The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) is a half-day standardized test required for admission to law schools approved by the American Bar Association.
The LSAT is administered four times a year. It measures your critical reading, verbal reasoning, and analytical thinking skills.
The LSAT has five 35-minute sections:
- The reading comprehension section tests your ability to understand examples of writing similar to what's seen in law school. This section has four sets of reading questions, each consisting of a reading selection followed by five to eight questions to test your reading and reasoning abilities.
- The analytical reasoning section measures your ability to understand structures of relationships and to draw logical conclusions about them. You are asked to deduce from a set of statements, rules, or conditions that describe relationships among persons, places, things, or events. They imitate the sort of detailed analyses of relationships that law students perform when solving legal problems.
- The logical reasoning questions evaluate your ability to understand, analyze, criticize, and complete different arguments. You are required to read and understand short passages and answer a single question about each one. The questions test your abilities to reason logically and think critically.
- The experimental (or "variable") section looks like any other one. It is used to pretest new test questions or forms and is unscored. You will not be able to tell which section is the experimental one.
- The writing sample assesses your ability to argue one position over another. Your essay is not scored; it is sent to law schools as part of your application package.
