If you’re reading this, you probably thought you would never have to think about the LSAT ever again. But what you didn’t account for was that the LSAT, like most things in this profession, is constantly changing. Additionally, opinionated students don’t know how to keep their thoughts to themselves. Well, I apologize, but I think this short piece is worth a quick read.
The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) previously announced that the LSAT would be altered to accommodate students with disabilities. The issue started in 2019 when two visually-impaired students faced great difficulty with the Analytical Reasoning section (commonly known as the Logic Games section) because they could not diagram as effectively as a non-impaired student could. In fact, they couldn’t diagram at all. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how imperative diagramming is to your success in the Logic Games (LG) section. It was decided shortly after that the section would be altered or replaced. The time has now come. LSAC announced that the LG section is getting completely removed.
So now that the LG section is getting dropped, what is to replace it? What kind of inhumane testing method could they devise next? The answer is very anticlimactic. Alongside Reading Comprehension (RC) and Logical Reasoning (LR), students will have to complete… an additional Logical Reasoning section.
The president of LSAC, Kellye Testy, argued that “Because the analytical and logical reasoning sections test the same skills, it made sense to drop analytical reasoning altogether.” Karen Sloan of Thomson Reuters also reported that based on LSAC’s testing, this amendment to the test had “virtually no impact on overall scoring” and furthermore, that this new format was just as predictive of law school success.
This begs the obvious question: Why did we have the section at all then? Surely, students didn’t have to take this testing format for over forty years (the LG section as we know it was first introduced in 1982) for no reason. While I can’t argue with the testing numbers LSAC claims in regard to their effectiveness in predicting success in law school, I can, however, argue that the LR and LG sections don’t test the same skill. At least, not exactly.
The way I see it, LR is a marriage of the LSAT’s two other sections and is the ultimate tool for testing success in Law School. RC tests your ability to efficiently wade through walls of text to understand structure. LG tests your fluency in logic in an extreme, and frankly unrealistic, fashion (I mean come on, some of the scenarios in that section are absurd).
Logical Reasoning requires you to combine both skills. You must be able to read for structure in order to effectively read an LR prompt, and you must be able to use logic to pick the best answer choice.
So, does removing LG matter? Well, probably not. Besides LSAC’s claim that the removal of LG won’t have an impact on test scoring, I can think of at least two other reasons that the removal of this section won’t be impactful.
Firstly, the level of logical fluency required by the LG section is overkill. If your law school experience has been anything like mine, you’ve probably never needed to use reasoning as complex as what the LG section throws at you.
Secondly, the LG section is truly designed like a game. What happens when you give people a complex game and a lot of time (say, several decades)? They game it. Mike Kim, the author of The LSAT Trainer, observes that “The Logic Games section is … commonly the most learnable of all sections.” If students are simply gaming the section, then one could argue the section doesn’t serve its intended purpose.
Thus, I conclude my rant. While Logic Games may have once been a great tool for testing logical reasoning ability, the time has come for them to take a bow and make way for a new form of testing; a form that hopefully maintains the integrity of the test and, importantly, makes it more inclusive. As for those of us who truly enjoyed scratching the logical puzzle itch with Logic Games (I know you exist), we’ll always have Sudoku and Minesweeper to fall back on.
