What to Expect Starting With the August 2024 LSAT

By Susan Krinsky

We are announcing today a change we will be making to the LSAT at the start of the next testing cycle, beginning with the August 2024 exam. The LSAT will still assess reading comprehension, reasoning, and writing skills that are so important for success in law school and the legal profession. The change will not take effect for nine months, but we are informing students, schools, licensees, and others now to allow plenty of time to plan and prepare.

As you may recall, in 2019, LSAC entered into a settlement agreement with two blind individuals who asserted that the Analytical Reasoning section of the LSAT, commonly known as “logic games,” disadvantaged blind test takers because they could not draw or use diagrams to solve these questions. This concern was not shared by all blind test takers. Nevertheless, in order to address any concerns about diagramming, LSAC committed to research alternative methods for assessing analytical or deductive reasoning skills, as well as the extent to which those skills are assessed on other existing sections of the LSAT.

After extensive review of alternatives, LSAC has decided the best way to continue to assess students’ reasoning skills is through the addition of a second Logical Reasoning section to replace the existing logic games section.

Starting with the August 2024 test, the LSAT will consist of two scored Logical Reasoning (LR) sections, one scored Reading Comprehension (RC) section, plus one unscored section of either LR or RC that enables us to pilot items for future tests. You can learn more about the August 2024 test on our website.

While the logic games will be sunsetting after the June 2024 test, the LSAT will continue to assess prospective law students’ skills at analytical and deductive reasoning. The LR section has been a component of the LSAT for decades and was designed to assess many varieties of reasoning skills that are essential for law school success, including the deductive reasoning skills that were the focus of the “logic games” exercises.

Replacing the current logic games with a second LR section will ensure that the LSAT continues to assess the reasoning skills that are so important to the study and practice of law, while eliminating the concerns that were raised about the use of diagramming. 

Extensive research, involving hundreds of thousands of test takers over multiple years, has confirmed that substituting a second logical reasoning section for the logic games section had virtually no impact on overall scoring — analysis of over 200,000 test sessions found that the mean score changed by 1/100th of a point. 

While there are, of course, some variations at the individual level, for the overwhelming majority of individual test sessions, any shift in scoring was within the margin of error for the test. Indeed, the majority of individual test sessions analyzed showed a change of one point or less as a result of the revised test format.

Research has also confirmed that the revised test format will have virtually the same predictive validity in predicting first-year law school performance. Analysis of the more than 200,000 test sessions over multiple years found that the correlation with first-year law school grades changed by less than 1/100th of a point using the revised test format.

We are making the change at the beginning of the next testing cycle, starting with the August 2024 test, to reduce any confusion or complexity for students and schools. And we are announcing the planned change now, nine months in advance, in order to help promote a smooth transition.

Because students are already very familiar with the LR section of the LSAT, adding a second LR section at the beginning of a new testing year will have minimal impact on test takers who have already begun to prepare for the LSAT. We will also provide test preparation materials that mirror the revised test starting in February 2024. As part of that process, we are working with Khan Academy and Equity Accelerator to evolve how we provide test preparation for students, including practice tests, explanatory lessons, focused problem sets, and other resources.

As a reminder, this change will not occur until August 2024. For students who plan to take the LSAT between now and June 2024, there is no change — their test will consist of one Logical Reasoning (LR) section, one Reading Comprehension (RC) section, one Analytical Reasoning (AR) section, plus an unscored section. In addition to the new prep materials available in February, we will continue to provide test preparation materials for the existing test through the end of the current testing cycle.