LSAT

The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) is a half-day standardized test administered six times each year at designated testing centers throughout the world. The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) administers the LSAT for prospective law school candidates. It is designed to assess reading comprehension as well as logical and verbal reasoning proficiency. The test is an integral part of the law school admission process in the United States, Canada (common law programs only), the University of Melbourne, Australia, and a growing number of other countries. The test had existed in some form since 1948, when it was created to give law schools a standardized way to assess applicants in addition to their GPA. The current form of the exam has been used since 1991. The exam has six total sections that include four scored multiple choice sections, an unscored experimental section, and an unscored writing section. Raw scores are converted to a scaled score with a high of 180, a low of 120, and a median score around 150. When an applicant applies to a law school all scores from the past five years are reported and either the highest score or an average of the scores is used. The purpose of the LSAT is to aid in predicting student success in law school. Researchers Balin, Fine, and Guinier performed research on the LSAT's ability to predict law school grades at the University of Pennsylvania. They found that the LSAT could explain about 14% of the variance in first year grades and about 15% of the variance in second year grades. The LSAT was the result of a 1945 inquiry of Frank Bowles, a Columbia Law School admissions director, about a more satisfactory admissions test that could be used for admissions than the one that was in use in 1945. The goal was to find a test that would correlate with first year grades rather than bar passage rates. This led to an invitation of representatives from Harvard Law School and Yale Law School who ultimately accepted the invitation and began to draft the first administration of the LSAT exam. NYU, in correspondence by memorandum, was openly unconvinced 'about the usefulness of an aptitude test as a method of selecting law school students,' but was open to experimenting with the idea, as were other schools that were unconvinced. At a meeting on November 10, 1947, with representatives of law schools extending beyond the original Columbia, Harvard, and Yale representatives, the design of the LSAT was discussed. At this meeting the issue of a way to test students who came from excessively 'technical' backgrounds that were deficient in the study of history and literature was discussed but ultimately rejected. The first administration of the LSAT followed and occurred in 1948. The LSAC previously administered the LSAT four times per year: June, September/ October, December and February. However, in June 2017, it was announced that the LSAC would be increasing the number of tests from four to six, and would instead be administering it in January, March, June, July, September, and November. 129,925 LSATs were administered in the 2011–12 testing year (June 2011–February 2012), the largest percentage decline in LSATs administered in more than 10 years, and a drop of more than 16% from the previous year, when 155,050 LSATs were administered. The number of LSATs administered fell more than 25% over a two-year period (from the 2009–10 testing year to the 2011–12 testing year). The October 2012 administration reflected a 16.4% drop in volume from its 2011 counterpart. LSAT numbers continued to drop over the next two cycles but to a lesser degree, with 13.4% and 6.2% drops, respectively, for the 2012–13 and 2013–14 cycles. February 2014 showed the first increase in test takers (1.1%) since June 2010. In December of 2018, LSAC announced that the Microsoft Surface Go tablet will be used exclusively to administer the LSAT beginning in 2019 when the test transitions to a digital only format The writing sample section will be separate from the LSAT starting with the June 3, 2019 test administration. By registering for the June or July LSAT, candidates will be automatically eligible to complete the writing section as of the date of the LSAT and up to one year thereafter.