Asia LSAT digital or no?

Comments

• 2 Likes

  Regis_Phalange63 Alum Member

  June 2019 1058 karma

  Not going to happen for years. LSAC emailed me back.
• H.W.Shepard Alum Member

  June 2019 12 karma

  @Regis_Phalange63 said:
  Not going to happen for years. LSAC emailed me back.

  That is such a disappointment... I was writing in this comment an extended complaint about circumstances concerning the transition (ex: their 'collaboration' with Microsoft; July exam being half-and-half) but at one point I was reminded of how TOEFL transited from PBT to IBT way back when. Then I realized there's no point of complaining; it is what it is...
• UnicornFarts Alum Member

  June 2019 222 karma

  I've heard people say their scores went up a few points with the new digital version. It does seem to eliminate the hassle of bubbling.
• 3 Likes

  cooljon525-1-1 Alum Member

  June 2019 917 karma

  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.
• 2 Likes

  Habeas Porpoise Alum Member Sage ⭐

  June 2019 edited June 2019 1866 karma

  I was actually gonna take the July LSAT instead of June (I was out of PTs and wanted to use June as a fresh PT), but when I heard it was mixed-digital I scrapped that and just went with June.
  I played around with the LSAT's digital practice thing and much prefer the paper version; the downside of bubbling is offset by being able to annotate and cross off and make side notes easily (for me, at least). And I have a bad tendency to skim when I read anything in digital.
  Plus eye fatigue. I can only look at a screen continuously for so long.
• corpus Free Trial Member

  June 2019 15 karma

  @cooljon525 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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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?
• BrainiacMS Alum Member

  November 2019 98 karma

  I was afraid they were going to implement the digital test soon in Asia. It's good to know I don't have to change my test taking habits.