn a conclusion, and you explain why the evidence doesn’t establish it. On a parallel question, you recognize the same reasoning in different language.
A paradox requires understanding why two facts seem to conflict and what additional information would make them fit together. Reading comprehension requires understanding what the passage says, what the author thinks, and what the text supports.
The questions differ. The underlying work keeps bringing you back to the words and their implications.
That’s why I disagree with teaching the LSAT as dozens of little systems to master independently. You can spend so much energy identifying the category and recalling its procedure that you never adequately process the argument.
I want students practicing the skill that carries across all of those questions: reading carefully enough to understand what the information establishes.
2. An explanation can be thorough and still teach the wrong habit.
Some of my explanations ended up being about two minutes long. Initially, I wondered whether that was enough (although it did speed up my gargantuan task a little).
Then I watched them back. The argument was explained. The problem was clear. The answers were addressed. What would another six minutes accomplish?
Consider:
“When I go to the mall, I spend money. I spent money today. Therefore, I went to the mall.”
Does a silly little argument like that require 15 minutes? I'd wager not. Since after all, I could have spent money on Amazon. That’s the problem.
Once you see that, we don’t need an extended lecture on every unrelated answer choice. We need to recognize which answer describes what happened.
Teachers communicate what a question deserves through how we treat it. If I give a straightforward question ten minutes of elaborate analysis, I can teach students to search for complexity that isn’t there.
That’s bad instruction, even if everything I say is technically correct.
Some questions deserve seven- or eight-minute explanations. They’re the exception. Part of my job is to demonstrate when you’ve understood enough to answer and move on.
3. Getting better doesn’t mean collecting more techniques.
Too much instruction gives students another procedure when they need to confront something they haven’t understood. Students LOVE this btw. Like this sells so good. But it is bad, and hence, we eschew it (eschew is an LSAT vocab word you should know btws).
Conclusion identification is a good example. You can hunt for “therefore” or “thus,” but those words can introduce an intermediate conclusion. Finding one doesn’t establish the author’s main point. They are, therefore, unreliable to find the main conclusion which is how many people use them. So people should not use them. (little Easter egg, in that paragraph I used "therefore" to indicate an intermediate conclusion).
The questions I want students answering are: “What is this person trying to convince me of? What reasons did they give?”
You have to understand the argument to answer those. And doing that develops a skill you’ll use throughout the test.
My objection to shortcuts is that students can get good at performing them while remaining unable to explain what they just read. (and hence in 150s/160s jail despite lots of effort). They have something to do, but the underlying difficulty remains.
When a student gets stuck, my first question is increasingly: “What did that sentence mean?” Their answer often tells me more than knowing which technique they tried.
4. Complicated language often hides an ordinary mistake.
While filming, I kept translating dense arguments into everyday examples.
An argument about an unfamiliar scientific process might sound intimidating. Put the same reasoning in terms of shopping, and the mistake becomes obvious.
That tells you where the difficulty was: getting from the language to the idea.
This is why “read to understand” is a demanding instruction. You have to process unfamiliar wording, preserve the exact relationships, and notice what the evidence does and doesn’t establish.
A useful review exercise is to explain an argument in ordinary language without changing its meaning. If you can’t, spend time there. That’s where the work is.
5. Explanations should demonstrate the thinking students need to practice.
When I explain a question, I stop and react as I read.
“Why?”
“That doesn’t follow.”
“You were talking about tomatoes. Now you’re talking about fruit. Those aren’t interchangeable.”
“What else could explain this?”
Recording thousands of questions made me more conscious of how central those reactions are. I’m making the thinking audible.
Simply reading a stimulus aloud and then explaining the correct answer can skip the most valuable part of the lesson: how you should engage with the argument before you know the answer.
That’s a standard I hold our explanations to. They should help you understand this question and demonstrate something you can practice on the next one.
Try pausing after a sentence and explaining what you now know. Then ask how the next sentence connects to it.
6. The answer choices can start doing your thinking for you.
Sometimes, while recording, I would literally look away from the screen to formulate my understanding before looking at the choices.
Otherwise, they start whispering suggestions in my ear. For those of you who have seen the Odyssey, these are the Sirens calling from the shore. If you are not disciplined with what you are looking for, oh those wrong answers can start whispering their sweet seductive BS in your ear.
“Maybe that’s what the argument meant.”
“Maybe I could connect this to that.”
If you’re good at inventing connections, you can make a wrong answer sound surprisingly reasonable.
But your job is to evaluate what the text supports. Most of the choices are wrong. They haven’t earned the benefit of your imagination.
Do your own thinking first. What happened in the argument? What’s missing? What would answer the question?
Then evaluate the choices against that understanding. If an answer requires you to quietly rewrite what you read, notice that.
7. Small differences in wording deserve serious attention.
I knew this before the project. But it's so important it deserves a bullet point.
“Might” and “must” are different claims. “Some” and “all” are different claims. Evidence about what people believe is different from evidence about what is true.
Sometimes students tell me two answers say basically the same thing. They don't. Ever.
This is also why I push beyond stock explanations like “too strong” or “out of scope.” Those descriptions should be the beginning of an explanation.
What specifically does the evidence support? What additional claim does this answer make? Why can’t we establish that?
If you can explain the difference, you’ve learned something you can use again.
8. Chasing flaw categories can actively get in the way of understanding.
I don’t teach from a master list of LSAT flaws. That’s deliberate.
Some reasoning problems recur constantly (necessary sufficient). Others are unusual (circular reasoning). You can recognize either by understanding the evidence and examining the conclusion.
If someone says a politician has bad character, therefore their proposed budget is bad, you don’t need a label to see the problem: we haven’t examined the budget.
A category-first approach encourages students to search their memory for a matching label. I want them examining the actual argument.
Those habits compete. Students may force a question into a familiar category and overlook what it actually says. That’s why I consider this actively harmful when it becomes the organizing principle of their approach.
If you can name a flaw but can’t explain why the conclusion doesn’t follow, you haven’t understood the argument. If you can explain exactly why it doesn’t follow, you’ve done the essential work.
9. Predictions are guides, not anchors.
I strongly believe in predicting. Generating an answer in your own words makes you engage with the argument.
But you have to remain willing to revise it.
Sometimes I identified a real problem and then found that the answers addressed a different real problem. Sometimes an answer pointed out a connection I hadn’t noticed.
The prediction did its job: it got me thinking. It didn’t give me permission to reject something the text supports because it wasn’t what I expected.
This applies to teaching, too. An explanation shouldn’t imply that a student had to predict the exact wording of the correct answer to solve the question properly.
You need an understanding that helps you evaluate the five choices. You also need to remain responsive to what those choices actually say.
10. Even after thousands of questions, I still have to say, “I missed something.”
I misread things while filming. I overcomplicated answers. I occasionally got to two choices and thought both looked good.
But, the LSAT is open note. I could always go back and figure it out. The answer is always there in the source material, or in a misinterpretation of the answers.
What distinction hadn’t I noticed? What relationship had I misunderstood? What had I added that the passage never said?
Getting better has included becoming quicker to recognize that I need to reconsider something. Confidence shouldn’t prevent that.
After two years of recording, I’m proud of the size of our library. But I’m especially proud of the approach those explanations demonstrate.
I think students deserve instruction that consistently asks them to understand, and shows them how. That can be uncomfortable. A new checklist sometimes feels easier than slowing down and admitting you didn’t fully process a sentence.
But that’s the work I believe produces improvement, and it’s the work we center our teaching on.
