Law School Admission Test
| Acronym | LSAT |
|---|---|
| Type | Standardized test |
| Developer / administrator | Law School Admission Council |
| Knowledge / skills tested | Reading comprehension, analytical reasoning, logical reasoning, and (unscored) writing. |
| Purpose | Admissions to Juris Doctor (JD) programs of law schools in United States, Canada, and some other countries. |
| Year started | 1948 |
| Duration | 35 minutes for each of the 6 sections, for a total of 3 hours and 30 minutes (excluding breaks). |
| Score / grade range | 120 to 180, in 1 point increments. |
| Score / grade validity | Scores of up to 12 tests taken since 1 June 2008 are valid. |
| Offered | 4 times a year, in February, June, October and December. |
| Restrictions on attempts | Can be taken maximum thrice in any two-year period. |
| Countries / regions | Worldwide |
| Languages | English |
| Annual number of test takers |
 105,883 in 2015–2016. |
| Prerequisites / eligibility criteria | No official prerequisite. Intended for bachelor's degree graduates and undergraduate students about to graduate, who want to apply to law schools. Fluency in English assumed. |
| Fee | US$180. (US, Canadian and Australian citizens with extreme financial need may be granted fee waivers valid for two tests in a two-year period.) |
| Scores / grades used by | Law schools in United States, Canada, Australia and some other countries. |
| Website | www |
The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) is a half-day standardized test administered four times each year at designated testing centers throughout the world. Administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) for prospective law school candidates, the LSAT is designed to assess reading comprehension, logical, and verbal reasoning proficiencies. The test is an integral part of the law school admission process in the United States, Canada (common law programs only), the University of Melbourne, Australia, and a growing number of other countries. An applicant cannot take the LSAT more than three times within a two-year period.
The test has existed in some form since 1948, when it was created to give law schools a standardized way to assess applicants aside from GPA. The current form of the exam has been used since 1991. The exam has six total sections: four scored multiple choice sections, an unscored experimental section, and an unscored writing section. Raw scores are converted to a scaled score with a high of 180, a low of 120, and a median score around 150. When an applicant applies to a law school all scores from the past five years are reported, though, depending on the school, the highest score or an average score may be used. The 2016–2017 price to take the LSAT is US$180.
The purpose of the LSAT is to aid in predicting student success in law school. Researchers Balin, Fine, and Guinier performed research on the LSAT's ability to predict law school grades at the University of Pennsylvania. They found that the LSAT could explain about 14% of the variance in first year grades and about 15% of the variance in second year grades.
The LSAT was the result of a 1945 inquiry of Frank Bowles, a Columbia Law School admissions director, about a more satisfactory admissions test that could be used for admissions than the one that was in use in 1945. The goal was to find a test that would correlate with first year grades rather than bar passage rates. This led to an invitation of representatives from Harvard Law School and Yale Law School who ultimately accepted the invitation and began to draft the first administration of the LSAT exam. NYU, in correspondence by memorandum, was openly unconvinced "about the usefulness of an aptitude test as a method of selecting law school students", but was open to experimenting with the idea, as were other schools that were unconvinced. At a meeting on November 10, 1947, with representatives of law schools extending beyond the original Columbia, Harvard, and Yale representatives, the design of the LSAT was discussed. Interestingly, at this meeting the issue of a way to test students who came from excessively "technical" backgrounds that were deficient in the study of history and literature was discussed but ultimately rejected. The first administration of the LSAT followed and occurred in 1948.
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