c. Exam Format

c. Exam Format

The LSAT is a skills-assessment exam comprised of six sections, only four of which are scored. Each exam will have:

• Two scored sections of Logical Reasoning • One scored section of Analytical Reasoning and • One scored section of Reading Comprehension

In addition to these scored sections, each exam will also include:

• One unscored experimental section and

• One unscored writing sample

The five scored sections contain anywhere between ninety-nine and one-hundred-three questions. Each section has a thirty-five-minute time limit; with the exception of the writing sample, all of the sections are multiple choice. Each multiple-choice question will have five answer choices from which to choose. Every LSAT has the same format. And all test-takers taking the exam during the same administration will have the same exam. The exam may appear in a different order, however. The only exception to this is students who sit for Sabbath exams. Since Sabbath exams are administered on a different day within the same week as the test administration, the exam is different. If you are unable to sit for the exam on Saturday for religious reasons, there is a special online registration process to get approval. Otherwise, you may register for the June exam, which is administered on a Monday.

A sample LSAT exam might look like this:

• Thirty to forty-five minutes of instructions issued by the exam proctors

• Section One: Analytical Reasoning, thirty-five minutes • Section Two: Logical Reasoning, thirty-five minutes • Section Three: Logical Games Experimental Section, thirty-five minutes • Section Four: Logical Reasoning, thirty-five minutes • Section Five: Reading Comprehension, thirty-five minutes • Section Six: Writing Sample, thirty-five minutes

Again, these sections can occur in any order. This just gives you an idea of what a sample exam might look like.

OK, now let’s look at each of the sections you will encounter on the exam individually.

First up is Logical Reasoning. The Logical Reasoning section primarily measures your ability to evaluate, challenge, strengthen, and logically complete arguments. Each of these questions contains an argument—or stimulus, a question task, and an answer choice set. The questions are each about eighty to one hundred words long. Each stimulus is relatively short and ranges from two to five sentences. Occasionally, the stimulus may include a dual argument where more than one author is represented. These stimuli might be slightly longer.

Each section of logical reasoning contains between twenty-four and twenty-six questions. Like all the other sections of the exam, you have thirty-five minutes to complete the section. The stimuli are developed using a wide array of material and tend to focus on topics such as economics, science, politics, psychology, and other academic topics. It is not necessary to know anything specific about these subject matters; remember, this is a skills-based exam, not a content-based one. Your focus is on the question task that will direct you to evaluate the logic of the argument in some way.

This section is often considered the most difficult, and unfortunately, makes up fifty percent of the exam. The abstract nature of some of the arguments and the section’s expectation that you analyze complex arguments containing confusing language can further enhance the difficulty level of the section.

Then there’s Analytical Reasoning. The Analytical Reasoning section—commonly referred to as the logic games section—measures your ability to determine relationships and identify possible logical outcomes based on provided variables and a given scenario. The section contains four games. Each game has a scenario, a set of rules, and an answer choice set that contains five answer choices. The section typically is made up of twenty-two to twenty-six questions, depending on the exam. You can expect each game to have a least five questions and at most seven. There are various types of games that you may encounter, including basic linear and grouping, which we will talk about later. But essentially, for right now, just know that there are two key tasks games will ask of you: either sort or order. Some games will ask you do both, but that’s it. The composition of the games section will vary by exam; and there is no reliable way to predict the exact game makeup you will encounter on any particular exam.

OK, let’s address the elephant in the room. It’s no secret that the logic games section is often considered by test-takers as the most daunting and pegged as the most difficult section. That’s not without merit. It is a hard section. However, many students initially feel this way because they are unsure of how exactly to approach logic games. Once students develop a greater familiarity with games, they usually conquer their initial feelings about the section and navigate it more smoothly. So, see? There’s hope!

Next is Reading Comprehension. The Reading Comprehension section measures your ability to derive information and draw inferences from complex narrative passages from various fields of study. In this section, you will have four passages that can be anywhere from fourhundred-fifty to six-hundred-fifty words. Of the four passages, three of them will be a long single narrative. These are not uncommon from passages you may have seen on other

reading comprehension tests. The remaining passage will be a comparative passage. This passage, while the same length overall, is broken into two smaller passages and written by two separate authors. The passages are related to the same issue but may express different viewpoints or may share the same viewpoint but for different reasons, for example.

Each passage is followed by five to eight questions. Overall, the section has twenty-six to twenty-eight questions, making it the longest section on the exam. The topics of the passages run the gamut from hard science to humanities to history to law. The passages are typically drawn from academic journals and other scholarly or publicly available sources. Like the rest of the exam, the passages assume no subject-specific knowledge. You will have everything needed to answer the questions provided in the passages.

So that’s it for the scored sections—but hardly it for the exam. You’ll also encounter a writing sample and an experimental section. The experimental section is an additional unscored section included in the exam. The experimental section will be either Logical Reasoning or Reading Comprehension or Logic Games and will occur in any section prior to the writing sample.

The Law School Admission Council uses this section to test out new material that it may be thinking about introducing to the exam. For example, the Reading Comprehension comparative reading passages first occurred on the June 2007 exam. Prior to that exam, however, they were tested in experimental sections.

While every student who sits for a particular exam administration will have the same exam for the scored sections, the experimental section may be different in terms of content and placement. At the end of the exam, you will know what type of experimental section you had, though you may not know until you receive your scores which section number it actually was. There are many theories and speculations about how to figure out which section might be experimental. However, it can be a risky gamble if you guess incorrectly