Law School Admission Test
admission test for law school
The Law School Admission Test (LSAT EL-sat) is a standardized test administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) for prospective law school candidates. It is designed to assess reading comprehension and logical reasoning. The test is an integral part of the law school admission process in the United States, Canada (common law programs only) and a growing number of other countries.
The test has existed in some form since 1948, when it was created to give law schools a standardized way to assess applicants in addition to their GPA. The current form of the exam has been used since 1991. The exam has four total sections that include three scored multiple choice sections, an unscored experimental section, and an unscored writing section. Raw scores on the exam are transformed into scaled scores, ranging from a high of 180 to a low of 120, with a median score typically around 150. Law school applicants are required to report all scores from the past five years, though schools generally consider the highest score in their admissions decisions.
Before July 2019, the test was administered by paper and pencil, with in-person testing only. In 2019, the test began to be administered exclusively electronically using a tablet, with test-takers still sitting for the exam in-person in testing centers. In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the test was administered remotely, with test-takers using their personal computers at home.
The public source identifies “Law School Admission Test” as admission test for law school. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around School, Admission and Test.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q840999. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1991, 2019 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Law School Admission Test” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.