Customer Reviews

Cracking the LSAT with Sample Tests on CD-ROM, 2004 (Graduate Test Prep)

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The Princeton Review LSAT book suffers from many deficiencies. Chief among them are poorly constructed, badly worded, or just plain incorrect practice problems. This stems, in large part, from their tendency to generate their own practice problems, ('similar' to LSAT problems), rather than using actual LSAT questions from old exams released by the testing agency.

Practicing on old, actual LSATs -- which are released by the testing agency and bound into books ten at a time -- is probably the best way spend the bulk of your LSAT study time. But if you want explanations, instructions and analysis -- in addition to just questions and answers -- I suggest the two Kaplan LSAT books. Their basic LSAT book provides a good overview of the test, and their LSAT 180 book, intended for the advanced student, explains how to tackle a number of particularly difficult problems on the test. Both books use actual old questions licensed from the LSAT testing agency, resulting in a much better product.

I found this book to be of very little use, and the CD-ROM was even worse. If you take a diagnostic exam and score 160 or greater, skip this book. While it is an easy read, the concepts are overly simplistic and probably provide you with nothing that you didn't already subconsciously do on your own to achieve the score you did. Also, I tend to be suspect when a book that claims to help you pass the LSAT is chock full of silly typographical errors.

If you start below a 160, this is a good book to help you organize your thinking and strategy for attacking test questions. However, for all users, just buy the book-only version and SKIP THE CD-ROM!!!!

The CD-ROM was VERY poorly edited. It appears that no one at Princeton Review QA'ed it before mass-producing. Not only have the nasty typos from the book carried over, but there are even more glaring mistakes. For example, arguments that have more than one question attached to the same argument will repeat the same question for both sets of answers. In those cases, the question has absolutely nothing to do with one of the sets of answers and you're certain to get it wrong unless you're a lucky guesser.

On many questions, there is more text than the screen can display all at once, so there is a scroll bar on the right side. Unfortunately, even if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you can frequently not see the last line of text. Again, missing important info led to missing several questions unnecessarily.

Finally, one of the games (one of my particular strengths) did not give enough information to solve any of the questions. I printed out this game and questions and gave it to several other people who absolutely agreed that it was the game missing info - not just me. Not surprisingly, I got all 7 questions associated with this game wrong.

Considering that you'll be taking the LSAT on paper, the CD-ROM is clearly not an effective study tool, nor will it give you a very good diagnostic of your scoring potential since you'll miss a lot of questions based on the TESTS' MISTAKES!!! (I scored a 153 on the CD-ROM test and a 174 on the real deal....Hmm)