Customer Reviews:
 *two thumbs up* November 7, 2008
I've spent over $1000 on LSAT prep material and the Exam Krackers series is by far the best material that I've come across. It's so easy to understand what the author wants you to learn than the other more well know LSAT prep materials.
Thanks Mr. Lynch!!!
An Improvement Over Other Books April 14, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I'm a private LSAT tutor who uses a mix of past LSATs, commercial books, and my own material for my students. I previously reviewed the Examkrackers LR book, and I find this AR book equally useful.
Since this book provides the first real competition to the powerscore LGB, it is natural to compare the two. The first obvious difference is the philosophy of where to put things on the page. PS advocates a main setup at the bottom of the page, with work for individual question done next to the question. I've always found this problematic for two reasons: students forget to follow important rules when they are written far away from the problem at hand, and work scattered around the page makes it difficult to use work on previous questions to help answer later ones (which is a huge time-saving strategy for some questions). The EK approach shows you have to put everything in one place, which I like better; I've found my students do as well.
I think the EK book has better symbols too. One disastrous set of PS symbols is the "<" and ">" signs and the branching order symbols, which always throw my students off; EK comes up with a more sensible solution to this problem, and a clever set of symbols that are intuitive and work with just about every game.
There is plenty of emphasis in this approach on finding overall deductions before jumping into the questions. People who are already familiar with the LSAT know that this is where the real points come from, and the book doesn't skimp here. Of course, there are some weaknesses. I think the chapter on rare game types is written in a particularly confusing way, but luckily the "rare" games are very rare indeed, so this is unlikely to hurt your score. Overall, I like this series enough that I now use the EK complete study pack and the home study regimen on their website as the basis of my tutoring program with students.
 Not bad. But there are still better options elsewhere. March 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a decent book. I didn't like some of the methods, but it does have some worthy advice in it.
I'm just not a fan of writing diagrams where you set up some sort of grid and write different iterations of attempts on the same grid as you go. For a linear game for example, the book suggests writing each iteration as a new line, going vertically down the page as you go. I think it gets confusing, you end up just staring at a sea of symbols.
I think logic games should be solved with one major template diagram and drawing strong inferences from the initial rules. That's more what the logic games are testing, as opposed to trying out different answers combinations to see what can be true, etc. And this book seemed to want you to do that at times.
As far as tutorial advice goes, I don't think this book is a replacement for the Powerscore Logic Games bible which tries more to help you see the deductions that can be made from the rules. This book however, is half the price. Still, for the extra $20, I'd say go with Powerscore if you can only buy one book. But if you are going to buy two, Examkrackers is decent choice. There are some worthwhile pointers in here.
If you want some extra games as practice, the games in the book are reasonably good. There are 24 games included, but 3 are mapping/pattern games which rarely appear on the LSAT anymore.
So, for the price, the tutorial + 24 games is a decent bargain. If you have more money to spend, the powerscore book + something like Ace the LSAT logic games (which has 70+ games) is another option.
A great investment in LSAT prep February 7, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I struggled with the games a lot before I got this book, but this was super helpful. This broke things down in a really intuitive way and gave me an approach that is easy to apply to every game. I looked at some other books, including the PS bible, but the symbols in this book work a lot better. One nice thing they do is give you tons of drills that just teach one little part of a technique before making you try it out on a real game. This helped me a lot. And they give you tons of games to practice on too. I'd say buy this book, the other two Examkrackers books, and the "Next 10", and you're completely set.
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