@ said:

my friend, i don't hurr durr the lsat. in fact i share your appreciation to some extent, although mine is much more qualified. it does provide a more even playing field than other aspects of one's application...but that isn't saying much lol. the fact that an lsat prep cottage industry exists is no accident, either. it isn't to reward people with the grit to work hard and study, it's to enrich all the parties that get in on the grift. come on... if you want to be an attorney, you should be able to detach from your emotional sympathy for a test that you're good at and analyze its implications objectively

My opinion of the LSAT is not unqualified. LG as a section in particular strikes me as silly. Incredibly niche and something which I honestly doubt more than 1/1000 will -0 in a first timed attempt. On the other hand it's somewhat easily forgiven because it is a factor that most people who are top scorers can get close to -0 without immense time investment. The fact that there's a section that people will learn quickly, but are likely to perform relatively poorly in initially regardless of the way they think or their background is not great. Overall the test fields a narrow range of aptitudes and a shallow skill set. Is that skill set useful for analysis? Probably. Could it be broader and a better predictor of law school success? Absolutely.

You haven't really addressed anything else I've said. To analyze the implications objectively: People who are already good at skills tested by this test which include reading, rationalization will be advantaged, those who have the time to study will be advantaged, those who will pay for resources (often incredibly expensive ones) will be advantaged. In the first two camps - is that an advantage we discourage? Surely not anywhere else in the process of filtering for academia. What is GPA 'supposed' to measure if not particular kinds of intelligence/knowledge and commitment? If you don't have the time to put into the LSAT to potentially save yourself tens of thousands of dollars... well it's a strange problem to have. If you have a young family and are working full time for all the lead up of a test then I can see arguing you're sufficiently time constrained. If you're just working full time? Study after work. Study on the weekend. It's not something only the rich can do. If you work a job that pays rent and puts food on the table you have enough to study with. And that study time is at your pace. Maybe you set your career trajectory back by not running overtime or something or by taking a year before you write the LSAT - but at least working while studying for the LSAT isn't under a definite time pressure. It's surely less of a disadvantage than working while studying for school - a no do-over affair with hard deadlines indifferent to an individual. LG in particular (the thing that basically everyone has to study to a degree) is not some great time investment - particularly not compared to +4 years of school you were likely paying in part for.

The last - the issue of money - is where the LSAT presents the least advantage of any part of the application as you've conceded. Many people have +170'd without formal teaching or even courses. Some started with colds in the 140s. Yes if you throw more money at it your outcomes will be better on average. And the people that can afford to pay for $300/hr tutors and elite prep schools can afford to go the schools that we will say no to because the scholarship wasn't sufficient for it to not bury us in debt. The LSAT is the way the rich pay for normal and poor people to attend Ivys. It's not the GPA that everyone in an elite circle is going to be at least +3.6 just by going to a school with high grades (really look at the average of expensive vs inexpensive schools) and having as many resources as they want. I know of people.. who didn't write a single paper in school and many schools where just being in the top half is already +3.6 range. They aren't even all selective schools lol. Wish I had had foresight to research that. Your softs aren't going to save you unless you're an elite athlete. The likelihood you have letters of recommendation good enough and from people important enough to save bad numbers.. well eh. Unless you're rarer than a 178 none of your softs will make or break your profile - this is Ivy Law not Ivy Undergrad. At best good ones will give you a couple points or .3 edge if you aren't a complete unicorn.

Objectively the LSAT is the part of your profile (besides demographic) that lets you least be affected by the advantage of being rich and well connected - as you've conceded. It NECESSARILY FOLLOWS that it's presence disproportionately disadvantages the rich and benefits the rest. They are disadvantaged because overall they lose spots that they would have held by having better metrics in the other parts of profile where their advantage is even greater than in preparing for the LSAT. This is not every case - many poor will have good GPA and bad LSAT and lose out. Many rich will have bad GPA but good LSAT from extensive prep and win out. But it logically follows on average simply due to the point you conceded - that it's where the rich have the least advantage. All things are relative. This is the objective impact of the LSAT and why I call it an equalizer.

On the balance of things it seems we don't disagree. But that the LSAT is a special way of benefiting the rich is something I've seen many many times, and so I grow tired of it an extremely misleading argument. People who are rich will be advantaged compared to people who aren't in basically every possible metric from birth to death - and that includes every possible test you can create. One overall impact of the LSAT is to benefit people who aren't rich. When one says something like "The LSAT benefits the rich" there is an implicit assumption language creates that says 'we are describing something - when we describe something it is relative to something'. When people read The LSAT benefits the rich it seems to say - the existence of the LSAT leads to better outcomes for rich people. This is objectively not true by your own admission. But people who don't know better read it - assume that's the intent of the statement (and usually that is the intent of the statement as articles will then attempt to justify the position that without the LSAT admissions would be fairer to normal people) - and go on thinking it's true.

An extreme comparison perhaps: Being in America benefits black people. In fact even this is perhaps less of an insidious argument because the flaw in the reasoning is more obvious. On the balance of things being in America benefits you compared to the average human. Being in the first world is advantageous in all sorts of ways compared to an average person outside of it and while that varies the average US person is doing a lot better than most third worlds. If less than 20% of the black population of the world is outside Africa - than black in America likely means a longer life, better odds at social mobility, better quality of living, etc than being born in a comparatively poor and turbulent country. Of course the statement is at odds with the fact that being black in America has a host of disadvantages compared to being white (or even other minorities in most metrics) in the same country and that black people on average live harder less fair lives with less opportunity in the US than people who aren't black. If you could write the statement in a way that would be commonly interpreted as 'being black in America is more advantageous than not being black in America' you'd be a bit closer to what people who say the LSAT benefits rich people do. It's not the exact same flaw, but it's basically creating a statement that reads opposite to the objective outcomes.

@ said:

You guys are definitely not missing out. Im here contemplating whether I should buy a $1,000 plane ticket just to take the test in a different country so that I don't have to deal with the digital test. I've been using the microsoft surface tablet and taking the 7sage PTs with it and you cannot underline anything. On RC, if you try to underline a text, it underlines a different line. I used to circle a lot on games and on RC and now I can't do that anymore. You can't glance the questions on a specific game to see if they are asking general CBT,MBT etc... or specific rule based questions.

Yeah same boat as you. First vacation in like 4 years.. to go take an LSAT abroad. I'm seriously considering it. My reading comp is way worse digitally. One of the largest PT gains I saw was moving from doing the LSAT off my laptop and writing down answers using scrap paper for LG - to - doing the LSAT fully printed. I think my avg improved roughly 3-4 immediately. Less fatigue, better comprehension, no eye strain, better short term retention, and possibly most importantly finishing test sections earlier. I don't think I was even biased against digital - the only reason I ended up printing non LG sections was because I wanted to be able to go to a coffee shop without the potential distraction of my laptop. The first time I thought I had an easy test. The next one was digital and felt normal so I didn't suspect a thing. A few tests later I noticed more variation than usual. I looked at my test scores and noticed a major pattern. Turns out all of my tests on paper ended up feeling easy and the scores reflected it.

After I found out about digital (and I stupidly hemmed and hawed about not being ready and didn't book) I looked a bit into my experience with slower writing. Old research is considered kinda irrelevant because the tech of screens has changed a lot and screen vs paper comparisons in 2005 might not be relevant in 2019. What I have found from recent material is for a lot of people to handle paper faster - and no one to find digital faster (basically par results or a tiny bit above is best I've seen for digital).

https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/

The mentioned study here is interesting. It's not extremely recent (2012) but my monitor from my 2010 Mac is better than the new laptop I use now outside of refresh rate - and that laptop is the screen I'm dramatically under-performing on. I haven't found the Microsoft Surface Go LSAC is adopting to be an improvement in screen quality. So I'm going to consider the results of this 2012 study to be pretty relevant to the situation at hand - maybe that's biased of me. Meandering aside for students in the study - for both under timed and free conditions paper outperformed dramatically. Interrupted (unexpectedly - not based on a time limit they knew before hand) results were far closer between the two groups. The author speculates that this could prove people's weakness with digital format is due to a psychological factor.

I can come to one of two conclusions:

The results here purely (or at least mostly) psychological. The important thing to note here is regardless of the reason for the change of score - it's large negative impact on some test takers will be the same on the LSAT unless it's easily out-trained. If it is psychological my dozen digital LSATs, daily use of reading on a computer (+5 hours a day) at work, time through uni and reading forums and message boards far more often than I've read books throughout my life doesn't seem to have done the trick. I wonder what it will take to be equally comfortable with digital format? Maybe digital is something only people who were born and raised on digital formats can get similar performance on.

The results for interrupted can be explained despite their divergence from free and timed results. There's many possible explanations for this. Maybe the hardest material was at the end of the passage and wasn't tested on an interrupted test. Similarly maybe the material is Maybe people get burned out on screens or zone out harder than on paper (definitely seems to happen for me) and that effect increases as you read longer. Maybe your short term retention is worse on digital, so if you've only read a little bit and are tested immediately you might perform similarly, but if you're reading most of a long passage you'll do worse.

Whatever the case may be the effect is the same - many people do worse on print. I'm jealous of the people who are unaffected or close to. For the rest of us the 90 seconds (assuming you take a while to bubble) saved on bubbling is probably going to be more than made up by any worse retention of material. This is before any strategies that involve "scanning" that will now be time sinks (checking for local questions in LG, comparative passage strategies, etc), or the time lost swapping between questions and scrap paper (LGs, RC summary, LR parallel reasoning diagramming). It's also before thinking about how the material in this study differs from LSAT: Tight time constraints that require rapid comprehension, the need to diagram on some questions, the advantage of in-text notation for passages, the denseness of some text that needs to be parsed, general test anxiety. Somehow I doubt these factors would do more to bridge the gap in the tests' results. The only advantage again seems to be in the 90 seconds for bubbling. If you lose more time than that 4% save in read or answer speed you're at a net loss. If you're making any mistakes that you wouldn't have otherwise (due to lower time or from misunderstanding) you're really losing out. Tbh I'm not excited to be moving back to digital - even if it's only a loss of a couple points it'll make the whole process more painful for me. I guess some people aren't seeing any score changes tho?

@ said:

alright but an admissions test where formal preparation correlates strongly with success is already suspicious. more preparation generally leads to faster completion of the logic games section at least, so could the restraints plausibly intensify the advantage rich people with lots of free time enjoy? idk, but always amusing that some will argue that logic games are the most teachable section of the test while simultaneously defending it as some sacred great arbiter of natural skill.

I worked my entire way through Undergrad to pay for it and have 15k debt to show for it. I've never not worked - I study LSAT on weekends after I put in my 8 hours and I'm gonna score a +170 in September. The resources I've used include a PS Bible I bought for $20 off Craigslist, some PTs I bought in bulk and the free explanations available on 7Sage and LSATHacks as well as a couple forums and the LSAT Reddit. You know what's going to suck compared to other potential Ivy candidates? My GPA which I earned while doing 30 hour work weeks. My softs which I have no time to pad up. THANK GOD for the LSAT - the greatest equalizer available to students attempting to go to law school.

The idea that the rich are more advantaged by being able to easily afford retakes or a $700 prep course (which you don't even need to take to score top 1 percentile), but that that advantage is somehow smaller in the other elements of an application when the rich can afford to never have to work through school and have their entire week to devote to class... That they can be selective and informed about where it's easy to pad GPA. Where they can get a tutor (just like LSAT!) for any of their +40 courses or to help them or someone to do writing assignments... it honestly blows my mind that people argue the LSAT is what advantages rich people. It's the fairest part of the admissions process from a poor vs rich person standpoint and that's before even talking into account the benefits of a standardized system in fairness compared to one where sometimes top 1/4 of class is A in one school and where top 1/10 of a similar quality of students is an A in another one.

And of course this all comes before talking about scholarship money. If you're rich you choose a school 4-5 schools higher on the list (assuming you're not already headed for T6) because you don't need the money to survive. For people like me most of our scholarship is going to be funded by the people with worse scores than us who go to the same school and can afford to pay for the difference.

Sorry to ramble. The concept that the LSAT is what advantages rich people has always struck me as a great fall back for people who either aren't willing to put the time in, or don't have the capability to excel at the components being tested (which correlate better than anything else with your ability to do well in 1L and so are a more legitimate than anything else they use to filter students by). As for natural skill - your initial LSAT is a good measure of some of that. Some peoples' colds are 120s, others are high 150s or even low 160s (usually brought down by LG). But the LSAT doesn't measure natural skill, it measures your ability to read, understand and rationalize. Some people will already be better at these skills from the get go or due to their life experience - but as you said it's a teachable exam. They want to take the people strongest and most efficient at those skills - not the people who are naturally best at it the first time they see it. That's the idea behind any admissions isn't it? Natural advantage is helpful, but hard work also impacts the result because you're testing skills and a way of thinking that is meant to be helpful for learning law. Why the hell would you want a test not testing that? Otherwise we'd just take people based on IQ.

Speaking of that... "an admissions test where formal preparation correlates strongly with success is already suspicious" - what admissions test doesn't correlate well with preparation? Is it the GED? The GMAT? The SAT? Those seem pretty suspicious in light of your criticism. The only admission I can think of that would be mostly free of suspicion in your analysis would be for Mensa. Why would you ever want an admissions test that doesn't test learnable content?

Seriously stop with 'hurr durr LSAT good for rich people'. It's up there on the list with 'LSAT only exists cause racism'. As someone poor but driven and reasonably smart it's the only reason I have a shot at improving my position in this life. Ty