The Joy of LSATs

I just took a practice LSAT exam, and it was one of the more disgusting things I’ve done recently.

Studying education has made me acutely aware of the flaws of standardized tests. One of the biggest is goal displacement: instead of focusing on the knowledge tested in the exam, you become focused on preparing for the test as an end in itself. It’s more about the test writers than my future legal clients. But perhaps law schools would rather know how well we can study for an exam, rather than our actual ability to reason through logic problems. This is quite possible.

Studying education has also made me more critical of statistics, and how they are interpreted. Right before the exam, Kaplan (administering the test) told us your LSAT score matters 3-4 times more than your college GPA in law school admissions. They couldn’t tell me how they got this number, and I have no hypotheses. How do you quantitatively determine how much weight one admission factor has over another? While there may be statistical models for this, I don’t think law schools are releasing those numbers to Kaplan.

This is not to say that Kaplan prep courses are not helpful to prepare for the LSATs; they can really change the way you read problems, and improve your score. But they make money off of preparing people for the LSAT exam, not getting higher GPAs. So the more important they make the LSAT seem, and the more insecure they make you feel, the better their business. For example, while reviewing problems, they said, “You may have gotten this problem right, but you can do it faster.” (Read: You need us!) Pedagogy mixed with advertising. My favorite.

In any case, I can’t afford their $1200+ prep courses. ($100 off doesn’t help much.) I’ll just pore over the practice books that they deemed useless…