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35 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
35 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: LSAT
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tags:
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- misc
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- glossary
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- legal
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date: 2023-09-21
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---
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The Law School Admissions Test ("LSAT") is a timed multiple-choice and written test administered by the Law School Admissions Counsel ("LSAC"). It's designed to provide some indicator of performance in law school, and it's bad at its job. An applicant's score on the LSAT (between 120 and 180) is the primary metric that law schools examine when determining whether to extend them an offer of admissions.
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It consists of three types of multiple choice sections:
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- Analytical Reasoning (aka "Logic Games")
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- Several small sets of incomplete logic problems that involve grouping/assigning/picking/ordering some objects into defined categories or based on their attributes.
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- Easily the most foreign section that requires a specific method for most people to score highly. Once you know the method, every setup becomes trivial, and this setup is also the easiest to get perfect if you do enough repetitions.
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- Example, because these problems are strange:
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- A problem describing 7 different named dinosaurs and 4 different colors.
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- Based on the rules, you must choose 5 dinosaurs and what color they are.
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- Rules are given about when certain dinosaurs are what colors, how many of some colors are included, and if some dinosaurs are included or excluded depending on other inclusions or exclusions.
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- The questions in the set about this problem could ask you to identify an additional implicit rule found by conditional logic substitution, determine which set of 5 could be a valid combination given the rules, or to determine what must/must not be true about a combination if that combination has a certain extra rule attached to it.
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- Logical Reasoning
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- Short word problems involving one question of summary, policy, word choice, support, logical fallacy identification, or conditional logic.
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- A more squishy section requiring you to choose the *best* answer more often than not. Weighing these is inherently subjective and really involves knowing the test and question types more than knowing any sort of inherent property.
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- Reading
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- Medium length essays or book passages that will ask a set of questions including summary, word choice, main points, substitution, support, and content.
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- Also a somewhat squishy section, albeit easier to answer if you've read the content thoroughly.
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- Reading the content thoroughly is the hardest part, as these are very dense passages to digest and critically analyze under the time limit.
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The number of each of these sections has fluctuated somewhat.
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- Historically, it's been 5: 1 LG, 2 LR, 1 W, and 1 experimental section which could be any of the above. You are not told which section is experimental, and they are presented in a random order.
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- Over the global pandemic, the fully remote LSAT Flex involved only three sections: 1 LG, 1 LR, 1 W. Same ordering and disclosure notes.
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- LSAC then moved to a fully remote four-section system, tacking on an experimental section to the LSAT Flex with the same ordering and disclosure notes. LSAC has since begun administering this four-section test in person as well.
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There's also a required Writing section which law schools don't look at as closely. It's just an essay, and many schools will require separate essays which they'll actually examine rather than the Writing section. It's also only required once, and if you have a valid LSAT Writing score but retake the main exam, you won't be required to write another essay.
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More information on the LSAT can be found on the [Law School Admission Council website](https://lsac.org). |