The LSAT

The Law School Admission Test, the ultimate in standardized tests. Each school has its own way of calculating your future success as an attorney, but let's be realistic. The LSAT is the single most important test in your path to law school; regardless of your GPA, your essays and resume, no matter how many hours of community service you provided, nothing compares to a solid LSAT score. There are a total of six sections on the test and you're allowed 35 minutes to complete each section, no working ahead or going back. The test is multiple choice, other than the writing section which is not scored, but is reviewed by the schools you're applying to. One of the remaining five sections is an experimental section where they test out future questions on you. You have no idea which section this is however, so you have to approach each section as if it's the real deal. The other four sections are broken down to one reading comprehension, one analytical reasoning and two logical reasoning sections.

Without going into too much detail (sorry this isn't an LSAT Prep blog), the reading comprehension is either a long passage followed by six or seven questions about that passage or two shorter passages with questions comparing the two passages. Honestly, we've been doing this kind of reading comprehension since elementary school, so if you're not good at it by now, there's not a whole lot you can do to master it quickly. My only advice is that the questions are meant to trick you and try to get you to use information you know from outside the passage to answer the questions. Just remember to only refer to the information provided, even if you know it's wrong, to answer the questions. The test makers try to bring up topics that spark bias and strong opinions so they can get you to pick wrong answers. Logical reasoning is another tricky one, but something you should be familiar with. It consists of small paragraphs followed by a question or two. Again, only refer to that paragraph when answering these questions. There are a number of questions that can be asked, but most of them are similar to the types of questions you'll be asked in the reading section. The best advice that I was given was to look for the wrong answers to the questions and never the right. It's easy to convince yourself something can be right when it's not, however it becomes more difficult to convince yourself that something is wrong when it's really right. I just stupified myself writing that, so you might want to go back and read that again. Mark off the wrong answers and what you're left with is the BEST answer, not the right answer.

The last section, Analytical Reasoning, is insane, but for dorks like me it was pretty fun. Some people refer to this as the games or logic section; it can be pretty challenging, but it's also the area you can improve on the most. Here's a sample question:

An attorney is scheduling interviews with witnesses for a given week, Monday through Saturday.
Two full consecutive days of the week are reserved for interviewing hostile witnesses. In addition,
non-hostile witnesses Q, R, U, X, Y and Z are each interviewed once for a full morning or a full
afternoon. The only witnesses who are interviewed simultaneously are Q and R.

X must be interviewed on Thursday morning.
Q must be interviewed before X.
U must be interviewed before R.
Z must be interviewed after X and after Y.

I know what you're thinking, what on earth does this have to do with being an attorney? As far as I know nothing, but they tell me that it shows the ability to think analytically and that it compares all test takers at the same time with the same problem on a level playing field, blah blah blah. Fact is, you have to take it, so buckle down and start breaking it apart. After giving you this information, there will be five to seven questions based just on this info, such as:


Which of the following is a sequence, from first to last, in which the non-hostile witnesses
could be interviewed?
A. Q with R, U, X, Y, Z
B. Q, U, R, X with Y, Z
C. U, X, Q with R, Y, Z
D. U, Y, Q with R, X, Z
E. X, Q with U, Z, R, Y

The principle here is that you should create a chart or diagram to collect all the information you can so that you can fly through the questions as quickly and painlessly as possible. Another good tip I was given on this section and on the others is to answer the easiest questions first. Each question has equal value, so if you answer all the easy ones first, you'll hopefully get all those correct, then you can work on the harder ones.

The average LSAT is like a 151 I think, and it's a bell curve, so they take the average number of questions answered correctly, make that a 151 and then curve the rest of the scores. The scores range from a 120 to 180 and there are four times a year you can take the test: February, June, September or October and December. This is getting to be an essay and not a blog, so you should check out LSAC, Wikipedia, Kaplan or Princeton Review for more info.