Every so often, the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) decides to give the LSAT a facelift. Like an aging starlet, the test can benefit from a little fine-tuning around the edges. This time around, the Reading Comprehension section (RC) is changing. This momentous event is slated for the June 2007 LSAT.

Such announcements are met with the kind of chaos that only occurs when type A, lawyer-to-be personalities meet with uncertainty. Beads of sweat form as prospective law students contemplate taking the “new” exam. How can they possibly study for a section of the test that has never been given? What if this new variable causes them to fail the test? Will life have any meaning without law school? And why does Kevin Federline persist in making albums?

Such existential questions are enough to drive anyone mad. Feeling the imperative to allay the fears of would-be lawyers around the globe, Blueprint brought the issue to James Vaseleck, the Executive Assistant to the President of Law Services. Here is the information he imparted.

The format of the new RC section:

The new RC section will have three long passages of the kind with which students are familiar. Instead of a 4th passage, however, there will be two shorter passages, collectively equal in length to the old passage. Although some of the questions may target only one of the shorter passages, most will ask about the way in which the passages interact.

Think of it as sharing a Snickers™ bar with your sibling. After it’s been split in two, you’re far more interested in comparing both halves to ensure you didn’t get shafted on the size than in contemplating your own share alone.

The reasoning behind the new RC section:

According to Mr. Vaseleck, current long RC passages “measure the ability to read with understanding and insight.” They prepare students for law school by having them read “lengthy and complex materials similar to those commonly encountered in law school work.”

In contrast, the shorter passages will test students’ abilities to “[apply] skills of comparison, contrast, generalization, and synthesis to different texts.”

Translation: you read a lot in law school. That’s why there are long passages. But you have to understand how what you’ve read compares with that other stuff you read before. Hence, the shorter passages.

How do they score the new RC section on the June 2007 test if it’s never been taken before?

As a reader, you have just committed the fallacy of acquiescing to a faulty conditional. In other words, students HAVE taken the “new” RC section – they just weren’t a scored section of their LSAT. As Mr. Vaseleck describes: “The new comparative reading test material was field tested in 2002-2003 with appropriate populations and numbers of students. This field testing provides the statistical information needed to introduce the new material into the test.”


So rest assured, the new section has been tested as much as the new trans-fat-free cooking oil at KFC, and your results won’t be bizarre or unfair.



Will the new RC be harder than the old?

This is the million-dollar question, one that has some students scurrying to take the February test before the LSAT changes. Are they smart to do so? Before we answer that, let us explore for a moment the purpose of the LSAT.

As GPAs differ between schools and majors (how does a History major from NYU with a 3.0 compare to a Math major from OSU with a 3.5?), the LSAT provides a way for law schools to evaluate students from standardized criteria. Because the LSAT is ideally meant to test all students on the same exam according to one standard, the best circumstance would be all students taking the same test. Because this is wildly impractical, the real-world solution is to have tests that are as similar as possible to each other and whose micro-level differences are normalized through a statistical process called equating (similar to a curve). Hence, LSAC is committed to ensuring that difficulty levels across tests don’t vary widely.

As Mr. Vaseleck puts it: “The field-test trials of comparative reading in 2002–2003 indicated that comparative reading is of approximately the same difficulty as traditional reading comprehension.”

In other words, don’t run to enroll for the February LSAT: June isn’t going to be appreciably harder, just slightly different.

What do I do to study for the new RC section?

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information available about the new passages right now. What little there is may be found on the LSAC web site at www.lsac.org by clicking on "notice of upcoming changes to the LSAT". Or ask Kevin Federline. We hear he may be contemplating a career change to law.