
Taking the LSAT with Zero Preparation - malloci
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kvv3n/i-took-the-lsat-with-zero-preparation
======
dvt
The LSAT is what's known as a "learnable" exam, which means that taking it
without preparation is 100% not indicative of the final score one could get.
This is well-reported all over law school forums where people took it cold and
got a 140 and after months of study ended up with a 177. Or started with a 155
and ended with a 165.

The LSAT (especially the logic games) is mostly pattern-recognition and
understanding the "type" of problem you're being asked to solve. Getting a
high score (e.g. over 170) the first time around is probably impossible
because the questions are formulated so weirdly (in other words, you'd need to
be familiar with the format to do well). Further, you'd probably not be used
to the time constraint and end up guessing on whatever you didn't have time to
answer. This article is just stupid bravado, but then again, it's Vice and
they're not exactly known for hard-hitting journalism.

NB: 158 going in cold is _very_ high (which is why the article seems like
humblebragging to me). A 20 point increase is doable with an intense studying
regimen. And with a 178, you can write your ticket to basically any law school
(given a 3.5+ undergrad GPA).

~~~
jacobolus
I know a guy (with BA in physics) who almost aced the LSAT going in cold (i.e.
had never seen a practice test), on a dare, without any intention of becoming
a lawyer. At some point a decade ago I was vaguely curious to try the same,
but not curious enough to overcome laziness and actually sign up for the test
(and nobody dared me).

My impression is that people who spend a lot of time thinking critically about
text, have a solid understanding of grammar, and have done lots of logic
puzzles (say, work through Smullyan’s books for fun) and other mathematics
problems tend to do pretty well without any specific training.

One reason many Americans have trouble with tests like the LSAT is that we
spend very little time or effort up through high school on solving real math
problems (as compared to trivial mechanical exercises), with the result that
students’ technical reading comprehension and critical thinking also tends to
be pretty poor. See e.g. [http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-
SWEDEN-NEW.pd...](http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-
NEW.pdf)

~~~
dvt
I'm not saying this isn't true, but I take stories like this with a grain of
salt. Every now and then, you'll have someone claiming that they got a 170+
with no practice on TLS or reddit. Since the LSAT is multiple choice, even a
completely random outcome has a nonzero chance of scoring a perfect 180.

I'd argue that what makes the LSAT difficult isn't the raw _difficulty_ but
rather the time management. Most people could probably do decent on it if they
had as long as they needed, but the fact that you need to pick the _best_
answer in like 2-3 minutes when the _question_ is like two paragraphs long
makes it very unlikely that a neophyte will score well. Once you study it, you
learn to look for certain things and only end up skimming questions for the
key information. Without having ever seen the test, you will most likely do
what any sensible person _would_ do: read the question carefully, read every
potential answer carefully, come up with your answer, eventually run out of
time, and blindly guess on the last 5 questions on every section.

~~~
ABCLAW
I did the test cold, expecting it to be in-situ practice for a 'real' test
which I anticipated to write a year later. I scored over 170 easily.

I later trained to become an LSAT instructor on the basis of my scores and
realized I didn't have any aptitude for it because none of my strategies for
dealing with the test were explicit - they were just my test taking routine.

If you did logic puzzles for fun as a kid and read enough to develop a large
vocabulary, good test taking practices will take you the rest of the way. For
what it's worth, in my experience most of the kids who did the LSAT coming
from the sciences considered it a joke and prepared minimally with good
results. They, however, constituted maybe 1/100th of the test takers.

------
bbatha
> Testy told me she too once took the LSAT, though she doesn't remember her
> score. Unlike many of today's students, she didn't spend months studying.
> "Honestly, I didn't even know at the time people did that." She says LSAC
> actually worries test-takers spend too much time preparing. It suggests
> students familiarize themselves with the test and the rhythm of the
> questions and maybe take an online course.

This sounds about right. I took the LSAT in college after doing some studying.
Between my first practice test and my final test I went up 12 points to 168.

For those unfamiliar with the test there are 3 types of sections, plus an
essay, which isn't really used by admissions offices nor is it a factor in
your score. The multiple choice questions are a long form reading with many
questions about a long passage, a logical reasoning section with a question
per prompt, and logic games with several questions for a set of logical rules.
The first two, reading and analytical, saw almost no difference in studying.
There's a couple tips to get the flow of the test but there isn't much to
learn: its fairly good test of innate skills. The logic games sections, even
coming from a computer science background and solving similar problems for
fun, were pretty challenging especially with a clock. However there are only a
dozen or so variants to the games, with the occasional ringer and so studying
by practicing a few of each variant has a huge pay off.

~~~
wahern
The clock is the test. That's pretty much the LSAT in a nutshell. This is much
more so than the SAT, the GMAT, or even the bar exam.

------
graeme
I run an lsat prep website. A cold 158 is a very high score. The median LSAT
is 151. Most students can improve about 10 points with practice.

Beyond that, improvement gets dicier, as it depends on actually changing your
patterns of thinking. The LSAT is a test of precision, and gets to a level
most people are never called to think about when making everyday arguments.

It’s actually a very interesting test, many people here on hacker news might
find it fun to try. You can print this free version:
[https://www.lsac.org/docs/default-source/jd-
docs/sampleptjun...](https://www.lsac.org/docs/default-source/jd-
docs/sampleptjune.pdf)

I _strongly_ recommend doing it timed, as it is as much a test of your
intuition with reasoning as anything else. It also uses subtle psychological
biases to lead you astray. Each section is 35 minutes. If you only have time
for one, try the logical reasoning.

Law school admissions is in flux right now, as there is a move to start using
the GRE as an admissions test. At the highest level of schools, this will
likely help get a few STEM graduates into law school. Mostly though, it’s seen
as a move by schools to pad their enrolment, as law student numbers have
declined in recent years. Skyrocketing tuition is the main cause.

The big open question is how the GRE and the LSAT will be compared in the
rankings. My impression is that the GRE isn’t very important in grad
admissions, so people don’t study for it. I suspect that motivated law
applicants will be able to achieve a comparatively higher GRE percentile than
LSAT percentile, as the GRE’s subject matter is more trivially learnable, and
the motivated prelaw students will be ranked against the unmotivated GRE
takers who are using it for grad school admissions.

~~~
Naritai
You mention skyrocketing tuition, but haven't mentioned the second major cause
of declining admissions, which is that employment rate for new grads _still_
hasn't recovered from 2008-2009 declines[1].

[1][https://www.nalp.org/0917research](https://www.nalp.org/0917research)

~~~
graeme
Thanks. Yeah, that’s the other half. If jobs and salaries were up I’m sure
more would take the debt. Right now you need a scholarship for most schools to
be worth it.

------
ladberg
Incoming: Bay Area LSAT registration skyrockets as techies try to outdo their
law school friends with zero prep.

~~~
olympus
After that: A bunch of nerds blow the LSAT out of the water, get admitted to
Yale, and become crappy lawyers because they lack every other skill necessary
to be a lawyer(social skills, mainly).

------
epmaybe
We're also starting to see some law schools not require the LSAT for
admission. I know that Harvard, Northwestern, and Georgetown Universities are
among those that have started accepting GRE or ACT scores.

From the article, I noticed an interesting parallel to medical school
admissions:

> Testy told me she too once took the LSAT, though she doesn't remember her
> score. Unlike many of today's students, she didn't spend months studying.
> "Honestly, I didn't even know at the time people did that." She says LSAC
> actually worries test-takers spend too much time preparing. It suggests
> students familiarize themselves with the test and the rhythm of the
> questions and maybe take an online course.

I've had mentors say the same thing about the MCAT for medical school
admissions, and even our USMLE board exams taken during medical school. It's
almost as if it's a requirement for everyone to pay up for a service that just
drills you until you can expect the kinds of questions that can come up,
rather than actually being tested on conceptual knowledge.

~~~
graeme
Not ACT, just GRE. And Testy was actually recommending people prepare _less_
than they do. (I think she’s wrong, incidently. If she had a $200,000
scholarship riding on the outcome, she’d prep)

The LSAT is entirely different from MCAT. It’s a skill based test. From what I
saw the MCAT is more content based, and you can cram the knowledge, except for
the reading section.

------
anon1253
I took GRE without prep as a non-native speaker. Lets just say I severely
underestimated it, and went on to do other things in life … the concept of
these tests are quite foreign in Northern Europe, so I was not expecting it
/at all/. If I wanted to ace it, it would've probably taken me weeks to prep
properly (especially all the silly math things, that I mostly forgot about how
to do fast enough without mistakes or stressing out). Never ended up
submitting my application, even though I had several first author papers as an
undergrad, I felt too defeated by it.

~~~
lmm
I would expect the language to be the issue? As a European I took the GRE with
zero prep and comfortably got an 800 on the numeric part and a 6.0 on the
essay part (I felt I was consciously pandering with an American-style essay
because that seemed to be what they wanted), but dropped a bit in the verbal
part (640) which seemed to be just about knowing dictionary definitions for a
lot of obscure words.

------
ChuckMcM
Wow the logic games are pretty interesting (sample:
[http://www.admissionsconsultants.com/lsat/lsat-prep-
game.pdf](http://www.admissionsconsultants.com/lsat/lsat-prep-game.pdf)) They
feel like Karnaugh maps and state machines to me :-)

~~~
graeme
And those aren’t even real ones. Try the ones in this official practice test:

[https://www.lsac.org/docs/default-source/jd-
docs/sampleptjun...](https://www.lsac.org/docs/default-source/jd-
docs/sampleptjune.pdf)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Awesome, thanks. I find those quite entertaining.

------
dogruck
I found the writing amusing, but I don’t understand the premise.

If I were a writer, I’d happily take any standardized test, with zero prep and
zero consequences. Then I’d tell you how I scored. And, so what?

I did not find his manufactured premise of “always thinking I might be a
genius at something” too compelling.

Suggestions to strengthen the piece:

1\. Now, he should study hard for 5 months and then take it again.

2\. Interweave a profile of another LSAT test taker who has hung his or her
dreams on scoring well.

3\. Take 3, or 10, standardized tests in other domains, and report on what it
says about his greatest area of strength.

------
EGreg
I once went to take a tough mudder without any preparation. I wanted to see
what shape I was in straight from the computer chair.

Well, it was in Mount Snow - turns out that going up and down large mountains
was the hardest part for me. The obstacles themselves were pretty
straightforward, but I was completely exhausted from jogging up mountains. I
did skip the ice bath, though.

------
userbinator
The Wiki article on the LSAT has an interesting section:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_School_Admission_Test#Scor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_School_Admission_Test#Scoring)

 _In the most recent study Nieswiadomy took the LSAC 's categorization of
test-takers into 162 majors and grouped these into 29 categories, finding the
averages of each major_

...and ironically, the last and second-last majors are criminal justice and
pre-law, respectively.

~~~
graeme
I’m not american, so I may be incorrect, but I believe many of the top ranked
schools tend not to have prelaw/criminal justice as a major. So it could be in
part a school quality issue.

------
relics443
I scored pretty high (I don't remember the score though) on a cold LSAT, but
after taking a course with an instructor who got multiple 180's, my official
score was in the 99.9th percentile.

I got into a top 5 law school, but didn't get a scholarship even with my LSAT
score, a 4.0 GPA, and multiple honors (including PBK).

Two weeks into the semester I transferred to the MSCS program. Best decision I
ever made.

