Today’s LSAT advice comes from our friends at Blueprint LSAT Prep. Blueprint offers live LSAT prep classes throughout the country and online LSAT courses for those who want to study on their porch.
Thoughts on the October 2012 LSAT
If you took the October 2012 LSAT last Saturday, you’ve now had over a week to recover. Congratulations, friends, you did it. Whether you owned or were owned by the test, it’s all over now. But what of the exam itself? How did it stack up to other LSATs? Well, you’re in luck, because we here at Blueprint are familiar with the October test and have some thoughts.
The biggest thought is that it was fairly conventional (a controversial opinion, we know). There were no entirely new types of games, no groundbreaking reading comp passages, no new drawing section. Just a lot of run-of-the-mill LSAT goodness.
But let’s look at it section-by-section.
After the test was over, a lot of people were talking about games. There wasn’t anything really new about games, but there were a couple difficult ones. The first game was a bit of a doozy, but the second and third games were fairly easy. What really knocked people out was the final game. LSAC’s rules don’t allow us to go into too much detail, but it was basically a challenging but conventional game. What really gave people some trouble is that the setup was worded awkwardly. But if you took your time to parse it down, it became relatively straightforward.
Reading comprehension was rather difficult, but again, nothing out of the ordinary here. What made this RC section so challenging seems to have come from the fact that the passages themselves were dense and confusing, rather than the questions being abnormally hard. If you had a good grasp of the passage, the questions became much easier.
Logical reasoning turned out to be the least-discussed part of the test, as is often the case. People didn’t seem to think it was either particularly hard or easy. There were a few tricky questions, but that’s always the case for any given LR section.
One thing people are always interested in is the curve. If a test is very difficult, it has a more forgiving curve, allowing you to miss more. But if a test is easy, it has a much more stringent curve, giving you less wiggle room. Predicting the curve is always very difficult, and involves a fair share of guesswork, but if we had to make a prediction we’d say that this test will likely have a standard curve. Nothing really stuck out as being too hard or easy, so we might be seeing an unremarkable score conversion chart when the test is released in a couple weeks.
If you took the October LSAT, here’s hoping you got the score you were looking for.
And if you’re taking the December LSAT, pick up the October exam when it’s released and give it a whirl. Just be sure to watch out for that final logic game.
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