Breaking Down Your January LSAT Scores

  • Reviewed by: Matt Riley
  • January LSAT scores are out! As predicted, most everyone taking the January official administration received their scores at or around 9:00am Eastern on Wednesday, February 2nd. This is an important time of year in the law school admissions cycle. If your application was on hold while the school waited on this particular LSAT score or even if you’re considering whether to hit “send” on a few more dream or safety schools, now is the time to take action. Remember, law schools operate on a rolling admissions basis, so submitting earlier is always better than holding off and waiting.

    According to LSAC data, 19,669 test takers took the exam in January, a 26% decrease from 2021. These numbers are consistent with what we’ve been seeing all fall and the early part of winter. Applying to law school in 2022 will no doubt be competitive, but 2021 was the year everyone wanted to go to law school. While the numbers have varied month-to-month, admissions officials are predicting that the final applicant pool for the current cycle could be down approximately 10% over 2021.

    We briefly discussed right after the January exam that this test, at least for those who took the exam in the US and Canada, had all the ups and downs of your average LSAT seen over the past few years. And we now see that there was a fairly good reason for that. Many of the test questions seen on this exam had also shown up in the undisclosed February 2020 LSAT exam.

    Logic Games gave students a run for their money in the official scored sections. You may have seen a real section with a game organizing supermarkets. Other games in this same section included novel release dates, family portraits and library readings. You might have also seen a real games section that included a fruit display, books, landscapers, and actors/scenes. Both were challenging, but doable if you didn’t get too sucked into the third game. The Logic Games experimentals were hard, but other than being a royal pain in the neck to deal with during your official exam, luckily these games – the dreaded park rangers, teachers, or expeditions/ice in oceans – didn’t count.

    Reading Comprehension had a brutal comparative passage about Mali gold and a somewhat tricky lit passage regarding a mid-20th century novel. There was another real, scored Reading section on a 19th century author, violent movies and media, and large gas planets, which was also legitimately rough. One thing to remember when a particular section is tough-going no matter what, the scaling is likely to work in your favor. Just like when you see tough experimental sections that don’t affect your score at all, don’t lose heart if you’re in what feels like the middle of a nightmare. The scaling is there to balance everything out. You won’t need to answer as many questions correctly in order to receive the same scaled score.

    The Logical Reasoning section continued to prioritize characterization and operation family questions. Lots of Flaw and Weaken questions to deal with, to be certain. That all means that being able to describe what’s going on in the stimulus or knowing what’s required to create a specific effect on the stimulus was your guiding light for this section. 

    For many of you taking the January 2022 LSAT, the LSAT curve is likely to be fairly standard on this test. If you think of a 170 normally being about minus seven questions (-7), this January 2022 test held pretty true to a -7. Most of the sections presented had enough balance to them to give an overall “standard” testing experience for the January LSAT.

    With all that in mind, are you ready to put the LSAT officially behind you? Congratulations if this is you! Otherwise, take a deep breath and use all of this miserable February weather and darkness to sit down at your computer and pull up your next LSAT drill.

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