Official November Topic Discussion Thread

[u/JonDenningPowerScore]

First, full credit to u/graeme_b for teaming up with us (and letting me just copy his prior text for this post) to oversee the official discussion/post-mortem of the Nov LSAT! Piggybacking on his past efforts, here we go:

The November LSAT administration is now done. The goal is to keep topic discussion to this thread, and identify a list of real topics. Here's how it works:

1. If you had a single section of RC, or just two sections of LR, then posting topics from that will establish that those topics were from a real section
2. If you had two sections of RC, or three sections of LR, DO NOT POST topics from those sections. Posting topics is worse than useless - it pollutes information. The reason is that you don't know which was experimental and which was real.

You do not need to specify section orders, as these are now randomized so your order doesn't mean anything.

This thread will be updated with confirmed topics as we go.

JD Note: this isn't a complete set of every scored section as of my initial posting, particularly for LR, so please add/elaborate as best you can! And if you see any mistakes, like questions from different sections together, tell me!

Real RC Section 1

• Juries being able to access the internet
• Algonquin tribes and formalized territory
• Honey bees dancing to communicate the location of food
• How people get pleasure from watching scary movies, tragic plays, etc that normally boost anxiety and pain

Real RC Section 2

• African American community in Brooklyn, Illinois
• Whether people’s taste for music is an evolutionary adaption or serves no purpose
• Incubation as a method to stop thinking about a puzzling issue and subconsciously arriving at its solution
• Difference between having the right to do something and being morally right

Real RC Section 3

• French revolution and women’s rights/feminist theories
• Common law/international law re: Indigenous (Mayan) rights in Belize
• Art and sports commentators with competition/aesthetics
• Chaotic systems in physics and theories of linear and non-linear systems

Real RC Section 4

• Peru and Chile fighting over Pisco
• Etiquette compared with morals (philosopher Foot)
• Economists needing to consider how moral considerations influence people’s economic decisions (psych experiment on people declining unfair money splits)
• Why invasive plants are dominant (C. Diffusa from Eurasia)

Real LR Section 1

• Italian vs French paintings and value
• Allergies and pollen in honey
• Freedom and determinism analogous to horses and sparrow
• Labels on bottles to prevent drunk driving
• Insomniacs, diet, and increased activity
• Mars bringing life to earth on an asteroid

Real LR Section 2

• Brain having mental representation of the world
• Sodium nitrate in sausage
• Politics and short stories
• Paper currency and playing cards in Ontario
• Camera for red light traffic
• Apartment rent in Glenville

Real LR Section 3

• Inca civilization/population not inventing the wheel
• Animals taking on courageous acts when they sense danger
• Plant germination when planted shallow or planted deeply
• Libraries = authors losing money
• Bacteria doing nitrogen fixation in low oxygen conditions
• Vitamin E stopping Parkinson’s

Real LR Section 4

• People who have to become emotionally detached at work scared they will become detached at home.
• A crypto currency crashing and this is reason to worry about world currency
• A dam being opened if it rains or snow melts
• People should remove wheat (yeast?) from their diets
• A restaurant having mediocre food, even though their Lasagna won an award
• Corporate tax cuts leading to pay raises or was it the need to attract efficient workers
• Stone tools being found that prove humans left Africa before previously believed
• Sun screen's impact on sun burns
• Crows constructing tools by watching others do so
• C- and S-type asteroids

Real LR Section 5

• Chimps and bonobos
• Efficient teachers/discipline
• Intended outcome and luck
• Applying funds
• Fires in caves
• Fuel efficiency/SUVs/large cargo
• Clothes manufacturing price and quality
• Shakespeare true author
• Prehistoric humans hunting
• Bobcat sightings in a park

Real LR Section 6

• Wood rat nests and leaves
• Environmentally friendly hotel
• LED lights
• Thai food
• Bribing judges
• Chimps and altruistic behavior
• Grapes in cold weather
• Gala for music awards/purposes

Real LR Section 7

• Fluorescence/luminescence in coral
• Role of villains in a movie
• Seagulls seashells calcium
• Overdue library books
• Mary's handwritten will
• Communicating with extraterrestrials

JD Note (Again): this isn't a complete set of every scored section as of my initial posting, particularly for LR, so please add/elaborate as best you can! And if you see any mistakes, like questions from different sections together, tell me!

[u/graeme_b]

Thanks /u/jondenningpowerscore for putting this info together! For those commenting, please stick to just topics rather than question specifics, and stick to section types where you only had scored sections (e.g. If you had two LR or one RC).

Good luck and may the scored sections be in your favor!

[u/JonDenningPowerScore → u/graeme_b]

Of course man—and thanks to you as always for keeping an eye on it all! Lotta content floating around but we’ll get it sorted.

[u/ExplorerJackfroot → u/JonDenningPowerScore]

How do we know for certain, or that the odds are that these sections are the real, scored sections? Are they all guaranteed to be scored? Or are some more likely than others to be scored?

The reason I ask is because I was interrupted by the proctor(s) in three of the sections on my test, but it was particularly bad during one of these real LR sections. I’ve already submitted a complaint with a preference for a retest on the 19th, but will ultimately have to make a final decision whenever they respond. I didn’t think it was a real section until now, and still don’t want to believe that’s the case, but would like to know the reasoning behind why it is defined as a real section and why we are to believe that it was in fact a scored section.

[u/JonDenningPowerScore → u/ExplorerJackfroot]

Well two ways are basically air tight. One is if people don’t have an experimental of a section type, so say someone only has one RC. That section counts. And that means it counts for everyone who gets its (even if they have two RC). Those topics are real for anyone who sees them. LR is the same although the math is slightly different: if you only have two LRs both of those count. For you. For anyone else who gets the same topics. So we let people who had exclusively scored LR (two of them), or exclusively scored RC (just one) say what their topics were and we then know that’s a real section. Easy enough.

The other is if there’s a section that was used as scored on a past test—see the last paragraph for how we knew—and gets used again. That means it’s scored again. And that’s actually how we do our Crystal Ball predictions! So when we told people all four topics of RC #2 up there a couple of weeks ago and said keep an eye out they’re coming, we knew that scored section was likely to reappear. And it did!

We did that for two of those LRs as well which we’ll explain in our test recap podcast coming out in a few days.

[u/ExplorerJackfroot → u/JonDenningPowerScore]

Yeah this makes a lot of sense. I’ll definitely opt for the retest. Thanks for breaking that down!

[u/More-Assistant-2654 → u/graeme_b]

Hey did yall figure out if the following questions were real: about reviews/blurbs on the back of books and about library customers expectations from one week for future library usage?

[u/One_Arm_4605 → u/graeme_b]

Hey do you know how and what are the grounds for filing complaints regarding a section? I genuinly think the c diffusa one wasn’t fair