February LSAT takers?

bluedevilmike
Sun, 04 Mar 2007 00:03:41 +0000

Having such a spread at the top is both a very intelligent and very stupid way to structure the test.

It’s very stupid because it means that law schools are often making distinctions between candidates who are genuinely very close together. The difference between a 178 and a 180 is less than 1/10th of a percentile point – surely not a significant difference. You can only imagine the gap from a 178 to a 179, which is probably less than half of that. And yet every point counts.

It’s very intelligent because the alternative to arbitrary spreading is no spreading at all, leaving you to guess at [example, SAT’s] which of the 1600’s is actually a 1600 and which of them would have been a 1700 if only the test measured a little bit higher.

MCATs are structured like that to the extreme. A perfect score is a 45, but nobody ever actually gets that. Max in the country is usually a 42 or so, and a 40 is already the 99.8th percentile (August 2004).