The Law School Admission Test gauges students’ ability to distinguish between evidence and inference. Yet when it comes to the LSAT itself, admissions systems do not always make that same distinction. LSAT scores are treated as meaningful indicators of future success in law school and legal practice, despite ongoing uncertainty about what the exam actually measures.
After taking the LSAT twice and spending a year preparing for it, I began to question whether the exam measured reasoning itself or the ability to reason quickly.
Careful reasoning requires time to consider alternatives, test assumptions and evaluate competing interpretations. Time constraints compress those processes, making performance depend in part on both reasoning ability and the speed with which that reasoning can be demonstrated.
William D. Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, has argued that the LSAT may identify who performs well under timed conditions rather than who is most capable of legal reasoning. A 2020 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oregon State University similarly found that strict time limits can “alter the construct the test intends to measure.”
Beyond time limits, the wording of the questions can affect what the LSAT measures. The Law School Admission Council is the organization behind the administration of the LSAT. It describes the exam’s questions as “clear and unambiguous,” while acknowledging that ambiguity or error can occur without specifying how often. David M. White, founder of nonprofit Testing for the Public, has argued that ambiguity may “unduly affect” test-takers by diverting time from reasoning to interpreting ambiguous questions.
Even if the LSAT measures the abilities it is intended to assess, an equally important question is whether those abilities predict future success. As LSAC researcher Linda Wightman observed, the modest correlation between LSAT scores and first-year grades leaves most of the variation in academic performance unexplained.
The LSAT’s evidence base consists primarily of first-year grades rather than the broader competencies of effective lawyering. A decade-long study by UC Berkeley Law professor Marjorie Shultz and UC Berkeley psychologist Sheldon Zedeck found that the LSAT predicted fewer than 10 of the 26 factors they identified as contributing to lawyer effectiveness, including creativity, practical judgment, stress management and engagement. Given that the LSAT explains only about 25% of the variation in first-year grades, admissions decisions that hinge on marginal score differences risk a “fallacy of misplaced precision.”
For UC Berkeley students preparing for law school, these questions become concrete during the admissions process. The LSAT can influence which schools applicants target, how they understand their competitiveness as candidates and whether a few additional points justify another round of preparation. In this way, the weight attached to the LSAT extends beyond the score itself, shaping how applicants assess their prospects for law school and the opportunities they believe are within reach.
Applicants are asked to present years of academic performance, experiences and individual accomplishments alongside an LSAT score. That broader record provides context that cannot be expressed through a single numerical result. What matters is the degree of influence that one’s LSAT score carries in evaluating the applicant as a whole.
Despite these limitations, proponents argue that the LSAT provides a standardized assessment of reasoning and helps predict law school performance. Without it, they argue, admissions could become more subjective and less consistent.
Still, this defense overstates what the evidence justifies. A standardized test can promote consistency without actually measuring the abilities required for effective lawyering. As White explains, overreliance on admissions tests produces “false-negative errors” by rejecting applicants who would have succeeded in law school.
Confidence in the LSAT should be matched by greater transparency in how it is administered. Each LSAT includes an unscored experimental section, but test-takers are not told which one. As a result, they spend valuable time answering questions that do not affect their scores, even as some are later revised or discarded.
Such concerns have fueled broader debate within legal education. In 2022, the American Bar Association Council voted 15-1 to eliminate the accreditation requirement that law schools require applicants to submit an admissions test score, signaling a growing willingness to reconsider the role of standardized testing.
At best, the LSAT offers a narrow window into performance under compressed testing conditions. By the standards of reasoning the LSAT itself teaches, the available evidence supports a far more limited conclusion than admissions systems often draw from a single score. If legal education aims to produce effective lawyers, admissions should give greater weight to the broader range of competencies that legal practice demands.