Lnat 2006

If by the 'sample test' you mean the practice paper that is available on the LNAT website then you should know that most of those questions were taken from the year that the LNAT was piloted- 2004.
I say most of the questions because a few had to be added to make the total number of questions representative of the LNAT you will sit- which has 30 questions. In 2004 the test was out of 21 (I think).
The sample test is therefore very much like the test that you will sit!

Reply 5

DaveLawStuuuudent06

Yes the sample test is similar. Supposedly the real thing is more difficult and scores tend to be lower than in practice, however i am not so sure if this is the case. I took it this year and scored 21/30. I tended to focus on analysing the texts and the points that each article made. Timing is'nt all too difficult either aslong as you discipline yourself :rolleyes:

Reply 6

DaveLawStuuuudent06

Yes the sample test is similar. Supposedly the real thing is more difficult and scores tend to be lower than in practice, however i am not so sure if this is the case. I took it this year and scored 21/30.

OK just to be clear the sample test is an actual LNAT paper that was sat, therefore its more than just 'similar', its the real McCoy!
I don't see how it can be more difficult, the only variable between the two that I see is just being in a proper exam situation.

Reply 7

DaveLawStuuuudent06

Very true, excuse my misleading type :redface:

Reply 8

thats_my_poison

OP

Ron Stoppable

The benefits of colleges over schools include few/no restrictions on subjects.

Most sixth form students prefer a well-rounded development route instead of examination-robotics - it's a simple matter of personal preference and drive.

i didnt actually do 8 AS' in 1yr; i took 2 early in yr11 and these were only critical thinking and ict avce, and the other 6 i took includes general studies

Reply 9

having guessed that GS doesn't involve any lessons (or I hope it doesnt :redface:

) you did 5, which isnt so excessive, how many are you doing to full a level?

Reply 10

thats_my_poison

OP

we didnt have any teaching for GS at all and although i did 5 academic subjects, it wasnt *that* uncommon at my college and i only go to a normal comp.

im taking 4 A2s now (see sig) which means i now get lots of frees - yay

Reply 11

WokSz

17

I already took the LNAT, and may I add it was rather TOUGH! Books and preparation are useless, in my opinion, and the only way to do well in it is to sleep well the night before and have a good breakfast. I did it with only 3 hours of sleep and I think that will be the main reason why I don't think I did so well.

Reply 12

3 hours sleep before anything is a bad ideda, error. I hold the view that books and stuff dont really help that much, although no doubt they can be of some benefit in the right person.

Reply 13

The LNAT is a tough test to take and I certainly wouldn't want to do it after only 3 hours of sleep! It is important to realise that there are 'easy' questions and that you need to get as many of those right as possible. Harder questions generally come later in the paper and generally it is a harder passage not a harder question which is the problem.

Reply 14

WokSz

17

I tried to sleep, but it didn't work as I was too nervous. As for the easy questions, these depend on the people. I found only one question out of the 29 and that's saying something :rolleyes:

But all I can suggest now is just make sure you read through some of the sample essays on the LNAT website as they're very useful.

Reply 15

thats_my_poison

OP

i posted this somewhere else but cant remember receiving an answer. on the sample paper there are some easy questions (like which is an opinion) and some much harder questions (name an assumption) so if the questions are randomly chosen out of a bank, how do they ensure there's a mix of easy/hard questions

ps: WokSz - is there anything you'd suggest would be useful in preparation. iv booked my lnat for 26th september and will probably just flick through my old critical thinking book. is that enough?

Reply 16

By way of useful preparation see this thread.
And in particular the post quoted below (in that thread) by somebody close to my heart...

Practice tests should be the primary way of practicing for the LNAT. There is a lot of good information available on the LNAT website that was recently launched including a complete practice test, answers, discussion of answers (inc how to reach them), and essay responses to previous LNAT essay questions.

Multiple-choice questions
Reading newspapers is a good idea. It is important that you read them critically and for example think "What is the main point of this article?",
"Why did the writer use this particular example?". It is important that you read unfamiliar articles as this should improve your technique.
Reading introductions of unfamiliar books for example on music, History, English Literature could also help. Introductions are relatively short and are the kinds of sources on which LNAT questions could be bases.

Also and interesting approach might be to write your own LNAT article having in mind the typical possible questions that could be asked from it. What this would allow you to do is see how the important points/feelings/examples are used by a writer to convey their thoughts into words. It sounds quite tedious but it was an approach that my friend adopted for a similar test that he had to do. An obvious good short piece of writing that you can produce is one that has two sides to the argument and a conclusion of which side the author sides with. Remember that the piece of writing doesn't have to be very long and even if it doesn't really help you here, it could be helpful for the next section- essay writing.

The most important thing that I found to be helpful was spending some time thinking why the author wrote this piece of writing (i.e. its purpose). Is it to inform/to argue/ to explain/ to discuss. This is helpful when answering a lot of LNAT questions such as the two mentioned above. Although obvious it is good to know what topic the writing is on and in particular the scope within that topic the author is writing about. If you bear this in mind then you can also answer questions like "Which of these is assume/not assumed by the writer?" more easily.

Essay
Jumping the gun a bit, but I would say that an important element that tutors are looking for in this, is the ability to to present many arguments in a concise a manner as possible. I don't think detail is the real issue here being tested. So following on from this a good way to practice for this part of the LNAT is to try writing in a concise manner. This can be done relatively easily find an article (can be familiar) think about points that you would want to make. Put the article away. Get out a small notebook and write about it.

Reply 17

In terms of the difficulty of the questions do they use ppl to see which are hard, grade them in some way and then it selects a random number of each of a certain difficulty?

Reply 18

John Gardner

6

The questions in the bank were originally calibrated using human guinea pigs.
The computer assembles test variants that ensure everyone has a test with the same difficulty-profile.

However, if there were a statistically significant variation in performance across test variants in the first 6 weeks of sittings, this would be detected by the computer. The questions would be recalibrated at that point, and the scores of those who sat the test in the first six weeks would be adjusted retrospectively to take account of the variation.

Reply 19