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Your February 2016 LSAT Recap

BPPaaron-lsat-blog-feb-2016-recap

The February 2016 LSAT is in the books. Did you take it? How do you feel? Peyton Manning have a Budweiser? Or sad face Cam Newton?

Compared to the other LSATs in the year, the February LSAT has an aura of mystery about it. Since the test is undisclosed, no one outside LSAC ever gets to see it, except on test day. This leads to the rumor that the February LSAT is weird or different.

It isn’t. Sure, there are weird things on the February LSAT sometimes. Just a couple years ago, test takers reported what sounds an awful lot like a circular ordering game. There hadn’t been one of those on a released LSAT in more than ten years. But there’s weird stuff on other LSAT administrations, too. Just look at one of the games from this past December. The difference is that when there’s something weird on another LSAT, everyone gets to figure it out when the test is released, and it doesn’t seem so weird anymore. On the February LSAT, the weird and hard questions remain forever shrouded in mystery.

I’ve heard some reports about last Saturday’s LSAT, and by all accounts it should help to dispel the rumor that February is weird. All I’m hearing is that it was a pretty normal test.

Logic games were apparently unremarkable and on the easy side. A couple students who normally have trouble finishing the games section reported that they were able to get through everything without much problem. We can’t talk too much about the details of the test, but it sounds like the games were all the kinds of games that come up over and over again.

Reading comp was hard, or so I hear. Again, that’s pretty normal of late. Some people sweated comparative reading in particular, but the consensus seems to be that it was a pretty hard section. Hard doesn’t mean weird. Some informants had trouble finishing, but no one had a “WTF” reaction.

In the land of logical reasoning, things were normal as well. Some test takers reported that one section was harder than the other. Normal. There were some hard questions. Normal again. It sounds like there was really nothing out of the ordinary. Boring, perhaps, but reassuring.

Since the February LSAT won’t ever be released, we’ll never know the score conversion table, or “curve,” but I won’t let that stop me from guessing. I’ll guess 12 questions wrong for a 170, or about average for recent tests. The hard reading comp might do more than you think to offset easy games. Or it might not. We’ll never know.

Ultimately, even if this last LSAT shows that February isn’t weird, we’ll never see it. The rumor will live on. But rest assured that law schools demand that the LSAT consistently measure whatever it is it’s supposed to measure. The February LSAT is just another LSAT.