how hard is the LSAT?

[recondite7]

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I wonder if the LSAT has seen a noticeable increase in perfomance on the games section since the Sudoku craze started. I remember the games on the test requiring very similar deduction skills.

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I would guess the performance on the logic games has increase more due to the fact that it is the most teachable section and there are tons of classes offering instruction on them.

[Misfire]

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Any advice to prepare for these in the next 20 days? Remember, taking a class is not realisitic, as far as I can tell none are offered at this time of year in the next 20 days.

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Why do you have to take the test so soon? Waiting this late to take it pretty much screws you for admission/scholarships for 2007. For 2008 you'd be fine taking the June or October test.

If you're gonna take it anyway, I recommend getting a tutor for the next few weeks to crash course the games. If you're not 100% on args, any improvement there is worth double as well.

[Misfire]

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Do every logic game you can find. There are only about seven total types iirc.

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It depends on how picky you are a defining them. For my more advanced students I'll get into sub-genres of games and alternative ways of setting them up.

There's also hybrid versions of all the game types, although these are becoming more rare. The trend in recent years has been that the games section is shorter (roughly 22 questions), and the games are fairly straightforward.

A more recent trend (since about summer of '05) has been to throw an oddball clue in some of the easier games. October 05 (preptest 47) had a simple in/out game about switches on a circut, but there was this clue that told how to determine the circuit load. It wasn't hard, but it threw some people off.

[mlagoo]

btw if one more young genius who scored 170+ comes in an lsat thread talking about how "easy" the lsat is, im gonna freak out


its easy for you because youre very very smart and/or a very very good test-taker. this is not the case for everyone -- this is, in fact, not the case for most people. for most people, the lsat would be a very difficult test. to express otherwise to someone thinking about taking it is stupid and potentially harmful.

[NickMPK]

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Every school I'm lookin at takes applications til April 1st or May 1st.

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As almost everyone in this thread has mentioned, if you don't want to be a lawyer, don't apply to law school.

But if you do want to be a lawyer, don't apply to schools with such a late application deadline. Apply next year, when you have had time to study for the LSAT, do a good job on your applications, and apply to good schools. It will make the rest of your career much much easier.

[PartyPooperGuy]

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My advice, FWIW, is to buy every available *REAL* LSAT (avoid wasting your time with Princeton Review's or Kaplan's or whomever's own simulated LSATs), and take them under real conditions.

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I teach for Princeton Review. Our diagnostic exams and class workbooks only contain real LSAT questions licensed to us by LSAC.


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Yes, questions in your class workbooks and class diagnostic exams are LSAC-licensed, but the questions included in the workbooks you sell to the public--i.e., not the questions that a student in your courses will be seeing--are not real LSAT questions licensed by LSAC.

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If you're going to take a review course, take Testmasters. Their method is superior to PR's and Kaplan's, and all of their instructors scored in the 98th or 99th percentile.

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I've heard this from several sources and I call BS. Nobody I have ever challenged has been able to name one difference (let alone one advantage) to Testmaster's method over the Princeton Review. Feel free to prove me wrong.

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Most people don't have access to the teaching manuals of both, and therefore would have a hard time naming concrete differences in method, but there is clearly an obvious and objective difference in quality of teachers. All Testmasters teachers are required to personally score in the ninety-eighth or ninety-ninth percentile, while PR teachers are only required to get a 163 on the exam. There is clearly not a perfect corellation between one's own score and an ability to teach, but I'm sure there's a decent one.

I don't really know how to prove you wrong here. I also wouldn't know how to prove someone wrong who insisted that a Bush is "just as good a President" as Washington.

You already seem resistant to public opinion, so it probably wouldn't help to mention that everyone who takes Testmasters loves it, and many people report mediocre PR experiences.

I would guess that you are an excellent PR teacher, but you have to admit that there are plenty of relatively poor PR teachers out there.

[glengarry]

The question in the title of your post is the question the LSAT is asking you.

As others have said here, no need to rush. Work for 1-2 years. Take the next LSAT. You'll have better perspective about who your are.

[buriedbeds]

The LSAT is hard for time. Given no time limit the test would be insanely easy.

You can always do what I did: study really hard, do questions until your head feels like it's going to explode, take the test and then realize before you even get your score that there's no way in hell you'd ever want to be a lawyer.

Seriously, though, at this point you're not going to get too much insight into the "how" of doing the questions, so concentrate REALLY hard on getting your pacing down using a clock. Learn to not get bogged down on questions - to identify trouble question types and then narrow down your answers to make educated guesses. Time is everything, imo.

-bb.

[mosta]

here are some of my own numbers, which may give a sort of picture.

PSAT, forgot the number but I got the scholarship, but I was in the lower range for the scholarship.

SAT 10th grade. 660 V, 700 M.
SAT 12th grade. 690 V, 760 M.

in college decided to start reading novels with a dictionary and look up every word I didn't know.

GRE 800 V (99%), 780 M (93%), 720 A (92%).
Studied either minimally or not at all (cocky, lazy and foolish). Ran out of time on analytic. Analytic, when they still had it on GRE, is same as logic games on LSAT.

GMAT 760 (99%). (48 Quant (96%), 47 Verbal (99%)).

LSAT 167 (can't find percent).
I studied with a bad book. I knew to prepare for the logic games. After a couple days I killed all the ones in this book. In the actual test the problems were much much harder. I got stuck cold on the first one. I would have cancelled but I had no time to retake.

GRE (again) 790 V (99%), 790 M (91%).

So I do well at tests generally, if not quite stunningly. I can do all the math with time, but get stuck under pressure sometimes. Conclusion: Logic games you need to practice/ learn them, and need to be sure to practice hard ones. I did worse on the LSAT than on anything else b/c I didn't prepare. (And I generally didn't prepare much for any other tests either.)

PS No, I didn't go to school all these times. I considered and decided not to more than once.

On another note, I spent a semester at a top 5 law school and took the hardest classes there by consensus (while going to a lower level school on a scholarship). I was mildly surprised (okay, not really) that for all the 175-180 LSATs that were in my classes with me, almost none of them exhibited any sort of exceptional analytical or logical abilities when analyzing a complex argument or parsing a statute. Throw out an answer like "'if' here means necessary but not sufficient" and they look at you like you're Martian. Something like diagramming the rule in International Shoe (2X2 matrix) takes a week for them to figure out. Does the LSAT really mean nothing at all? Or does it distinguish the really-not-so-impressive from the truly stupid?

[Riverman]

I got 1400 on the old sat and a 164 on the lsat. It was tough for me because losing concentration for 3 minutes can cost you 3 points, which is HUGE.

Go to the best school you can. Lawyers seem really elitist about that.