The LSAT is important, but that’s probably not news to you. What you might not know is that the LSAT, a half-day test that asks many questions about dinosaurs and clowns, is actually more important than your undergraduate GPA (which most likely took you at least 4 years to get, and probably had to do with something other than dinosaurs and clowns). The relative weight of LSAT to GPA is around 60/40, and can be skewed even more in favor of the test. This means that the time and hard work that went into your honors thesis about the worldwide implications of Latin American uprisings in the 70s can all be undone if you can’t figure out whether Fran is getting her hair permed or colored. So why should such a strange 3-hour test be more important than all of college?

Not knowing the answer to this question can be understandably frustrating. But there’s a method to the madness.

You’re All Unique Snowflakes, and That’s a Problem

Grades are hard to compare. Yes, most schools grade on a 4.0 scale. But does a 3.7 for an applied math major at MIT involve the same amount of work as a 3.7 for a sociology major at UC Santa Cruz? Unless you’re a sociology major at UC Santa Cruz, then you would probably think not. Law school admissions officers tend to agree. When reviewing applications, they do their best to look at the individual schools’ and majors’ grading difficulty, and adjust accordingly. Unfortunately this is far from precise. Grades are certainly useful to get a broad sense of academic achievement (a 2.X is generally indicative of less work than a 3.X), but when you’re admitting and rejecting students from a pool numbering in the thousands, you need something more fine-tuned, and more comparable.

Too Many Snowflakes

The other problem is that there are just too many high GPAs. Especially when looking at the “top” law schools, there will be thousands of applicants with GPAs at or above 3.75. It’s simply not feasible for every application to get hours and hours of attention, so applicants have to be cut out in a faster and more methodical way. Here’s where the LSAT comes in. While there are many, many 3.75+ GPAs, there are considerably fewer 170+ LSAT scores (in point of fact, if you get a 170, you have a better score than 98% of applicants). At the end of the day, LSAT scores provide a way to significantly narrow the applicant pool in a manner that GPAs just can’t match.

OK, They Need a Measure. But Clowns and Dinosaurs?

Just needing another measure wouldn’t alone justify law schools’ caring so much about this test. Height, weight, and credit score are all quantifiable measures, but none of them have any sort of relation to law school, so why should this seemingly random test carry so much weight in admissions?. Upon first seeing the LSAT, people tend to group it into that pool of irrelevancy as well. And this is understandable given the strange subject matter.

However, it is actually the case that the LSAT is a sophisticated test that measures important skills, and it’s the best predictor for your success as a law student. Just looking at the numbers, no factor predicts your success as a student in the way the LSAT does. The people who make and analyze this test argue that even slight variations in score significantly change the probability of success in law school.

You shouldn’t think that the LSAT is an IQ test (it certainly isn’t; the LSAT can be learned). But what it tests does have something to do with law school performance, so you really can’t blame admissions officers for relying so heavily on it. If it works, why shouldn’t they?




So What are These Skills, and Why Do They Matter?

There are three sections on the LSAT, and they have varying, but extremely applicable, relation to what you'll study in law school.

Logical reasoning is all about making very specific inferences from short passages. This is pretty darn analogous to interpreting the law. Just as you can’t make even the slightest mistake when reading and applying laws, you’ll be likewise punished in LR for drawing invalid conclusions or thinking outside the box. As you’ll one day learn in law school, inside the box is where you want to be.

Also, as you may or may not have heard, law school requires an unbelievable amount of reading. It’s terribly boring, incredibly long, and will often make you want to cry. The reading comprehension section of the LSAT is similar. Law schools want to know that you can comprehend dense passages, pick out the relevant data, and make valid inferences based on it; reading comp tests just that. Also, one of the hardest parts about reading comp isn’t just doing it well (which is very difficult anyway), but doing it quickly.

Ok, you might think, LR and RC make sense, but what about logic games? Are you ever going to have to determine when the blue dolphin is caught by the red boat? Unless you’re going into nautical law, then maybe not about that specifically, but the underlying skills needed for games are very pertinent. You’re given a made up environment with made up rules, and asked what you can figure out. At its core, games are the basest test of logical inference. And with the law, logical inference is the name of the game.

While relying on the LSAT does make sense for admissions, this doesn’t change the fact that it’s still very hard. However, there is a silver lining. Since the skills needed for the LSAT correlate to the skills needed for law school, by studying for the LSAT you not only increase your chances of admission, but you're actually preparing your mind for law school. Keep that in mind when you’re studying, and it just might keep you sane.