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Law School Admission Council Offers New Digital LSAT Prep Products (Press Release)

Expanded LSAT prep options support the diverse needs of law school aspirants

NEWTOWN, Pa., March 6, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Law School Admission Council, administrator of the industry-leading Law School Admission Test, today announced the launch of two new Digital LSAT preparation products that will help law school candidates improve their skills and feel more confident as they take the LSAT and begin their journey toward a career in the field of law. These new products are part of the LSAC LawHub, a new online legal education portal providing educational content and other services to help support students along their law school enrollment journey and beyond.

The two new Digital LSAT preparation products are designed to complement the wide range of existing test prep tools and services, providing even more options to meet the individual needs and learning styles of today's students. Both digital products include self-paced and simulated test modes, a record of the student's practice test history, and instant calculation of practice test score reports. The new products are:

Official LSAT Prep℠, which is free and included when a student registers for a free LSAC account, offers two full practice tests using the authentic Digital LSAT test environment launched in 2019.
Official LSAT Prep Plus℠, which is available as a one-year subscription for $99, offers more than 60 practice tests in the authentic Digital LSAT test environment.

Students using either product can choose to share their practice test performance with any of LSAC's Official LSAT Content Licensees, such as commercial test preparation companies or one-on-one coaches.

"Now that the LSAT has moved to a digital format, these new digital tools will provide students the opportunity to practice in a similar test environment, develop their critical thinking skills, and identify areas for improvement," said Erik Krajnikovich, director of product development at LSAC. "We are offering both a free version and a more robust version at a very affordable cost to help ensure that every candidate, no matter their background or income level, can prepare for success on the LSAT, as the first step toward adding their voice to the world of law."

Students who qualify for an LSAT test fee waiver will automatically qualify for a free one-year subscription to Official LSAT Prep Plus, with more than 60 practice tests.

"LSAC is committed to helping create a legal system that mirrors the breadth and diversity of our society, and these new offerings will help advance that goal," said Annmarie Levins, LSAC's chief strategy officer. "Working with our member law schools, we see huge opportunities to innovate and improve every step of a student's legal education journey – from attracting more people to consider a career in the law and at an earlier age, to helping students get the support and preparation they need in high school and college, to expanding and diversifying the law school applicant pool, to enhancing the law school experience."

In addition to these new tools, LSAC will continue to offer other LSAT prep resources, including free Khan Academy Official LSAT Prep, which offers the equivalent of dozens of practice tests at no cost to students, and through a wide range of publishers and test prep companies that license test content. LSAC will also continue to offer select publications of preparation materials in alternative accessible formats for candidates who need them.

To learn more about LSAC's Official LSAT Prep and Official LSAT Prep Plus, or to register for one of these new options, visit lsac.org/lsat/lsat-prep.

About the Law School Admission Council
The Law School Admission Council is a not-for-profit organization committed to promoting quality, access, and equity in law and education worldwide by supporting individuals' enrollment journeys and providing preeminent assessment, data, and technology services. For more information about LSAC, please visit LSAC.org.

a surprising insight about LSAT Logical Reasoning

Just about EVERYONE loves to suggest completing LSAT Logical Reasoning questions by question stem type.

I also recommend this, of course. I even suggest going through LR questions this way in my LSAT study schedules.

2 major reasons LSAT prep folks recommend this:
1. You have to understand what the question is asking in order to solve it. Drilling by question-stem type can help you solidify your understanding of what sort of information the question asks.

2. It's easy to categorize questions by their question stem. You can do this without taking the time to read the stimulus.

A surprising insight about Logical Reasoning questions
After teaching the LSAT for a while, I realized something:

What happens when ---

INSTEAD of thinking about questions by their "question-type" (AKA question stem)

you think about each question by the method of reasoning in the stimulus???!!!

Once I started having my students approach questions this way...their scores improved dramatically!

So I'm going to share some tips on how to think about Logical Reasoning questions by focusing on:

-the method of reasoning

and

-the gap between evidence and conclusion.

Bottom line: instead of thinking about the question-stem, let's focus on the STIMULUS.

By thinking about Logical Reasoning questions based on the method of reasoning in the stimulus, you get a better understanding of the argument. And this lets us understand each question on a deeper level and make connections across question-stem categories.

We could hypothetically categorize many LR questions by the flaws or gaps exhibited in their stimuli.
Here are just a few:

* Necessary/Sufficient Condition Confusion
* Correlation/Causation Issues
* Confusing a "Could" for a "Must"
* Taking "absence of evidence" as "evidence of absence (of evidence)"

These sorts of issues don't just come up in flaw questions. They come up in several "types" of questions.

Changing Logical Reasoning Questions
I want to SHOW you how argument gaps are important to lots of different question-types, so think about this for a second:

Some stimuli can easily be changed from one question-stem type into several others.

In other words, we can view the same stimulus and correct answer choice from a variety of perspectives.

By leaving the correct answer choice the same, by negating it, or by changing it just a little bit, we can change the question stem and still have a perfectly valid LSAT question!

Crazy huh?

All we have to do is change our point of view!

For example, we can easily change Necessary Assumption questions into the following types of questions:

Must Be True, Cannot Be True, Flaw, Strengthen, Weaken, Evaluate the Argument, and Resolve the Paradox / Discrepancy

And next time, I'll walk you through how to do this with an example from one of my favorite LSAT questions of all time.

Til next time,
Steve

P.S. If you like doing questions by type, that's totally fine. Use this BIG list of LSAT questions organized by type to easily find the ones you need :)

Recommended Resources:

1. LSAT Courses
The best of my LSAT material with exclusive access to attend my Live Online LSAT Master Classes + Q&As, and on-demand video lessons you can watch anytime. Plus, LSAT study plans to keep you on track. Save hundreds of dollars with an LSAT course package.

2. Logical Reasoning Explanations
The explanations that should have come with the LSAT. These don't just fall back on "out of scope," but actually tell you why the wrong answers are wrong, why the right answers are right, and the easiest way to get the correct answer.

3. Logical Reasoning Cheat Sheet
Based on what I'd typically do in college: read what the professor emphasized and condense it all onto a single piece of paper. It gave me a quick reference, making things a lot less threatening and a lot more manageable.

LSAT Self-Limiting Beliefs

"What technique have you found most useful to overcome self-limiting beliefs?" I have a lot of self-limiting beliefs, believe it or not. But I think we all do.

I've certainly created a lot of stuff, but I was actually a little nervous to do my first live online LSAT prep Q&A. I'd wanted to do something like this for quite a while before I actually did.

And you could say "that's stupid, why wouldn't you? It's easy. It's free. You've got people here who want to hear what you have to say. And you know your stuff."

But here's the thing. I'm not the most tech-savvy person. I've always been more on the humanities side of things, that's part of why I got into pre-law / LSAT-related stuff.

But it seems scary to try something new like that, in part because it's a new tech thing and in part because it's live. And I was talking with my coach about this.

You see, I have a coach and find it enormously helpful - he helps me see when I have blinders on and point out errors in my thinking that I couldn't spot for myself.

I discovered my self-limiting belief about doing live Q&As was that I was afraid it wouldn't go perfectly, and if it didn't go perfectly, then it would automatically have gone terribly - and it would be on record out there in the world for everybody to see.

Then I realized that it doesn't need to be perfect. The things I've created so far, they're great. They're useful. I would even go as far to say as it's pretty amazing, the resources I’ve created. I I just don't say that to toot my own horn, but because I really have seen the results that my students get. You can go read them in the LSAT Diaries. I probably don't pay enough attention to those myself because I just move onto the next thing, and I'm focused on helping the next student, not the one who's already gotten the score increase.

But people find my stuff helpful. And so, I realized that even if my live online Q&As might not be perfect, they'd still be helpful and that would be good enough.

And if the first one didn't go well, there's always the next one. And I think that holds true for the LSAT also. So my self-limiting belief, and it might be yours too, is worrying too much about what if things on the big day don't go as well as I want them to?

Of course, we want it to be perfect. What if it just goes good or okay? Turns out there's always the next one.

Just like there's always a chance for me to do another live Q&A, there's always the chance for you to take another LSAT exam. To retake.

So my request for you is, take this upcoming LSAT like it's not the real thing. Like it's not the end-all-be-all. Obviously it matters. You’ve put a lot of work in right now up to this point, and I certainly hope it goes well and I'm sure you do too, even more so.

But if it doesn't go well, you always have a next opportunity to do things better. So I would encourage you, keep that in the back of your mind. If this exam doesn't go great, there's always one a few months away or less even. So you could focus and reorient yourself towards that and aim to do better the next time.

For more, I've got an entire playlist focused on LSAT Test Day prep here -----> and several articles on LSAT Test Day prep here ----->

LawHub / Official LSAT Prep Plus - Digital LSATs

LawHub / Official LSAT Prep Plus - Digital LSATs for $99/year from LSAC

NOTE: Unfortunately, section numbering is different in Official LSAT Prep Plus / LawHub PrepTests from the prep books - most prep materials (including my LSAT study schedules) refer to section numbers in the prep books.

In the LawHub PrepTests, Logic Games is always section 1, Logical Reasoning is sections 2 and 3, and Reading Comp is section 4 - in the prep books, it's randomized like it will be on Test Day. (If you’re having trouble finding a particular a Logical Reasoning question, make sure to check both LR sections.)

(If you’re having trouble finding a particular a Logical Reasoning question, make sure to check both LR sections. The first LR section in a PrepTest book is section 2 in LawHub, and the second LR section in a PrepTest book is section 3 in LawHub.)

I told LSAC about this issue, and they said they will make the sections consistent eventually, but they couldn't promise when.

Update (Oct 23, 2020): LSAC has added a version of the May 2020 LSAT-Flex, along with an LSAT-Flex version of PrepTest 73. They've also added the regular version of LSAT PrepTest 89 (November 2019 LSAT).

***

LSAC has made 71 LSAT PrepTests available on a subscription basis for only $99 / year. You can buy them through your LSAC account on their website.

This is a great value -- especially compared to buying the exams in books of 10 for about 20 bucks each. Being able to buy them from LSAC for less than $1.50 each is an incredible value.

Now, I said there are 71 exams currently available. But there are far more than 71 released exams. So which ones are you getting? Which ones aren't you getting and why?

With Official LSAT Prep Plus, you'll get PrepTests 19, 20, 22-88, June 2007, and Form 96 (aka LSAT SuperPrep 2, Test C2).

So this is a pretty great value. The other exams (1-18, 21, and 89+) aren't available because LSAC hasn't digitized these exams.

When I first became a licensee, LSAC provided me with the tests as low-resolution scanned PDFs.

These were old scans. There had not been any optical character recognition done on these exams. So, if you were to scan them and try to do OCR on them to put them in a cleaner format, it wouldn't work that well. LSAC themselves didn't even have them cleaned up in this way!

They're still taking the time to translate the mess around their files a little bit to put them in that new digital LSAT format.

Presumably, they'll add those to the subscription eventually. And when they do so, I suspect they won't raise the price. At $99 for an entire year, they're clearly trying to make this affordable.

You'll likely see 89+ and the oldest ones added to the subscription service with time.

But for now at least, you “only” have those 71 exams available, which is more than enough.

If you're not able to afford the fee and you have an LSAC fee waiver. The good news is that you will get automatic access to this subscription service for free.

If you were recently approved for a fee waiver, or if you received an LSAC fee waiver in the past two years, you'll get this for free.

This is pretty awesome because it's going to democratize access to prep. And I suspect that once word gets out about this, pretty much everybody studying for the LSAT will take this because cost isn't much of a barrier anymore.

$99 isn't nothing, but it's a drop in the bucket when you consider the cost of prep courses, coaching, tutoring, and law school tuition.

This is well worth the investment. And it's also cheaper than getting those books of 10 exams on Amazon for about 20 bucks each.

And you can use this on any tablet, the Microsoft Surface Go, iPad, Samsung, and you can also access it on a desktop as well, of course.

(Note: on desktop, you're missing out on the digital LSAT touchscreen experience, which is what you'll likely experience on Test Day, but you do get the online LSAT-Flex experience.)

If your LSAT test date is years away, if you're a freshman or sophomore in college and just dipping your toes in the water - or if you're not sure about taking the LSAT yet - you don't need to buy this subscription to get exams and the digital format.

LSAC is also going to offer free access to two exams in the digital format. , they will be exams 71 and 73. They're calling this the Official LSAT Prep Program available through your LSAC account.

The June 2007 LSAT, which has been the free sample PDF for a very long time, will still remain free for now. With time, LSAC will probably remove it as a free test because they're putting out more recent exams, PrepTests 71 and 73, which are the December 2013 LSAT and September 2014 LSAT, respectively.

I applaud LSAC for making a couple of exams available for free, and I applaud them for making 71 of them available at a relatively low cost as a subscription service. (And you still have the print books available for the foreseeable future. Although with time, sales of those books will decline.) For now, you can use the books, you can use Digital LSATs, whatever you prefer. And if you're taking the digital LSAT, you may want to do them in the digital format.

Official LSAT Prep Plus is now live and available now inside your LSAC account at lawhub.lsac.org (click on your name on the top-right).

There are some confusing things about PrepTests, especially when it comes to section numbering.

You can get LSAT PrepTest books on Amazon, and you can get also them as part of LawHub (aka Official LSAT Prep Plus).

From LSAC:

Official LSAT Prep ℠ – FREE familiarization tool including two full practice tests in the authentic Digital LSAT test environment.

Official LSAT Prep Plus ℠ – includes more than 60 full practice tests in the authentic Digital LSAT test environment, plus additional resources and reference guides. $99 for a one-year subscription.

Is sitting down actually killing you?

My brain's kinda messed up from too much LSAT, so I can't help noticing potential correlation/causation flaws in the evidence related to these claims.

Can't help it. It's just who I am now.

For example...

"Obese people sit for 2.5 more hours per day than thin people."

Didja ever stop to think that maybe they sit because they're obese???

This is one of those alternate possibilities to consider when dealing with correlation/causation arguments.

Instead of the conditional statement:

>>>>>>>>>> sitting ---> obese

(if you sit too much, you will become obese)

It might be:

>>>>>>>>>> obese ---> sit

(if you are obese, you'll sit more)

Think about it:

Standing and running around is hard when you weigh more. Just try wearing a weighted vest for 5 minutes and see what it feels like.

When I saw this infographic, it reminded me that I DO sit a lot.

Maybe you do too, if you use a computer a lot...or you're studying for the LSAT.

So consider this a reminder not to sit for too long.

One thing that can help is a standing desk.

I got this one a few years ago and love it.

If you get one, just make sure to get into standing while working / on your computer gradually, and don't make the mistake of standing *too* much at a time.

Personally, I alternate between standing and sitting.

Some people go a step further and actually use treadmill desks!

I think that's more than a bit of overkill, but...bottom line:

exercise is good, so take a break from the books every once in a while to stretch your legs.

If you don't want to walk for hours, a standing desk might be a step in the right direction (no pun intended).

Got some LSAT knowledge coming your way next time, so...

Stay tuned,
LSAT Steve

Recommended Resources:

1. LSAT Courses
The best of my LSAT material with exclusive access to attend my Live Online LSAT Master Classes + Q&As, and on-demand video lessons you can watch anytime. Plus, LSAT study plans to keep you on track. Save hundreds of dollars with an LSAT course package.

2. LSAT Day-By-Day Study Plans
Preparing for the LSAT is confusing. There are dozens of prep books and practice tests out there, and 1,000+ articles on my website alone. When, and how, should you use them all? These super-specific study plans give you a clear plan of attack.

3. LSAT Cheat Sheets
Based on what I'd typically do in college: read what the professor emphasized and condense it all onto a single piece of paper. It gave me a quick reference, making things a lot less threatening and a lot more manageable.

good news about the LSAT (and conditional tips)

LSAT PrepTests 66-present are the only ones with the 2-page layout for Logic Games.

Before PrepTest 66, each exam only gave you one page per LG and related Qs. Then they started giving you two. Isn't that awesome?

So if you're studying from older exams and worrying about the amount of space you get...

worry no longer.

Awesome, right?

And now with the Digital LSAT, you get booklet of scratch paper (about 12-14 pages, 8.5 x 11, unlined). More than enough space to draw all your diagrams. And you can use it for all sections (not just games).

**

I used a tricky "conditional indicator phrase" in the first sentence of this article.

Did you catch it?

Look again:

*LSAT PrepTests 66-present are the only ones with the 2-page layout for Logic Games.*

It's "the only."

"The only" is a sufficient condition indicator, and it creates a conditional statement.

Whatever immediately follows "the only" is our sufficient condition, and the other part of the sentence becomes the necessary condition indicator....

So let's take the example:

"I'll go to law school only if I score 170+."

We could change this to:

"The only way I'll go to law school if I score 170+."

or.

"Scoring 170+ is the only reason I'll go to law school."

All of these statements are diagrammed as:

"Go to law school ---> 170+"

And the contrapositive would be:

"NOT 170+ ---> NOT Law School"

That's all for now.

If you're looking for more help, my LSAT guides cover these kinds of basic concepts in plain English.

(I never resort to using complicated phrases like "temporal flaw" or other such nonsense.)

And if you're having trouble with anything, just reach out - I read every message, and I'll try to cover your question in a future article.

Talk soon,
Steve Schwartz

LSAT Score Fluctuations (how to avoid)

"My scores fluctuate pretty wildly. I've been taking a bunch of practice tests. I find myself scoring a bit higher on more recent ones, but I'm doing the earlier ones and my scores dropped a bit. Should I be concerned? Would you happen to have any tips for improvements? I'm really aiming for a 175+."

Scores fluctuate. It happens. It's real. I don't know why. Well, actually I do know why, and the answer is chance.

Scores fluctuate because you are not the same person on any given day. And not all exams are equal in nature. Some are harder than others - the exam is equated, so it's not as if they are meant to be harder.

Also, you're not equally good at all things. You're better at some and worse at others. So if you hate Reading Comp passages on science and your LSAT has an easy science RC passage, you might be fine. Then if the LSAT you take another time has a harder science RC passage, you might get a bit flustered by that and do poorly.

Same goes if there's a weird curveball Logic Game that you're not that familiar with. So if you haven't done any pattern games in a while and you suddenly get one, your score is going to drop. Next time, no pattern game, your score improves. Or maybe you're tired or hungover when you do one exam and you're fresh and energetic the next time.

That causes score fluctuations. So you stay consistent by being good at everything they can throw at you and you stay consistent by making sure that you are the best possible version of yourself at all times. What that means is that you sleep well, you get good exercise, you meditate, you eat well, you get outside, you relax, you do all the stuff that you know you should be doing and you get pumped.

So you have an LSAT Test Day motivation playlist and you've listened to podcasts. You watch movies that are positive and upbeat and get you in the right mindset. So maybe you're watching Rocky or Friday Night Lights. Those are two of my favorites. Maybe you listen to Jock Jams and Eye of the Tiger. You go on YouTube and you watch 40 inspirational speeches in two minutes, or you listen to guided meditations (playlist).

So you're doing that stuff consistently. You're doing it every day without fail. You block off time in your schedule to do this. And so every practice test you take, you are feeling pumped up. You have the sleep you need, and you have shored up all your weak areas, everything possible. And so when you take your exams, you'll be in good shape.

And so, if maybe over the past few weeks you, maybe you go out late one Friday night cause you just needed a break. You had a few too many drinks, then you go take a full length exam Saturday morning cause you feel like you should, even though you're probably not feeling that great and maybe it's not the best use of your time and you're better off sleeping a few more hours, guess what?

The test doesn't go well for you and it's because you're hungover. Your mind is cloudy and honestly you have no one to blame but yourself and I'm sorry to tell you that. But alcohol, drugs, these are not things that you have room for in your life right now if you want to achieve your maximum potential.