According to the company that developed the test, there will be a significant change to the exam’s substance in 2024 when the so-called “logic games” component of the exam is eliminated.
The test will no longer include difficult questions like who gets which entrée at a dinner gathering if Mary has a fish allergy, Devin doesn’t eat gluten, and Jamal prefers organic food.
In an email sent to American law schools on Wednesday and examined by Reuters, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), which created and manages the exam, informed them of the modification.
In August 2024, the LSAC announced that the analytical reasoning component—the official term for logic games—would be replaced with a new logical reasoning section.
Critical thinking and deductive reasoning are tested differently in the logical reasoning and analytical reasoning portions, respectively. LSAT test takers must read a brief passage and then respond to a question based on its content for the logical reasoning section.
Many consider the LSAT’s portion on logic games to be the most challenging to learn. According to a 2016 story in The Atlantic, the majority of prospective lawyers are unfamiliar with logic games, which in turn feed the LSAT test prep industry. There are numerous posts criticizing logic games in the LSAT area of the online discussion forum Reddit.
Last month, one Reddit user wrote, “It’s tanking my potential.”
The LSAC settled with two blind LSAT test-takers in 2019 over their claims that the logic games violated the Americans with Disabilities Act since they were unable to draw the diagrams frequently utilized to complete that section of the test. This led to the abolition of logic games. The settlement gave the council four years to include a new component on analytical reasoning in place of the logic games.
The elimination of the analytical reasoning component made sense because it tests the same abilities as the logical reasoning section, according to council president Kellye Testy.
“This decision could benefit some, yet it hurts none,” Testy stated. “The skills that we measure are the same & the scoring is the same.”
According to an assessment of more than 218,000 examinations, the council claimed that adding a second component of logical thinking in place of the analytical reasoning section had “virtually no impact on overall scoring” in an email sent to law school admissions officials on Wednesday. According to the council, the redesigned structure was just as good as the current one at predicting first-year law school grades.
The University of California, Berkeley School of Law’s Kirstin Theis-Alvarez said on Wednesday that some applicants may be enticed to postpone taking the LSAT this year because they believe the new edition will be simpler.
“I’ve seen the data—it won’t,” she remarked.