The Decision Strategist

It’s about time for an LSAT recap.  After roughly five weeks of studying, during which I took 18 practice exams, I scored a 172.  I started at 167, so 5 points is not a bad improvement.  I waited until the last few weeks to really ramp up the test-taking, and I found the powerscore books invaluable.  Unfortunately, as you’ll notice from the chart below, I hit a peak three or four tests before my actual test.  These last scores were all in the last week, when it seemed that I really began to suffer from burnout.  Wednesday before the test I took my last practice test, and got a 167, exactly my first score.  Though I still had a few tests left, I decided to just do some relaxed studying Thursday and Friday night and a bit Saturday morning.

Laying off a bit seemed to have helped significantly.  I felt good on test day and was able to overcome the feeling of desperation that comes from doing worse as you try harder to do better.  Ultimately I probably could have gotten a few more points, but I’m not going to complain.  At this point, I have other things to think about.

So anyway, you might want to reference my earlier post about my LSAT studying strategy.  I have a few more months in the U.S. before I leave for the Peace Corps, and don’t anticipate many more posts on this blog until I have returned in two years.  In the meantime, you can check out my Peace Corps blog.

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Even though I’m leaving for the Peace Corps in August, I’m taking the LSAT soon, and the GRE a bit later. I’ve been thinking of applying to law school for a while now, and it would be good to be able to do so easily when I get back. With not a lot of other stuff going on as the date for my peace corps departure draws closer, I’ve had a significant amount of time to study for the LSAT and work on improving my score.

I began by taking a couple of tests to get a baseline. There are two test that you can download from the LSAT website. I ordered The Next 10 Actual Official LSAT Prep Tests as well as Powerscore’s Logic Games Bible and Logic Reasoning Bible. Powerscore has an edge on other LSAT prep providers because they actually license the old test questions from the LSAT for use in studying.  I also ordered 9 of the most recent unbundled prep tests (Prep Tests 42-51).

My initial strategy was rather unstructured, starting with taking the oldest tests first and working through the Logic Games Bible simultaneously. Two important things helped me add some points to my score. The first is that while the LG Bible system is excellent, it is easy to spend too much time on the initial setup of the game and waste time. The system itself also takes getting used to. My first few tests using that system I was consistently five to 10 minutes over the time limit. However, by reducing the time I spent trying to draw inferences in the initial game, I was able to significantly reduct my time.

I also began keeping track of my scores in each section. In the beginning I missed roughly six problems in each logic games section, three or four in each reasoning section, and four in each reading section. After working through the LG Bible and simply practicing with the reading section, I’m down to missing one in each.

Improvements in the reasoning section were more difficult to come by. I began by working through the Logic Reasoning Bible while continuing to take tests, but wasn’t seeing much improvement. After a week of that, I postponed taking tests for a week to focus exclusively on the LR Bible. This focus on strategy for the reasoning section allowed me to reduce the number of missed problems in each reasoning section by one or two. The best part about this is that I get a double bonus for my work in this section because there are two reasoning sections on each test.

I also set up a spreadsheet of each problem in the reasoning sections, classifying it according to the LR Bible categories and indicating if I got it right. This has allowed me to focus more heavily on those categories of questions I get wrong most often.

My overall strategy hasn’t been particularly complicated: find the areas where I do the most poorly and focus on them. As these areas improve and returns to effort decrease, shift to the new worst area. I see several other things as having made a big difference as well. Working through each bible before rather than in tandem with working through prep tests is when I saw the biggest increases in my score. Additionally, I choose not to focus heavily on time after my first couple of tests. While time is an essential aspect of the LSAT, I think getting the process down in the beginning allows for substantial increases in speed later on. By focusing on time early on, you cheat yourself of a full analysis process for each problem. Simple repetition is a big factor as well. At this point I’ve taken thirteen tests, and I’ve noticed patterns that allow me to move more quickly and confidently in answering each question.

With one more week to study and eight more prep tests, I’m hoping to increase that a few more points before I take the test on June 17th.

There is other interesting stuff on LSAT strategies from sites such as the forums at top law schools and the LSAT Discussion forums.

The whole process has been an interesting experiment in testing how trainable standardized tests are. I tend to blow of studying for standardized tests, and haven’t ever studied for a standardized test as methodically or thoroughly as this one. As a consequence I expected this test to be rather trainable, as I’ve always thought about standardized tests. While my score has certainly improved, it has not been as large and improvement or as easy a process as I expected it to be. Does this mean that the LSAT is a good measure of a person’s skills in reading comprehension and logic? Is the GRE or the SAT a corresponding good measure of general knowledge? Does the MCAT accurately measure scientific knowledge?

I’ve always held that standardized tests were somewhat bogus, and I still think that as a measure of intelligence they are quite lacking. But perhaps if their scores are taken with a grain of salt, that is, with the recognition that they are only measuring the specific skill set associated with answering the types of questions on the test, they can be a useful tool for evaluating potential students.

In the end, the test’s usefulness as a predictor of student success seems dependent on how well the activities of students are similar to the test taking process. In law school the LSAT is supposed to be an excellent measure of student success. But is this because the people who do well on the test are simply good at taking tests, since in law school grades are dependent on your final? I worry that we correlate intelligence with test-taking ability, when the reality is almost certainly more subtle.

Anyway, I will have to present some data on my score improvement after the thing is done with.

Good luck to the rest of you test takers, and to you non-test takers trying to make your way.

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Google Adsense, affiliates, and their derivatives have encouraged a whole new direction in the monetization of internet sites now, especially blogs. So much so that I sometimes wonder if the entire internet isn’t just a giant group of advertisers struggling for links.

UPDATE: Techcrunch has an interesting article discussing some of the same material.

But there’s just one problem:

People have to buy things to make advertising worthwhile.

With the world economy entering what looks like a severe credit crunch and Americans owing more than 2.4 Trillion Dollars (that’s more than $8,000 of debt per capita), not to mention a loss of wealth due to declining housing prices, many economists are expecting a consumer spending-led recession.

In other words, people won’t be buying as much from internet ads anymore.

On the other hand, advertising is a curious business. In some ways, the less people buy the more companies advertise. Still, I’m expecting the price per ad to do some substantial declining in the next couple of years, which corresponds to a loss of income for all the ad-supported blogs sites out there.

That doesn’t bode well for Adsense supported startups out there either. Though I think Paul Grahams thoughts about the direction of startups in general are pretty spot on, I think the survival rate is going to start doing some plummeting as consumer spending slows.

Survival rates of businesses always decline when we enter recessions, but this one may be particularly bad.

I’d love to see some data on types of organizations that tend to thrive during economic turmoil. I’m betting it isn’t financial institutions (at least not this time) or consumer products. We might see a rise in alternative communities though.

-zot

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A significant amount of my profession involves working with small towns to examine economic issues. These are issues that are probably familiar to all of you because they are the same for every small resort town:

• Youth leave because there are few economic opportunities and the big cities are more exciting, or to attend college in the big city.
• Real estate is priced far beyond anything that is affordable to local residents. Only wealthy immigrants can buy houses.
• Costs are extremely high.
• Arts and tourism are a significant, if not the main, source of income for residents.

The result of these issues can generally be described in terms of two major trends. First is the demographic shift brought on by the emigration of youth and the immigration of aged populations.

With the median age getting older, the towns focus naturally shifts to fulfilling the desires of older population and away from providing a better and more enticing environment for the younger up and coming generations.

The second major trend is the gentrification of the community. As the median income increases, low wage earners become more and more marginal, and end up relegated to the role of providing services for wealthier tourists and residents. These are jobs almost exclusively located in food services, accommodations and retail. The problem of residents not being able to buy real estate only intensifies.

The parallels with so-called “third world” countries are alarming.

Pursuit of Economic Growth

The strategies for economic growth are not qualitatively different except in minor aspects: pursue tourist-funded and export-led growth.

Depending on tourist spending as an economic engine has worked out fantastically for some countries and towns, but never without the problems mentioned above and what amounts to the institutionalization of a very poor working class that serves very rich tourists. I’ll leave it for others to argue whether this is an improvement over their earlier lifestyle.

A tourist-based economy is undesirable for at least two reasons: tourism is extremely fickle and dependent on economic fluctuations, and it locks the town’s economy into a single track that cannot be left without significant consequences.

As the world approaches a recession, small resort towns are clamoring to find out why their real estate sales are slowing and their tourist numbers are down. They think that it is a problem they can fix if they just market themselves more, or make the town prettier and more friendly, or (insert random improvement here).

What they don’t realize is that the last 8 years of tourism have been funded by first a tech bubble and second a housing bubble caused by extremely low interest rates financed by our tax dollars.

In essence, much of tourists’ perceived wealth was imaginary, and now it is leaving (I’m talking about house and stock-based wealth here, not true wealth).

Few small US towns export anything of significance except their youth. Export led growth usually makes people think of China. In some areas crops are a major export, and in others arts and crafts may be somewhat important.

The real truth being, of course, that America itself isn’t a net exporter of anything but marketing and design. It hasn’t been more than this for years, though the severely weakening dollar will likely change that somewhat.

But the real problem with tourism or export-led growth is that they are based on the same thing: inequality.

A Simple Sustainable Strategy for Growth

There is really only one way to sustainably increase the economic well-being of a community, and that is to increase the productive capability of the area.

I don’t mean this in the industrial sense of destroying the surrounding environment to build manufacturing ability, but rather to take steps to develop both the infrastructure and the productive ability of the workforce.

This is a slow process in which a community must consume less than it produces and invest the excess in greater capacity. In the US this is a completely foreign concept. Instead we focus on getting people to spend as much as they can.

In other words, we have unequivocally adopted a strategy of short term growth at the expense of long term sustainable gains.

This is the tragedy of democracies in general, but especially strongly pro-corporate democracies. Politicians are under pressure to produce immediate gains, and so sacrifice future gains to do so. Bush has pursued this strategy to perfection by both cutting taxes and spending an outrageous amount of money, ensuring that the economy stays afloat for a while, but the consequences when the party is over will be that much more painful.

Those of you who work in sustainable community development in small towns, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about how communities can pursue a general strategy of sustainable development. I’ll post your responses next week.

-zot

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