Due to the overwhelming tidal wave of popularity and support and unadulterated love for my previous post about old LSAT questions, I decided it was time for a second heaping serving of ancient LSAT goodness leftovers. Like I mentioned last week, the LSAT has been in its current incarnation since 1991, but before this it looked like some fever dream of SAT questions on acid combined with 1950s political incorrectness. Open your mouth and taste the rainbow:

Word Classification
This showed up in 1948, only to hibernate for a number of decades before resurfacing on Sesame Street in the popular “One of these things is not like the other” segment. What happened is that you would get five words, and would have to cross out the one that didn’t fit. Some of these required familiarity with things that you might not expect prospective law students to know, such as Chaucer, respiratory illnesses, and the respective sizes of mythical creatures. I’m also extremely pleased to report that dinosaurs made it onto the very first LSAT ever. Observe:







Verbal Analogies
If you took the SAT back when it was on the 1600 scale, or if you watched Conan before his recent declawing, you’ll remember these. None of the ones I could find were really interesting enough to reprint here, and they apparently didn’t do much in terms of predicting a student’s potential law school ability as they only lasted from 1948-1950. I did, however, make an analogy of my own based on this information: Verbal Analogies are to a Meaningful LSAT Score as Business School is to a Meaningful Life.

Reasoning
This was another 1948-only section. Which is strange, because it’s actually remarkably similar to some LR questions you see today (the Dec 2006 question about Montagues and Capulets comes to mind). In this section, you’re given some pretty simple premises and had to infer valid conclusions. If you’re good at the modern LSAT, these would be cake.
Throckmorton, by the way, is about the coolest name ever.


Quantitative Comparison
Aka “Which One’s Bigger?” – That basically sums it up. This seemed to just require some pretty basic math skills (I haven’t taken any sort of math since high school, and it was pretty easy even for me). As you see in the examples below, you just have to say whether column A or column B is bigger, or if they’re the same, or if there’s no way of knowing. This was actually relatively recent (1976-82), but apparently elementary geometry was deemed to be unnecessary for law school.


Paragraphs/Paragraph Reading
Another vintage question type, lasting from 1948-1950. Here you got a short paragraph and had to pick the word that spoils the sense or meaning of the whole thing. Where to begin?


Logical Reasoning
This isn’t a pre-modern LSAT question type, I know, but they used to look quite a bit different. Maybe it’s just because I’ve seen every single modern LR question multiple times so I’m excited to see something new (sad, I know), but I can’t help but think that these are kind of more interesting than what we see today. Irony as an argument technique? Awesome.


Lastly, many of you are probably acutely aware of how politically correct and minority/woman-loving the LSAT is. I think they’re trying to make up for stuff like that pearl necklace above, and answer choices like this:


*All examples taken from A Compendium of LSAT and LSAC-Sponsored Item Types 1948-1994 by Lynda M. Reese and Ruth Anne Cotter, freely available at LSACnet.org