So You Want to Take the LSAT
So you recently watched Suits and decided that you want to go to law school. Unfortunately, there is a big hurdle you will need to clear before you get there — the LSAT.
The LSAT is an entrance exam required to get into most English-language common law schools in the US or Canada. Unlike other popular entrance exams like the MCAT, the LSAT is a skill-based test. This has two implications:
- Things you learned in your undergraduate degree are going to be basically useless (barring some philosophy, math, and computer science courses that touch on basic logic).
- Since it's a skill-based test, it is beatable!
Test Structure
A standard LSAT has 4 sections. Each section is 35 minutes long. You get a 10-minute break after the first 2 sections. Each section is either a Logical Reasoning (LR) section or a Reading Comprehension (RC) section.
LR Sections
- 24–26 questions per section
- Each question has a stimulus (a brief paragraph with some information) and a question stem (your task to do with that information)
- 5 answer choices per question, with one being the most correct answer
RC Sections
- 26–28 questions per section
- Questions are divided among 4 RC passages
- The 4 passages cover science, humanities, law, and social sciences — presented in random order so that students of a particular background don't have an unfair advantage
Scored vs. Experimental Sections
Even though the LSAT has 4 sections, your raw score (i.e., how many questions you got correct) is derived from only 3 of them: 2 LR sections and 1 RC section. Given this, there are only two possible combinations:
- 3 LR sections (one LR is experimental) + 1 RC section
- 2 LR sections + 2 RC sections (one RC is experimental)
However, there are 10 different permutations of how these sections can be ordered:
3 LR + 1 RC
| Permutation | Frequency (out of 59 official PrepTests) |
|---|---|
| LR, LR, LR, RC | 10 |
| LR, LR, RC, LR | 8 |
| LR, RC, LR, LR | 11 |
| RC, LR, LR, LR | 9 |
2 LR + 2 RC
| Permutation | Frequency (out of 59 official PrepTests) |
|---|---|
| LR, RC, LR, RC | 1 |
| LR, RC, RC, LR | 4 |
| RC, LR, LR, RC | 9 |
| RC, LR, RC, LR | 7 |
| RC, RC, LR, LR | 0 |
| LR, LR, RC, RC | 0 |
Test Day Flow
On test day, you do not know the section order in advance. You find out which section is coming only 1 minute before it begins — so you have one minute to breathe, gather your thoughts, and lock tf in.
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| Start | Test begins |
| 1 min | View section 1 type |
| 35 min | Complete section 1 |
| 1 min | View section 2 type |
| 35 min | Complete section 2 |
| 10 min | Break |
| 1 min | View section 3 type |
| 35 min | Complete section 3 |
| 1 min | View section 4 type |
| 35 min | Complete section 4 |
For those going to law school because they're bad at math, I'll do the addition for you:
- 140 minutes answering questions (2 hours and 20 minutes)
- 10 minutes of break
- 4 minutes to breathe before each section
Total: 154 minutes (2 hours and 34 minutes). That's exactly how long Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction runs. So if you can watch that movie from start to finish, you can sit a standard LSAT without blaming the short attention span you've developed thanks to Mark Zuckerberg's innovations.
The Experimental Section
The experimental section is the one unscored section of the LSAT. And when I say unscored, I mean it literally — you could get a 0 on it and still get a perfect score. The catch: you don't know which section is experimental. Therefore, the only rational thing to do is treat all 4 sections as if they're scored.
That said, there's some deduction you can do, especially on the last section. For example:
- If you've gotten 3 LR sections back-to-back, you know the last one has to be RC — and that RC will be scored.
- If you've completed two RC sections at any point, all LR sections are scored.
Why does the experimental section exist?
In my humble opinion, LSAC (the folks running the LSAT) just want to torture us and make our lives more miserable. But, according to them, they need it to test out future questions. It's up to you who you want to believe.
When you do past tests (we'll talk about how to prepare for the LSAT soon), all 59 official past tests have four sections — one of which is labeled experimental to simulate the real test. But the "experimental" sections in those past tests are actually real scored sections from previous administrations. So they're perfectly valid sections to practice on; there's nothing experimental about them at all.
How Scoring Works
So far, I've only been talking about the raw score, which is simply how many questions you got correct in the scored sections. But this isn't the three-digit score people actually mean when they talk about their LSAT results.
That's because LSAC converts your raw score to a scaled score between 120 and 180. If you get every question wrong, you'd score a 120. There's no one-to-one mapping between raw score and scaled score — each test is adjusted for difficulty so that LSAC can maintain standardization across administrations. This matters because your LSAT score is valid for five years, so your score needs to be comparable to those who took the test before or after you.
Here's an example using most people's dream score: a 170.
- On the April 2025 test, you'd need a raw score of 69/78 to score a 170.
- On the May 2020 test, you'd need a raw score of 70/78 to score a 170.
In other words, you'd need one more correct answer in May 2020 to hit the same scaled score — presumably because the April 2025 test was slightly harder.
The key takeaway: maximize correct answers. Easy and hard questions count equally toward your raw score. Getting 2 easy questions right is more valuable than getting 1 hard question right.
Percentiles
Each scaled score corresponds to a percentile. In the 2025 testing period, a 170 corresponded to the 95th percentile — meaning you scored better than 95% of all test takers.
One important nuance: percentile mappings can change as your score ages. For example:
- A 161 scored in 2024 mapped to the 78th percentile at the time.
- By 2025, a 161 mapped to only the 76th percentile.
So even though your score stays the same, the percentile tied to it can shift — and law schools will use the updated mapping when evaluating your application. This means even if you wrote the LSAT in 2024 and scored a 161 but applied during the 2025 season, law schools will treat that 161 as the 76th percentile (even your official LSAC results page will be updated to reflect that).
What about the LSAT Writing?
Don't worry about this now. Just pretend it doesn't exist. We'll come back to it at the end.
Now that you have a solid understanding of what the test is and how it's scored, let's get into the important stuff: how to actually study for it.