What Does the LSAT Test?
If you adhere to the official “line”, the LSAT tests your initial aptitude for the types of tasks you will be graded on in law school. Essentially, it is intended to offer predictions on your likelihood to succeed (i.e., get good grades) in your law school classes.
And it does that fairly well—at least law school admissions offices seem to think so!
Which is great, but not particularly helpful to this discussion. When people ask me “what does the LSAT test”, the above is never what they’re really asking. No, they’re asking “how can one test measure anything about people with such a wide variety of educational and work experience backgrounds?”
Or, more pointedly, “if I were to take the LSAT, what would I have to study?”
The LSAT tests your ability to challenge expectations. It tests your ability to be confrontational, but confrontational in the “correct” way. The following quote, attributed to Aristotle, is—with slight alteration—entirely applicable:
“Anybody can become angry—that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
If you substitute the word “confrontational” for the word “angry” in each instance in that quote, you have a good assessment of the challenge of the LSAT. (As an aside, my colleague Patrick Tyrell wrote a blog post for the GMAT that has some applicability here!)
Let’s take an example from a rule in a logic game—the 3rd game of the free LSAT on LSAC’s homepage, the June 2007 LSAT. (If that seems woefully out of date, keep in mind the LSAT changes at a pace that could best be called glacial!)
Guadalupe will be its destination in the week preceding any voyage it makes to Jamaica.
Seems pretty clear, yes? If we allow G to be Guadalupe, and J to be Jamaica (gosh, I’m so creative), that means we’ll always see G and J next to each other in the schedule. Easy, right?
Yeah, no. Sorry.
Let’s unpack that rule more deeply. Start with “any voyage it makes to Jamaica”…so any voyage to Jamaica triggers more conditions. And any voyage to Jamaica needs a voyage to Guadalupe in the week prior.
So will we always see G and J together? Not necessarily…you could see G without J. Every time you see a J, there’s going to be a G right there next to it…but you could see G anywhere, with no restrictions.
The LSAT tests your ability to question possibly flawed conclusions, and identify other people’s conclusions. This happens everywhere.
So what does the LSAT test?
It tests your ability to ask the right questions! In the example of G and J…you should ask “can we see J without G? What about the other way around: could we see G without J?”
Or consider the following prompt from the same test, section 3 number 13:
Standard aluminum cans do not vary in the amount of aluminum that they contain. Fifty percent of the amount of aluminum contained in a certain group (M) of standard aluminum soft drink cans was recycled from another group of (L) of used, standard aluminum soft drink cans. Since all of the cans in L were recycled into cans in M and since the amount of material other than aluminum in an aluminum can is negligible, it follows that M contains twice as many cans as L.
And…SCENE. Wow; what in the world just happened here? I feel like I lost consciousness just reading that!
Let’s unpack, and learn where to ask questions:
- M contains twice as many cans as L.
- Half of the aluminum in M came from L.
- All of the cans in L were recycled.
Well, the conclusion is about number of cans, and all the information we have is amount of aluminum. So maybe the aluminum cans in M are larger than the cans in L!
Except no, we’re not allowed to go there: these are all standard aluminum cans, and we’re told that standard aluminum cans don’t differ in terms of amount of aluminum. So the individual cans have to be identical in that regard.
Ok, well maybe the cans in M are more pure than cans in L! Again, nope: sorry, but we’re told standard aluminum cans are all pure aluminum. Not allowed to go there.
I like lemon juice in my water. (And if you’re thinking “Chris, where the hell are you going with this??? Where did lemon juice come from?!?” please bear with me!)
So whenever I pour myself a glass of water, I like to cut a lemon wedge and squeeze the juice from that wedge into my water glass. And so I squeeze, and I squeeze, and I squeeze…but I can never quite completely drain that lemon wedge: there’s always some lemon juice that gets thrown away.
All the cans in L were recycled. But was some of the aluminum from L thrown away, in a similar sense to how I can never get all the lemon juice out of a lemon wedge?
That’s a question we’re allowed to ask. And if you asked that question, or, upon reading one of the answer choices, realized that one of the answer choices inherently poses that question, you now know the correct answer.
And that’s the LSAT. It tests your ability to learn to ask the right questions, of the right portion of the paragraph, in the right manner and at the right place, and to recognize when the right answer choice reveals the right question—that is not easy, but it does mean a high score on the LSAT will be within your power.
Good luck!
Related: How to Study for the LSAT
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Chris Gentry is a Manhattan Prep LSAT, GMAT, and GRE instructor who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Chris received his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Clemson and JD from Emory University School of Law before realizing that he genuinely enjoys the challenge of standardized tests, and his true passion is teaching. Chris’ dual-pronged approach to understanding each test question has helped countless of his students to achieve their goal scores. What are you waiting for? Check out Chris’ upcoming LSAT courses here.