Law School Admission Test (LSAT): US law school admissions test

About the Law School Admission Test (LSAT)

By the late 1940s, US law schools were facing growing applicant pools (driven by the GI Bill's funding of veteran legal education) and needed an objective screening instrument. Nine leading law schools (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Virginia, Yale, and the University of Chicago) collaborated with the Educational Testing Service to develop the Law School Admission Test, first administered in 1948.

The LSAT is distinctive among standardized tests for its Analytical Reasoning section (popularly called 'Logic Games'). This section presents complex constraint-satisfaction puzzles - 'Six runners are competing in a race. Anna finishes before Brent. Carla finishes after Dave. Etc. - which runners can finish first?' - and asks the test-taker to make valid deductions. No other major standardized test has anything quite like this section.

The LSAT also has Logical Reasoning sections (analyzing arguments) and Reading Comprehension sections. Total testing time is about 3 hours; scores are reported on a 120-180 scale. The LSAT went through major revisions in 1991 (current format introduced) and 2024 (writing sample moved to separate administration; one Logical Reasoning section dropped).

The LSAT is the most predictively valid standardized admissions test for its target outcome: the correlation between LSAT score and first-year law school grades is approximately 0.50, substantially higher than the SAT-college-GPA correlation (~0.35) or the GRE-graduate-GPA correlation (~0.35). This is partly because the LSAT measures skills (logical analysis, reading dense argumentative text) very specifically aligned with law school work.

The 4 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

LSAT items are under LSAC (Law School Admission Council) copyright. We document the test's history.