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trentteti · 7 years

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December 2017 LSAT Recap

When the scores for the most recent LSAT are released, test takers receive a series of documents: their score report, their question responses, the score distribution, a copy of their exam (unless you happen to take the undisclosed February exam), and the like. Most normal people, who see the LSAT as merely a hurdle in their path two a law school and a legal career, just look at their score and discard the rest.

But for the decidedly not normal and exceedingly nerdy — read: LSAT instructors — those discarded documents tantalize us. We love to pour over each released exam to analyze the questions, try to discern trends, and to predict changes in what is tested on the LSAT. We often compare each LSAT release to Christmas morning. We’re a very sad lot. But it was nonetheless very fitting that the December 2017 LSAT drop occurred so close to Christmas, giving us our favorite gift of all: the opportunity to gain insights into the LSAT that we can then pass along to our students.

So today we’re going to look over each section of the December exam to try to shed some light on some perplexing questions, to discuss which concepts this exam emphasized and downplayed, and to place this LSAT into the bigger picture of recent exams. If you took the December exam and are now hard at work filling out your application materials, hopefully this will be a revealing — and not too traumatic — walk down memory lane. If you’re studying for a future exam, hopefully this will be somewhat prescient in what your exam might look like.

So enough preamble, let’s do some quick hits on each section …

Logical Reasoning

• The first thing I check out with Logical Reasoning sections is the question distribution. Although an LR section could conceivably discuss any topic — and there were some bonkers topics, on this and every other exam — there are only a few different kinds of questions they ask (about 18 common question types, according to our classification system). And the number of each type of questions included remains fairly constant over time, although there have been some changes on recent exams.

The biggest change to the question distribution for Dec 2017? There were a ton of Strengthen questions. By my count, there were 11 overall. I believe that’s more than any other LSAT, ever. However, this is of a piece with a larger trend on recent LSATs. Strengthen questions have become increasingly prominent over the last few years. So much so that they have recently overtaken Flaw questions as the most common question type.

• A few of these Strengthen questions were presented in an unusual way. Often, an LSAT question will ask you to select the answer choice that “most logically completes” the argument. You look up to the passage, and you see a big blank space following a word like “therefore” or “thus.” Those words tell that you’ll be “completing” that argument by providing the conclusion. Since you’re trying to infer what a supported conclusion might look like, those questions are what we call Soft Must Be True questions.

Several questions on the December exam asked you to select the answer choice that “most logically completes” the argument, but when you looked up to the passage, it used words like “because” and “since” before the blank space. That means that you’re adding a premise to the argument that will support the conclusion already included in the argument. In other words, these questions were asking you to pick an answer choice that would strengthen the argument, not draw a conclusion from that argument. These were Strengthen questions.

Your approach to Soft Must Be True and Strengthen questions are very, very different (for one, you should prefer weaker answer choices on Soft Must Be True questions and stronger answer choices on Strengthen questions), so realizing that these were Strengthen questions was pretty important.

Still confused on the difference between the two “most logically completes” questions? It’s simple. If the blank space follows words like “therefore,” “thus,” “hence,” or “so,” treat it like a Soft Must Be True question. If the blank space follows words like “since,” “because,” “for,” or “as,” treat it like a Strengthen question.

• Another interesting tidbit was the number of Disagree questions. The typical LSAT will have 1 or 2 of these questions. This one had 5. Plus, there were 4 Disagree questions on the September 2017 exam. So it appears as if Disagree questions are becoming a little more prevalent. And I, for one, see this as a welcome development. For a test that prepares students to enter law school — where they will learn about our two party, adversarial legal system and spend quite a bit of time pouring over old legal cases and describing the two sides of the suit — it makes sense that test takers will see several questions that test their ability to describe a disagreement.

• Otherwise, this was a pretty normal test in terms of question distribution. Other than Strengthen questions, Flaw, Necessary, and Soft Must Be True questions were the most common question types, as they pretty much always are. There were two Parallel and two Parallel Flaw questions, as always. There was only 1 Describe question, 1 Role question, and 1 Sufficient question. And there weren’t any Main Point, Crux, or Explain questions. But those are less common question types, so getting one or none of each isn’t unheard of.

• There were a few questions that lodged themselves in test takers’ memories following the exam, and, unsurprisingly, these were the most interesting questions to unpack. One question that stuck out for many — which has shot straight to my short list of favorite LSAT questions ever (again, see the above statement about LSAT instructors being a sad lot) — was a Soft Must Be True question about T. Rex bones. Apparently, some fossilized T. Rexes bear evidence of bite marks that could only come from another T. Rex trying to fight them or eat them. The question then told us that these bite marks would have been impossible to inflict on a live T. Rex. Which should have led the astute test taker to deduce that the bite marks couldn’t have come from live combat, but instead would have to come from a T. Rex mawing on the dead T. Rex’s rotting corpse. The right answer required a bit of common sense and outside knowledge — that eating dead kin constitutes cannibalism — but if you figured that out, then bang a gong and get it on to the next question, because you aced that one.

Also, we predicted there would be some death metal on this exam. And this question literally gave us a cannibal corpse.

• The hardest question, I thought, was a Strengthen question about Caligula, the vilified Roman emperor, alleged freak, and subject of a very bad 70s film. This question asked us to support the position held by modern historians, who claim that Caligula isn’t as bad as he’s made out to be, since there isn’t that much documentation of his evil acts and the historical accounts of him were written by his enemies. Usually, getting a Strengthen question right is just a matter of figuring out what’s wrong with the argument. On this question, figuring out that part was easy. Just because enemies of Caligula described his bad behavior doesn’t mean that their descriptions were inaccurate. Befitting the Latin language Caligula spoke, that’s a classic ad hominem attack.

However, finding the answer choice that fixed that problem — by showing the enemies’ descriptions were inaccurate — was pretty tough. The right answer showed that these descriptions were inaccurate in a very oblique way. It said that the bad behavior attributed to Caligula is very similar to the bad behavior attributed to other cruel tyrants. That opens up the possibility that the enemies are either lying about the cruel stuff Caligula did (and using the older tyrants as their inspiration) or are confused about who committed the cruel acts (and misattributing them to Caligula). And either would buttress the position that Caligula — who reportedly engaged in incest and fed humans to wild beasts for pleasure — really wasn’t all that bad of a guy. Pretty damn difficult. What this question asked of you, at the end of the day, well, Caligula would have blushed.

• Aside from that question, how difficult was Logical Reasoning overall? Well after doing the exam, I assigned a number from 1 (least difficult) to 5 (most difficult) to each question. Not exactly the most scientific of methods, but I probably wouldn’t be doing this if I were good at math or science. Anyway, the average difficulty of each question was 2.68 for the first LR section and 2.65 for the second. So, there you have it, very average difficulty!

Reading Comprehension

• My students’ reports following the December exam suggested that this Reading Comprehension section was uncharacteristically easy, especially after many, many exams of excruciatingly difficult Reading Comp sections. I held out hope that students just felt that way because I did an especially good job of teaching them the strategies of how to do this section. While I know our approach to Reading Comp is sound, my ego is reluctantly taking this L, because this was a pretty forgiving section.

• One noteworthy thing about this Reading Comp section? All but the last passage were organized around answering an explicit or implicit question. This is a common rhetorical device on Reading Comp passages, and identifying it can help you understand the passage and destroy on the questions. That’s because the main point of the passage will always be the answer the author agrees with (or a summary of each answer described, if the author doesn’t agree with any). So the first passage asked whether the “Chinatown Chinese” dialect from San Francisco’s Chinatown was a distinct Chinese dialect (Answer: Nope). The second passage asked whether life developing in our universe was really as improbable as some cosmologists believe (Answer: Probably not). In the third, comparative passage, passage A asked why comedians don’t use the legal system to protect their jokes (Answer: it’s expensive and uncertain, and social norms do the same thing) and passage B asked why chefs don’t use the legal system to protect their recipes (Answer: again, social norms do the same thing). By my count, just recognizing this would have directly answered or helped answer 13 of the 20 questions distributed among these passages.

• San Francisco’s Chinatown was discussed at length in the first passage, so let me use this space to offer my hot take. Aside from a few decent bars, San Francisco’s Chinatown is hugely overrated. Los Angeles’s Chinatown, which is smaller and not even the nexus of Chinese activity in the city, is much better. NorCal types, don’t @ me.

• The second passage is all about the theory of the multiverse — that there are an infinite number of universes, occurring parallel to ours, in which things played out differently than they did in our universe. The concept of infinite parallel universes is pretty wild if you think about it — literally every possible scenario exists in some other universe. Since LSAC brought that up, I think this opens up a great opportunity for you to write an explanatory essay on why your LSAT score isn’t up to some schools’ standards. Just explain, as calmly and rationally as you can, that although you didn’t get a 180 on this LSAT, there is a version of you in some other parallel universe that earned a 180 on the LSAT, and that the admissions officers should take that into account. Hey, if they’re going to take past scores into consideration, they should take parallel scores into consideration as well.

• The final passage illustrated an important lesson many test takers unfortunately fail to learn for Reading Comp. So many test takers spend way too much time trying to understand every last detail of the passage, and don’t give themselves enough time to answer the questions. Now, understanding the structure of the passage and the author’s attitude are the most important tasks in Reading Comp, and you should take adequate time to do those. But you don’t have to understand every last little detail.

Parts of the fourth passage, about how a novelist and social theorist named Charlotte Perkins Gilman took her understanding of Social Darwinism and used it to support a feminist theory of human progress, were confusing as hell. You could have easily wasted 10 minutes on them. But the questions, I thought, were super easy, and really just depended on you understanding which camp of Social Darwinists Gilman belonged to. So remember: focus on the structure and author in Reading Comp. If you need the details of a passage, you can always re-read the relevant parts of the passage.

• Using the 1 to 5 scale for the Reading Comp section, the average difficulty was a 2.75. That’s a half-point lower than the September 2017 section and a full point lower than the June 2017 section. Is this the end of brutal Reading Comp sections? I wouldn’t bet my life’s savings on that. There is still far more evidence of tough Reading Comp sections to come. But we’ll see February!

Logic Games

• Finally, logic games. After a few exams of straightforward games with straightforward deductions, which followed a few years of the LSAT getting a little bit wild with some of its games, December 2017 gave a set of straightforward(-ish) games with straightforward(-ish) deductions. I’d place the difficulty of this section somewhere between the notoriously easy September 2017 section and some of the really difficult recent sections, like say, December 2016.

Now, I heard many frustrated test takers who found this to be a really difficult games section. I understand where they were coming from, as these games were decidedly more difficult than the games they did on their final practice exams, assuming they took the September and June 2017 exams last. But these weren’t really mind-melting or unfair or even usual games. I suspect a big reason so many found this lot of games difficult was that this section was the last of the exam, and students had to tackle them while fatigued.

• The common element to each game was making scenarios. Every game benefitted from the use of scenarios. If you made the right set of scenarios for each game, they were actually really easy (I completed all four games in about 20 minutes). Unfortunately, none of these games included the rules that obviously lend themselves to scenarios. Like a giant constrained block in an ordering game or a “must be together” relationship in a grouping game. So test takers had to get a little creative to find ways to construct scenarios. But those ways were definitely there.

• The first game was a “combo” game — combining an ordering game with an In & Out grouping game. Basically, a travel agent (which, btw, is a profession that’s antiquated even to me, who is part of an age group that could generously be referred to as “Washed Millennials”) has to select four of six Asian cities for a tour, and then schedule the selected cities from the first to fourth city traveled to.

The key to constructing scenarios in this game was realizing that, since Hanoi and Taipei were cities that must be included in the tour, the only cities that could fill out the remaining two open slots were Jakarta, Manila, and either Osaka or Shanghai (a rule forbid selecting both). Selecting two of three is always a potential way to make three scenarios, and that was the route to take for this game. Making one scenario where the last two cities were Jakarta and Manila, one where they were Jakarta and either Osaka or Shanghai, and one where they were Manila and either Osaka or Shanghai answered every question.

• The second game was a straightforward 1:1 Ordering game that used a difficult, but common, ordering rule: that a player had to be either before or after two other players. Rules that present two mutually exclusive options are pretty much always good for two scenarios. These scenarios combined nicely with another rule that presented two mutually exclusive options — that a player was either before or after another player — to create scenarios that helped out with each question.

• The third game was a source of consternation for many test takers, with many failing to figure out what type of game it was. The game involved a passenger railway system needing to close some of its six stations. So some stations would be left open, and some would be closed. Some open. Some closed. Open/Closed. In/Out. “Open” and “closed” may be the binary, but it’s still not all that different from an “in” and “out” binary.

This is an important lesson — a game may seem strange at first blush, but odds are that it fits in the paradigm of a safe and familiar game. And you’ll be so much better off doing that game using the same set-up and rules as a game you’ve down dozens of times before. For those studying for the next exam, btw, this was very similar to game 2 in the October 2005 exam (in which light switches are either turned “on” or “off”) and game 1 in the 2008 exam (in which dancers are either “on” or “off” the stage”).

Once you figured out this was an In & Out game, where the “In” group was stations left open and the “Out” group were stations that were closed, scenarios presented themselves with the first rule: that either N or R had to be “In.” That restriction combined with other rules and, by making the deductions in each scenario, the clever test taker should realize that N and R couldn’t both be “In.” There were many unrestricted players in this game, but the scenarios still provided a framework to quickly answer every question.

• The fourth and final game was admittedly difficult. Again, many test takers struggled to even set this up. Here’s an easy tip for setting up games, though: scheduling is an act of ordering. So whenever you get days of the week in a game, it’s an ordering game. So in this game, we had to schedule a day, Wednesday through Saturday, for an environmental consultant to examine the air quality on floors 1 through 8 of a building. The consultant would examine two floors each day, making this an Overbooked Ordering game.

One hard part of this game was the first rule, which prevented the consultant from examining consecutive floors on the same day. Seems inefficient, but sure, do your thing environmental consultant. Anyway, I suspect many got hung up on symbolizing this rule. But it’s more important to understand and apply the rule. This rule just means that if, say, floor 4 is examined on Thursday, floor 3 and floor 5 couldn’t also be examined on Thursday.

A pretty unique set of scenarios emerged in this game. The game placed a series of mutually exclusive options on certain floors. Floor 3 could only be examined on Wednesday or Thursday. Floor 4 could only be examined on Thursday or Friday. And Floor 5 could only be examined on Friday or Saturday. As on the second game of this exam, these mutually exclusive options were the basis of scenarios. These constraints, plus the first rule, which prevented floors 3 and 4 and floors 4 and 5 from going on the same day, gave us four scenarios: One were 3 was on Wednesday, 4 on Thursday, and 5 on Friday; one where 3 was on Wednesday, 4 on Thursday, and 5 on Saturday; one where 3 was on Wednesday, 4 on Friday, and 5 on Saturday; and one where 3 was on Thursday, 4 on Friday, and 5 on Saturday. Again, these scenarios helped on pretty much every question.

• Hopefully the above descriptions make clear one point about learning how to do logic games. Practice making scenarios! It can even be worthwhile to do games multiple times — once with scenarios and once without. Experiment on each game, and see which approach is better. This will help you begin to recognize which types of constraints are most useful for scenarios, and will help you choose the most efficient path for each game on your exam.

• Here’s a final point about games: If you’re reading this blog (and made it this far into the post), then you clearly take your studies very seriously. Bully to you! Hopefully that means you’re practicing more than the typical test taker. If so, you should want a difficult games section. Nay, you should crave a difficult games section. You’re going to be better equipped to handle more complex or unusual games than others. Take it from a guy who has taught hundreds of people — most fear difficult games more than anything on the exam. However, with the right practice, difficult games are the most conquerable “difficult” part of the LSAT. On the easier games sections this year, most people did very well on logic games. To distinguish yourself from the crowd and get a good score, you had to do really well on a much more difficult to master Reading Comp section. Trust, it’s a lot easier to distinguish yourself on a difficult games section. So don’t fear difficult games. You can master them. And then tests like December’s will be all the more conquerable for you.

Final take-aways

• So in all, this wound up being a slightly more difficult test than September or June 2017, but with a slightly more forgiving curve. For the December exam, you could miss 12 questions and still get a 170. This is much more generous than the 9 you could miss on the June 2017 exam and a little more generous than the 11 you could miss on the September exam.

• It also caps off a year when the LSATs were all fairly straightforward and predictable. At least more so than usual. Once 2018, with its slightly revised schedule of LSAT administrations, begin to roll around, we’ll see if this old dog of a test still has some tricks up its sleeves, or if it’ll be more of the same.

December 2017 LSAT Recap was originally published on LSAT Blog

#december lsat #LSAT #trent teti #lsat

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marymosley · 5 years

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How an Online Economics Degree Can Benefit a Pre-Law Student

So you’ve finally decided what to do with your life a few years from now: You want to be a lawyer and you’re going to law school. But going to law school requires a degree of preparation. Apart from the fact that you’d be required to take the Law School Admission Test before you are admitted to any institution that offers legal education in the United States, mastering the material once admitted won’t be a walk in the park either. While in college, then, it’s best to already pick a degree that will prepare you for what lies ahead.

Here’s how an online economics degree can benefit a pre-law student:

Economics Helps Hone Your Analytical Skills

The thing about economics is that it is a very logical science. When you study economics, you necessarily study these two forms of logic that allow for a good economic analysis:

Inductive Method: Under this method, a conclusion is derived from the particular to the general. An economist who employs this method is like a historian who observes events and applies these to more general occurrences. Ernst Engel’s Law of Family Expenditure, which states that the percentage of income allotted to food decreases as a household’s income rises, was derived through this method.

Deductive Method: Under this method, which is also called the abstract or prior method, a conclusion is derived by applying generally accepted assumptions to specific events. David Ricardo’s theory on wages and profit, which states that the price of labor in the market will always tend to go towards the minimum, was derived using this method.

In law school, there is such a thing as legal reasoning. While the inductive method is considered inconclusive reasoning in the study of law, the deductive method is key, as any specific conclusion is always conclusive and follows if one accepts the premises. The number of premises is usually more than one.

In short, an economics degree gives you the training that you need in reasoning, which you will necessarily have to have mastered when in law school.

Some Subjects In Law Are Rooted In Economic Analyses And Principles

When you enter law school, you will have to master certain subjects that are somewhat complicated from a learner’s point of view. Several of these subjects are rooted in economics. Here are only some of them:

Contract Theory: This is the study of how people and entities develop legal agreements. Contract theory is derived from financial principles and the principles of economic behavior, which lay down the assumption that different people are driven by different incentives.

Antitrust Laws: These laws, also called competition laws, are those that primarily deal with businesses in the context of an existing free market. Antitrust laws ensure an equal playing field for all businesses that are primarily driven by profit, and ensure that consumers are protected from predatory business practices.

Banking And Finance Law: This refers to the body of laws that governs the operations of banks, among others. Each country has its own set of regulations that ensure that the financial system, which operates based on economic principles, remains protected.

With an online Economics degree, you will have prior understanding of the economic principles behind these areas of study. That gives you an edge when you start studying these legal constructs, and ensures that you have a better grasp of them once you’re done with classes.

Economics Majors Fare Well In The LSAT

There is historical data to back up the claim that economics majors are among those that fare the best in the LSAT. According to 2017 to 2018 data from the Law Schools Admission Council, for instance, those majoring in Economics, 2,752 LSAT applicants at that time, had the highest average LSAT score at 159. For context, the LSAT is scored on a 120 to 180 scale, with the average score pegged at 150.

The following rounded up the top five that performed the best in the LSAT of that period, but trailed Economics majors in terms of average LSAT scores:

Philosophy majors (2,238 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 157.2

History majors (3,138 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 156.3

English majors (3,151 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 154.8

Arts and Humanities (1,947 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 154

This data is not at all surprising, considering the fact that some of the areas that are tested in the LSAT are subjects that are studied and mastered by Economics majors:

Analytical reasoning

Logical reasoning

Reading comprehension

It isn’t any wonder, too, then that of those who took the LSAT during that period, Economics majors also registered the highest percentage of test-takers accepted to at least one law school, at 86 percent. Admission to law school, after all, is primarily dependent on the LSAT score, apart from the GPA.

Conclusion

Becoming a lawyer is hard. It requires planning and preparation spanning years, including those years you would have to spend in college. When you do get admitted to law school, you should also get used to your life as a law student for you to survive.

In other words, the key is to have a plan, stick to it, and study hard. And then hope that the rest will follow.

The post How an Online Economics Degree Can Benefit a Pre-Law Student appeared first on Legal Desire.

How an Online Economics Degree Can Benefit a Pre-Law Student published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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marymosley · 5 years

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How an Online Economics Degree Can Benefit a Pre-Law Student

Here’s how an online economics degree can benefit a pre-law student:

Economics Helps Hone Your Analytical Skills

The thing about economics is that it is a very logical science. When you study economics, you necessarily study these two forms of logic that allow for a good economic analysis:

In short, an economics degree gives you the training that you need in reasoning, which you will necessarily have to have mastered when in law school.

Some Subjects In Law Are Rooted In Economic Analyses And Principles

Economics Majors Fare Well In The LSAT

The following rounded up the top five that performed the best in the LSAT of that period, but trailed Economics majors in terms of average LSAT scores:

Philosophy majors (2,238 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 157.2

History majors (3,138 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 156.3

English majors (3,151 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 154.8

Arts and Humanities (1,947 applicants), with an average LSAT score of 154

This data is not at all surprising, considering the fact that some of the areas that are tested in the LSAT are subjects that are studied and mastered by Economics majors:

Analytical reasoning

Logical reasoning

Reading comprehension

Conclusion

In other words, the key is to have a plan, stick to it, and study hard. And then hope that the rest will follow.

The post How an Online Economics Degree Can Benefit a Pre-Law Student appeared first on Legal Desire.

How an Online Economics Degree Can Benefit a Pre-Law Student published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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trentteti · 6 years

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The Morning Cometh: The July 2018 LSAT Recap

July LSAT takers: where were you on February 8, 2014? Maybe this was a simpler, pre-LSAT time in your life, and you were trying to figure out the newfangled “Stories” feature on Snapchat, while listening to Katy Perry and Juicy J’s “Dark Horse,” on your way to see the surprisingly good The Lego Movie, after watching the opening ceremonies to the twenty-second Winter Olympics games in Sochi? Or maybe, on the other hand, you were taking the February 2014 LSAT. If you were in the second camp, some may say you had an advantage over your social media-using, trap-pop-listening, Scandinavian toy-movie-watching, winter-sport-viewing counterparts.

Or, where were you in September 2017? Were you wondering how anyone could possibly enjoy that dreadful new Taylor Swift single that was skyrocketing up the charts, but mounting a defense of the scary clown movie to your friends? Or were you among fellow chosen ones who observe the Sabbath on Saturday, taking the LSAT given on Sundays for the folks of your stripe? If you were in the latter group, some may say you had a sizable advantage over your gentile peers.

That’s because the test LSAC gave out yesterday on July 23, 2018 was — as had been widely suspected — was simply an old “nondisclosed” test. Specifically, the old February 2014 test. This test was also administered to Saturday Sabbath observers in September 2017. So I guess the intrepid folks who thought they were signing up for something brand new with the July LSAT were actually just exploring well-worn ground.

But this shouldn’t be that surprising — in fact, reusing “nondisclosed” exams is precisely why LSAC makes some exams “nondisclosed” in the first place. When LSAC announced — sort of last minute — that it would add a July exam after already expanding the number of LSATs administered each year, it wasn’t like they could suddenly hire way more qualified psychometricians to devise, test, and equate three more exams each year. It would be so much cheaper and easier to simply draw from the well of old February exams. So it’s understandable that they would do this. For years, this is what they’ve done for Saturday Sabbath observers, for people who had to take the test on a different day because of an emergency at the test center, and for international test takers (allegedly, this February 2014 test was used for test takers in Asia in September 2016, as well).

Now, it is a little bold to re-use the same test maybe four times in the span of just over four years. And, if you had a hard time with the July test — like a lot of people reportedly did — you may be worried that a group of test takers who already took the exam when it was first administered were given a distinct advantage. Maybe so much of an advantage that it could affect the curve of this exam, and your chances of scoring well. But honestly, how many people took the February 2014 and then the July exam yesterday? Almost no one spends almost four-and-a-half-years studying for the LSAT.

Even if someone did, what are the odds that they remembered anything specific or helpful about that test? Can remember any specific Snapchat Story you made in 2014? Can you repeat a single line Juicy J rapped in “Dark Horse”? What was the name of the main character in The Lego Movie? You’d have to admit that those should be more memorable pieces of cultural ephemera than an LSAT. And if you can’t remember those, there’s no way someone who took a four-hour test — and never saw that test again — would have a strong enough memory to greatly benefit from taking the test once.

The Sabbath test takers from September 2017 and the test takers in Asia from September 2016 took the test more recently, true, but how many of them retook the July test? LSAC, as far as I can tell, doesn’t publish the number of tests administered to people who observe Saturday Sabbath, but it did publish the total number of exams administered in Asia in the 2016-17 LSAT “year.” In that year, there were a total of 2,286 test takers in Asia. That’s about 2.6% of all test takers that year. Typically about a third of all test takers take the exam in September. So let’s assume that about 762 people took the September exam in Asia. Even if everyone who took the exam in Asia in September 2016 also took the July test in North America this year and even if they remembered enough from the September 2016 exam to have a distinct advantage — two “ifs” that are roughly the size of the Asian continent itself — they would still represent only about 4.7% of the 16,338 people who were registered to take the July test. They would have at most a negligible effect on the curve.

So … yes, LSAC got a little lazy and re-used a test. And unfortunately they re-used what was previously considered to be a particularly difficult exam. But fortunately, I don’t think the former is going to influence the latter. In other words, I don’t think the fact that this test has been administered before made this test any less difficult for anyone. So I would expect the curve to very forgiving — potentially allowing test takers to miss as many as 13 questions and still earn a 170. And I don’t think the fact that maybe a handful of the July test takers already saw the exam is going to change that fact.

But it was a difficult test by all accounts, so let’s go over what we’re hearing about it, section-by-section.

Logical Reasoning

We almost never get a clear picture of a Logical Reasoning section immediately after the test, for understandable reasons. Test takers are inundated with 51 short questions (sometimes as many as 77 if they get a third LR section as the experimental section), about all manner of topics. It’s tough to remember anything about these sections, other than maybe a fleeting memory of an errant question or two.

We’ve heard tales of questions about fossilized birds and dinosaurs, about Chinese coins and Quebecois cards, and about shrimp economics. So you know, just the classic topics we all know about and read about all the time. It’s tough to gather anything specific about question distribution, though.

Reading Comprehension

For the Reading Comprehension section, the first passage was about the effect of French Revolution on women’s rights — a topic the LSAT has covered before, way back in October 2001. We’re hearing the second passage was the comparative passage about the aesthetics of viewing sports — whether we appreciate athletes in the same way we appreciate works of art. Does the violence Russell Westbrook inflicts upon a rim inspire us in the same way that violence Jackson Pollack inflicted upon a canvas?* The third passage was a physics passage about Karl Popper and “theories of everything.” This passage is the consensus pick for the most-difficult passage. It was dense, but not impossible for most test takers. In all likelihood, test takers who took the time to understand the most important parts of the passage — like the number of arguments and the author’s role — but didn’t waste time trying to develop a theory of “everything” in the passage — had the easiest time with it. Finally, there was a passage about Belizean common law and its effect on indigenous Belizeans’ rights. A passage about indigenous peoples’ rights on the LSAT? Not exactly an un-Belize-able development.

*As an aside, I really wish I could have seen this passage — as a lifelong skateboarder, I have a lot of experience with this topic, since analyzing other skaters’ tricks in aesthetic terms is pretty much all we do. We assess the style with which they perform their tricks, their ‘fits, the spots they chose to skate at. There’s even an art historian and curator who runs a popular Instagram account where he analyzes skaters’ clips with the same exacting, and brutal, terms he would bring to bear upon work of art. It’s tough to imagine a passage more squarely in my (polyurethane) wheelhouse.

Logic Games

Finally, Logic Games, which colored pretty much everyone’s opinion of this exam. This was a hard logic games section, by all accounts. These games were time consuming and difficult, according to most people. Most of all, the third and fourth games.

The third game involved five art instillations, installed over the period of three months. So it’s like an overbooked ordering game, wherein some months will feature more than one art installation. But then there was another variable thrown in — whether the installations would be supervised or not — that necessitated the construction of another tier. So it sounds like it was an overbooked tiered ordered game, which is a rare — and difficult — combination.

The fourth game was a seldom-seen circular ordering game, last observed in 2003. You know, those games where a group of people are sitting around a circular table, where the last person is still next to the first person, making the game annoyingly complicated? In this version of that fun ditty, we had delegates and translators sitting around table, and it sounds like the game mostly involved figuring out whom each delegate or translator could sit between.

These two games, taken together, made a lot of people feel like the test went poorly. Games have a way of coloring your perception of a test, more than any other part of the LSAT. They’re the most memorable parts of the exam, and you typically know, as you’re doing a game, whether it’s going really well or really poorly. But you should also be aware that one or two games won’t necessarily have a devastating effect on your score. Two games may have as few as 11 or 12 questions between them. Which is just a little over 10% of a scored LSAT. Not a small chunk of the LSAT, to be sure, but they shouldn’t be the only things you think about when you assess your performance, when you’re deciding whether or not to cancel. Especially if you nail the other two games — which in this exam were about city workers and grouping players into departments at a store.

Final Thoughts

So this wasn’t a new LSAT, but that didn’t make it any less difficult for many test takers. If you were among those who felt great about it, take a well-deserved victory lap. If you feel like it didn’t go well, you still have a few options.

First, you may be considering whether to cancel your score. LSAC’s official cancellation policy can be read here. According to LSAC, you have until 11:59 pm EDT on the sixth day after the exam to cancel using your LSAC account. To translate that out of unintelligible bureaucratese for your poor, fried brain, you have until Sunday at 11:59 pm Eastern to cancel. Sleep on it. Heck, take the next few days to think it through. Take a look at this video, if you need a little help.

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Before canceling, you should also be aware that nearly every law school will simply use your highest LSAT when constructing your academic index, or whatever calculation it uses to assess you as an applicant. Now, schools will see every score you got on the LSAT; however, the vast majority of schools won’t hold having multiple LSAT scores against you to a significant extent. For most test takers, our recommendation is to choose to receive your score, just on the chance that you’ll be happy enough to with the score that you don’t have to study for the next exam.

Second, LSAC announced a a new policy for July test takers who signed up for the September exam as well. For those test takers, LSAC is offering a full refund of the September registration fee if they decide they don’t need to take September test after receiving their July scores. To take advantage of this refund, you just need to email LSAC by August 17. Scores are due out on August 10, so you’ll have a week to make that decision. However, if you cancel your July score, you won’t be eligible for this refund.

So congratulations to all who finished this July LSAT, the brand new test that wasn’t at all new. We hope at the very least, you are enjoying a break from the LSAT. If you decide you need to take it again, we’ll be here to help.

The Morning Cometh: The July 2018 LSAT Recap was originally published on LSAT Blog

#July LSAT #LSAT #morning cometh #trent teti #lsat

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trentteti · 8 years

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The Greatest Lawyer Movies of All Time: Amistad

Movie lawyers have battled discrimination, hate speech, corporate malfeasance, political corruption, and even Santa skepticism. It is hard to imagine a court case with higher stakes, however, than that at the center of #24 on the ABA Top 25…

Amistad 1997 dir. Steven Spielberg

In 1839, a group of kidnapped West Africans were being transported to America as slaves on the Spanish vessel “La Amistad.” In the middle of the night, they managed to pick the locks on their chains and overthrow their captors. As dramatized by Steven Spielberg, the revolt was a heroic act of resistance, but the freedom the men and women won only extended from bow to stern. Adrift in a new world, and at the mercy of the navigational treachery of the two Spaniards they left alive to steer them home, they soon found themselves running aground in America. There, they were embroiled in a court case that would determine their fate and challenge the judiciary to stand up to the illegal slave trade.

If that doesn’t sound like the makings of a thrilling and important lawyer movie, I don’t know what does. And in the hands of Spielberg, America’s greatest historical sentimentalist, Amistad makes for a pretty rousing lawyer movie.

The leader of the revolt is Cinque, played with great strength and dignity by Djimon Hounsou. He was famous back home for having once killed a rampaging lion by nailing it with a rock. The beasts he faces on his transatlantic voyage and in the American courts are more ruthless.

Cinque and the other 43 kidnapped Africans do have some American allies: principally, Roger Sherman Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), a property lawyer, and Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) a fictionalized abolitionist. Together, they help devise a defense that raises interesting questions about the relationship of morality and the law. Baldwin, a pragmatist and a newcomer to the abolitionist cause, frames the case in strictly legal terms: the “Amistad Africans” were not born slaves in Cuba, as their surviving Spanish captors claim, but rather kidnapped as free men and women from West Africa. Since by 1839, the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished by international treaty (though “homegrown” slavery continued legally for years), Baldwin argues that the defendants were never actually slaves to begin with, so they were within their rights to kill the traders who were illegally kidnapping them.

Joadson, on the other hand, sees the case in more moral terms: slavery is an abomination and an affront to the founding ideals of both Christianity and America. Ultimately, Baldwin’s strategy wins out, and the case is argued the premise not that slavery is wrong but that the defendants were never legally slaves to begin with. Baldwin’s effectiveness as counsel stems from his ability to dehumanize the case and see it in strictly legal terms. Over the course of the trial, though, and in particular through conversation with Cinque, Baldwin comes to understand the deeper moral issue involved, the now obvious notion that people are, inalienably, people, not property.

That’s a pretty classic Hollywood set-up for this kind of movie, and it’s no surprise that it turns out to be not entirely accurate. Baldwin was, in reality, an abolitionist from the beginning. His come-to-Jesus arc gives the movie a convenient dramatic vehicle for a “slavery was wrong” message, but it displaces focus from the Africans to their white “saviors.”

“As in Glory,” wrote historian Eric Foner in an essay about the movie’s liberty-taking, “Amistad’s black characters are essentially foils for white self-discovery and moral growth.” Moreover, Spielberg paints an anachronistic picture of race relations in the 1840s. In reality, Joadson (had he existed) would not have been allowed to sit alongside his white colleagues in court, and John Quincy Adams, who makes an emotional argument for abolition when the case is appealed to the Supreme Court in the film’s third act, actually had a “solid record of indifference and callousness toward the plight of black Americans” that earned him the scorn of Massachusetts abolitionists.

There is one sequence in Amistad, however, in which Spielberg doesn’t sugar-coat. Testifying before the court, Cinque recalls what he witnessed during the middle passage across the Atlantic: torture, mass murder, and despair. Spielberg recreates these atrocities, letting them speak for themselves, and the results are immersive and haunting. As in the Normandy beach-storming scene in Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg’s skill as a filmmaker here sharpens rather than softens the horrors of history.

There are a few excellent moments in the courtroom, as well. For each witness that takes the stand, Spielberg intercuts the direct- and cross-examinations, a neat trick that gives the scenes a dreamlike quality. In a few sequences, the courtroom is de-familiarized, shown from the defendants’ perspective. Spielberg reveals the utter strangeness of our judicial system, the ritual pageantry and elaborate systems of rules: the trial becomes Kafkaesque. At one point, it gets to be too much for Cinque and he simply stands up and shouts (in his first utterance in English): “Give us free.” He’s saying: We’re human beings. But he’s also saying: What kind of system is this, that you people spend two years arguing legal technicalities instead of just doing the right thing?

So, while “Amistad” is certainly worth watching, it gives the American judiciary more credit than it’s due. The same Supreme Court that found in favor of the Amistad captives issued the Dred Scott decision just a few years later.

The Greatest Lawyer Movies of All Time: Amistad was originally published on LSAT Blog

#lawyer movies #trent teti #lsat

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