Product Description
Think a 180 is out of the question?
Think again. Kaplan's LSAT® 180 provides the extra tactics and advanced practice you need to get the absolute maximum score. Using this book with the practice tests and intensive review of Kaplan's bestselling LSAT® guide, you can get the perfect score. TOUGHEST QUESTIONS
Practice with "high-octane" questions -- the toughest you'll face on the test -- and get comprehensive explanations, plus tips and techniques for answering them quickly and accurately. HARDEST CONCEPTS
Target your review with focused practice sets containing the hardest Logic Games questions you'll find on the LSAT®. STRONGEST STRATEGIES
Take apart the most complicated questions with Kaplan's powerful strategies for every question type on the Logic Games, Logical Reasoning, and Reading Comprehension sections of the LSAT®. You'll learn how to get the most points in the least amount of time.
Comprehensive LSAT® Preparation!
For a complete review and four practice tests, look for Kaplan's LSAT® guide with CD-ROM wherever books are sold! Sign up for the Law School Edge.
Tap into Kaplan's expertise with the Law School Edge, our free e-newsletter. Filled with admissions tips, the latest LSAT® and career news, important reminders, study aids, and more, the Law School Edge is an excellent resource for critical law school admissions information.
Subscribe today at kaptest.com/law Test Prep, Admissions and Guidance. For life.
Kaplan has helped more than 3 million students achieve their educational and career goals. With 185 centers and more than 1,200 classroom locations throughout the United States and abroad, Kaplan provides a full range of services, including test preparation courses, admissions consulting, programs for international students, professional licensing preparation, and more. For more information, contact us at 1-888-KAP-TEST
or visit kaptest.com (AOL Keyword: kaplan).
|
Kaplan LSAT 180
- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Kaplan; 2002-03-01
- Label: Kaplan
- Studio: Kaplan
- ISBN: 0743224353
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 18 reviews
- Sales Rank in Books: #438515
Avg. Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great book...for what it is 2008-02-03
Comment: LSAT 180 is a great book...for what it is. It should be used not as a replacement for more standard test materials, but as a supplement. If you are looking for realistic LSAT questions, this isn't the right book for you. What LSAT 180 does is it gives you difficult LSAT-esque questions that will help you prepare your brain for the LSAT even if the questions are remarkably different. For example, it emphasizes process games, which are rarely seen on the LSAT...but which working through is good preparation nonetheless.
I'd say if you can score 168+, you'll find it helpful. But definitely don't use it at the expense of full-length prep tests and actual questions.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Unlike any real question 2004-08-30
Comment: I've used this book for a week, and I've found numerous weak points in this so-called book for advanced students.
The weakest part of the book is that it does not use any real question -- all of the questions in that book are "imagined" by kaplan staff who will never have a chance to write a real question for a real test.
Among all the dissimilarities of three types of questions, LR questions have the most similar materials to the real ones, because kaplan staff did not invent any "new" types of those lr questions. They just changed contents in real questions without ruining the overall logical structures.
Games questions are so ridiculous that you will never have one-millionth chance to see any of SIMILAR ones even if you take the lsat in the rest of your life( let's say 50 times). They are out of scope of real questions.
For reading, they excerpted some philosophy essays or so called plain tough articles from law documents or academic research magazines. They call those articles hard because no layman can possibly understand it without any peripheral assistance. That is totally opposite to LSAC reading principle that you do not need any further assistance to understand the passages. Those passages in the book are not similar to the real ones not only in contents, but also in strutures. They usually do not contain any argumentative elements which prevail in real ones.
I did not raise my practice score after I had finished this book. Instead, I raised my practice score from 165 to 175 after I had gone over all the tests I had done.
Therefore, I think if you really wanna achieve a high-170's in the real one, you should focus on real tests only. Kaplan will waste time of any high-score achiever.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Questions not really the flavor of those on the real LSAT. 2004-06-15
Comment: The book gets an E for effort, but the questions are lacking in flavor from what you'll see on an actual LSAT.
For example, in many of the questions in the games section, you can solve the entire question by appealing to only one of the rules of the game. This is a rarity on the LSAT, and certainly doesn't make for a particularly hard quetion. Much more often, you'll have to combine several clues, and the complexity of the deduction is what makes for a hard question.
Another example -- In the arguments sections, a key feature on the LSAT is the verbatim repeating of several key phrases from the passages to the answer questions -- it is this key rephrasing that greatly helps in choosing the right answer among several answer choices that appear to be of similar quality. This book is, in some cases, much looser with how it repeats phrases, which loses the LSAT flavor, and also makes the arguments questions hard, but not for the same reason that the hard LSAT questions are hard.
The techniques given in the book are all valid, but on the other hand, they're not earth-shattering, and the likely audience of the book (those that would already score at least in the mid 160s or higher) probably already have a good grasp of them.
This book, therefore, probably won't get you from the 165-170 range to the near-180 range. You're better off getting one of the Official LSAT books with explanations (these are good because it gives you insight into how the test-makers think) -- or Kaplan's 2 LSAT's explained. Even though a top-flight test taker won't miss more than a dozen or so questions in the first place (thus limiting the set of explanations that actually would tell you something you didn't already know in the first place), it gives you a set of explanations for the tough questions from which you can derive tactics for getting these quesitons right on test day.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very Helpful! 2004-04-23
Comment: I took Kaplan's LSAT course, and the instructor actually recommended this book to the class, which really got my attention because I was bored in the class (I was ahead of most of the students there as far as understanding the basic material the course teaches). But because of many of the negative reviews written here on the book, I decided not to buy it. I kept practicing on real LSAT questions and tests and eventually reached a point, particularly on Logical Reasoning, where I felt stuck. I knew I didn't want a 180 (mainly because I probably wouldn't get one anyway), but I knew the purpose of this book was really not necessarily literally to get a 180 from it but to help push your score as high as it could go! After having some people continue to recommend the book to me to help me out of my rut, I decided to order it.I received this book and immediately started studying the Logical Reasoning section (this review is mainly going to pertain to this section because I really didn't need help with the others!). Based on my studying, here's what I believe: Most of the people who complain about this book are either just Kaplan haters (and there are quite a few who really just hate Kaplan even if they have limited or no experience with it)...or are basically complaining due to the Logic Games section (which is the section most people seem to have a problem with/want to strengthen their skills on and, thus, look for supplemental materials on)...or are people who seriously bought into the title literally. If you're already scoring in the 170's, I really don't see what this book (or any book) can do for you, and, to me, there's nothing wrong with that. If you're in the 160's, you're missing enough questions for the book to possibly be of some use...but it depends on what you need help with. The questions in the Logic Games section that I have studied honestly didn't seem too bad in terms of how much they differ from the real questions or being impossibly hard. My take on if you are looking for something for Logic Games is that if you don't want to spend time doing problems that are unlike the ones on the LSAT (like the rare/outdated ones) or are too hard, then you probably don't need to buy this book. I mean, the point of this book IS to do some really, really tough questions--don't buy the book, then complain when it delivers just that. If that's not what you want, or if you are solely looking for a book that will help you master the Logic Games section, you might be better off checking out Powerscore's "Logic Games Bible." As for the Logical Reasoning section, I think the book is great. I don't see how the questions differ too drastically or are impossibly hard here, either. In fact, I felt like the questions in this section were basically like the hardest ones you actually do see on the Logical Reasoning sections. I did miss some questions, but reading the explanations and the tips they offered proved very helpful to me because questions that were similar in structure did show up subsequently in the book and on practice tests I took (not to mention I immediately recognized that these questions were like ones I had done and found difficult on practice LSAT's before). Other times, I looked at questions and thought, "They think THIS is a hard question??" I guarantee that if you study this book (the LR section, at least), you will think that at some point...and it will make you feel good, which is what many people told me--at the very least, this book helps by building confidence! This book DOES give tips that other books tend to leave out. And what they do is anticipate the types of Logical Reasoning questions that students usually consider the hardest and present those for you to do...then give techniques for handling them, basically, when they explain the correct and incorrect answers. I agree with the question types they mainly focus on--Formal Logic (mainly in the form of Inference questions), Parallel Reasoning, Statistics/Numbers, Surveys/Studies and then a mixture of questions from all other categories (but the ones that tend to be of the tougher variety in those categories). But, for example, on the Formal Logic sections, you kind of already need to being fairly knowledgeable on formal logic to have any kind of chance at these or, even, some of the Parallel Reasoning questions! This is where studying more basic guides beforehand like Nova's "Master the LSAT" comes into play! I like that the Reading Comprehension section of this book presents a chapter devoted to the Science passages, as, again, the writers have correctly anticipated that these are the type that freak a lot of students out the most. Again, I didn't pay a lot of attention to this section because what I really needed was something for Logical Reasoning, but I believe that this book definitely has something to offer to those having trouble with RC, as not only does it present Science passages but also those kinds of passages that are difficult solely by being boring or complex through language/topic despite not being Science passages. Honestly, if you need help and are stuck, you have nothing to lose by giving this book a try. I was desperate and decided to try it despite bad reviews, and I'm glad I did. If you do happen to be one of those people who feels this book has ruined your score or thinking, you can probably get back into your normal groove by working on practice tests from LSAC before taking the real thing! As far as the money goes, you can always just sell it to someone and get some of your money back!
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Wasted Effort 2004-01-04
Comment: In training for the LSAT, I used only official preptests sold by LSAC. Many reviewers recommended studying multiple books, like those available by Kaplan or Princeton Review. I have found that Kaplan and other study aides add to the confusion many test takers experience, and Kaplan even admits that its study guides do not help 40% of those who buy the books.
If you want to do well on the LSAT, this is the way to study: Your first purchase should the 10 More Actual, Official LSAT PrepTests. The PrepTest book will give several of real LSATs to take, though without question analysis. All of the answers are given, but they are not explained. I find this to be a bonus, because I believe that a test taker can learn more from figuring out why the answer is what is, instead of just going by the problematical answers Kaplan gives. Kaplan's answers have a tendency to be too long and lack an accurate answer. It is similar to when a person is talking but they are not really saying anything. Just getting used to taking the test is the most important part of the preparation process. If you finish all ten tests, get the older 10 Actual, Official LSAT PrepTests. DO NOT buy Kaplan's LSAT 180. It is full of the toughest questions that KAPLAN could MAKE UP. These questions are so bogus that they lowered everyone in my study group's score: we all had scores over 170 before this book. Some reviewers recommend this book for those with a score of 165+, but I do not think this book will be a use to anyone, no matter how well they have done on past tests. On one page, Kaplan gave two complete different explanations for two questions that were the exact same type of question. Kaplan's answers to MADE UP questions are lacking judgment. Kaplan is simply too lazy to buy official questions. Also, both www.LSAC.org and Amazon have individual PrepTests available for $8 each. Get the latest tests: these aren't a good buy like the books of ten, but seeing the most up to date material - even if it's just 1 or 2 tests - is worth it. If you are not in a hurry, you can get the tests free of shipping from LSAC, and they have the MOST RECENT tests, while Amazon tends to lack the two most recent tests. Specifically, get the June 2000 (PrepTest 31) exam. This contains the notorious "CD Game," the second game, which is commonly considered the most complicated LSAT logic game ever. BUT... If you REALLY want to, go ahead and pay in the thousands for a LSAT class prep course, like those offered by Kaplan and Princeton Review. I do not suggest doing that, but confidence is essential for acing the LSAT. If you feel that taking an over-priced prep course will boast your self-assurance, feel free to do so.
|
Kaplan LSAT 180
Enlarge View