What Is the LSAT®?

The LSAT® (Law School Admission Test) is the standardized test used for law school admissions in the United States, Canada, and a growing number of other countries. It’s made and administered by LSAC (the Law School Admission Council) and scored on a 120-180 scale, with a median of about 154.

The current exam has three scored sections, all multiple choice:

1. Two Logical Reasoning sections (about 25 questions each, 35 minutes per section)
2. One Reading Comprehension section (about 26-27 questions, 35 minutes)

You’ll also encounter an unscored experimental section and a separately scheduled writing sample. There’s no math on the LSAT®, no essay that counts toward your score, and, since August 2024, no logic games.

What Is the LSAT® Used For?

Law schools use the LSAT® to gauge whether an applicant can handle the academic workload, to narrow down a large applicant pool, and, less charitably, to protect their spot in the rankings. The rankings piece works less directly than most applicants assume. US News assigns median LSAT® and GRE® scores just 5% of its formula. But the categories that dominate it, employment outcomes at 33% and bar passage at 25%, both track closely with the test scores of the incoming class. So schools chase LSAT® medians because those medians predict the numbers that actually move their rank, and your score ends up carrying more weight in the process than you might expect.

Most ABA-accredited law schools require a standardized test score, though not necessarily the LSAT®. The ABA also recognizes the GRE®, and since late 2024 a small but growing group of schools has received ABA variances letting them admit students with no test score at all. In practice the LSAT® is still the safe default. The LSAT® matters as much as it does partly because it puts every applicant on the same scale regardless of where they went to college or what they majored in. A 3.8 from one school and a 3.8 from another can mean very different things. A 165 on the LSAT® means the same thing for everyone.

Some law schools also accept the GRE®, which gives you options if you’re also applying to non-law graduate programs. But the LSAT® is still the default, and some schools require it outright. For the detailed comparison, see Do Law Schools Prefer the LSAT® or GRE®?

There’s no eligibility requirement for the LSAT®. You don’t need to have finished college, and you can take it whenever you want. Most people take it in the summer or fall of the year before they plan to start law school, since applications are typically due between November and February.

What’s on the LSAT®?

The LSAT® tests two core skills: logical reasoning and reading comprehension. Every question on the exam, across all three scored sections, comes down to whether you can read a passage carefully and think about it precisely. There’s no math, no science, and no subject-specific knowledge required.

What’s on the LSAT

Logical Reasoning

Each Logical Reasoning section has about 25 multiple-choice questions. You’ll read a short argument, usually under 100 words, and answer a question about it. The tasks include:

• Strengthening the argument
• Weakening the argument
• Identifying the role of different parts of the argument
• Identifying assumptions behind a conclusion
• Resolving an apparent paradox or discrepancy
• Inferring a conclusion from the given facts

With two scored sections, Logical Reasoning makes up roughly two-thirds of your LSAT® score, so this is where you might consider spending more of your prep time. For more on how to approach these questions, see our Beginner’s Guide to LSAT® Logical Reasoning.

Reading Comprehension

The Reading Comprehension section has four passages, each about 3 to 5 paragraphs long, covering topics like economics, science, art, or history. Each passage is followed by 5 to 8 multiple-choice questions.

The point isn’t to test your knowledge of the subject. It’s to test whether you can read dense, unfamiliar material and figure out what it’s actually saying. Questions typically ask you to:

• Identify the main idea or primary purpose
• Draw inferences from the text
• Trace the passage’s logical structure
• Recognize the author’s tone or attitude

For more on how to approach these, see our Beginner’s Guide to LSAT® Reading Comprehension.

What Happened to LSAT® Logic Games?

The LSAT® used to include an Analytical Reasoning section, better known as “logic games”: a complicated, madness-inducing version of the sorting and matching puzzles you can find in the back of a newspaper.

LSAC removed logic games from the LSAT® in August 2024. To replace Analytical Reasoning, the exam now has a second scored Logical Reasoning section.

The Experimental Section

Only three sections count toward your LSAT® score, but on test day, you’ll see a fourth section. If you’re scratching your head at that, this is because there’s an experimental section – an unscored LR or RC section that LSAC uses to test questions for future exams.

Because the experimental section looks exactly like a real section, you won’t know which one is unscored. You’ll see either three Logical Reasoning sections or two Reading Comprehension sections, and there’s no way to tell which section is the experimental one. Thus, it’s important you treat every section as if it counts towards your score.

LSAT® Argumentative Writing

LSAT® Argumentative Writing runs 50 minutes total, separately from the rest of the exam: 15 minutes of prewriting analysis, which you can move past after the first 5, and then 35 minutes to write. You’ll be given a debatable issue with several perspectives and asked to defend a position. You can start eight days before your LSAT® test day, or any time after, and you have up to a year to get it done.

Your LSAT® score won’t be released until you’ve submitted the writing sample, so we recommend getting it done sooner rather than later.

Beyond that, don’t lose sleep over this. Law schools have much better evidence of your writing, your personal statement, your application essays, and your academic work in your application package. Also, most admissions committees aren’t reading writing samples very carefully unless they have a specific reason to question your writing ability.

What Test-Taking Strategies Are Important for the LSAT®?

Knowing the content and question types is only part of the picture. Here are the additional skills that the LSAT® tests:

Precision reading. This is the single most important skill on the LSAT®, and it applies to every question on the exam. Logical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension both reward you for catching exactly what a passage says, and they punish you for reading sloppily or filling in details that aren’t there. If you rush through an argument and miss a qualifier like “some” vs. “all” or “most” vs. “many,” you’ll get the question wrong, and you probably won’t realize why. 

Time management. You have 35 minutes per section, which works out to about 1 minute and 24 seconds per LR question and just under 9 minutes per RC passage. That’s not very much time at all. If you get stuck on a single question and spend 4 minutes wrestling with it, you’ve eaten the time you needed for two or three others. The better approach: if you read a question twice and don’t see a clear path to the answer, guess, flag it, and move on. You can come back to flagged questions before you finish a section. Use the time you save to be accurate on the questions you can answer.

Knowing when to let go. You will miss questions on the LSAT®. That’s normal. What matters is which questions you miss. Missing a few hard questions that had you stumped is much less costly than missing easy questions because you ran out of time chasing a difficult one. Be accurate on what you understand, and waste as little time as possible on what you don’t.

For more on building the reading skills that the LSAT® rewards, see reading fiction and reading nonfiction.

Where Can You Take the LSAT®?

For years you could take the LSAT® either at a test center or at home, and the choice was mostly yours. That changed with the August 2026 exam. LSAC now delivers the multiple-choice portion in person, at a test center, for almost every test taker in the US and internationally.

Remote testing still exists, but it’s an exception you have to qualify for rather than a preference you select at registration. LSAC grants remote exceptions in limited circumstances, including certain disability-related accommodations that require a separate room, and cases where you live an extreme distance from any test center. If you are approved to test remotely, you’ll also need to use your smartphone as a second camera during the session, on top of your computer’s webcam.

So for most people reading this, the practical answer is short: you’re going to a test center. Plan for what that involves, getting there early, bringing acceptable ID, and packing only what LSAC allows through the door. LSAC’s test day checklist is the place to confirm the details before test day.

One piece of the exam didn’t move: LSAT® Argumentative Writing is still taken remotely by everyone, on your own computer, on your own schedule.

The LSAT® is offered multiple times per year. You register through LSAC’s website. The registration fee is $253 USD – the full list of fees is available on LSAC’s fee schedule. 

You can take the LSAT® up to 5 times within the current reportable score period, which LSAC currently anchors at July 2021, with a lifetime limit of 7 attempts. Cancelled scores count against both limits, while absences and withdrawals don’t. Your scores stay reportable for the current testing year plus the previous five testing years.

For more on how the scoring works, including what different score ranges mean for your applications, see How Is the LSAT® Scored?

Should You Take the LSAT® or the GRE®?

Most law schools now accept both tests. For most people, the answer is still a no-brainer: if law school is the only thing you’re applying to, take the LSAT®. Schools have far more data on what an LSAT® score predicts, and the overwhelming majority of admitted students still apply with one. Do Law Schools Prefer the LSAT® or GRE® covers what admissions offices actually do with each score.

The GRE® makes more sense in a narrower set of situations: you’re applying to non-law programs at the same time, or the LSAT®’s reading demands are a genuine wall for you and your quant skills are strong enough to carry a composite. How much harder the LSAT® will feel in your hands is the subject of Is the LSAT® Harder than the GRE?

One caution before you go hunting for a shortcut. ETS publishes a tool that turns a GRE® score into an “equivalent” LSAT® score, and it’s tempting to use it to pick your test. Please don’t lean on it too hard. The two exams measure different skills, and the conversion carries a lot more uncertainty than its tidy output suggests. We break down why in our guide to converting GRE® scores to LSAT® scores.