Return to Blog Homepage

Dinosaur Violates LSAT Takers!!!!

BPPcolin-lsat-blog-dinosaurs

I currently can’t hold down water. This is because of the dinosaurs.

So Monday was the LSAT. Afterward, I met my students for what should have been celebratory drinks. And I heard the following story about 15 times. On the games section, the first one was nice and easy. The second wasn’t too bad, a bit tougher, but totally doable. Then you turn the page only to find a gigantic, mauve dinosaur has walked over and violated you. Allegedly, it was a monster. By the time it was all said and done, tons of people didn’t get to the fourth game, needed gauze to stop the hemorrhaging, and sobbed their way through the next section. Several just up and left.

The details are hazy, although sufficient therapy should bring them to the surface in time. But this is basically what I pieced together from my students. As a disclaimer, any/all of this could of course be wrong. Inebriated students were trying to relate the particular and traumatic details of the LSAT to me, during a time when I was similarly inebriated. If even some of this stuff turns out to be correct, it will be a miracle.

So it was apparently an in-and-out grouping game, protein style. You picked 5 of 7 dinosaurs to go on a display shelf. The dinosaurs were red, green, yellow, or mauve (many of my students learned yesterday that mauve is a color). But you didn’t know which dinosaur was which color, other than a red stegosaurus, so not having set subgroups made it rough. You also didn’t have to have every color represented, so although you knew that there were two mauve dinosaurs, the other colors were wide open. And then, if there were big deductions, they were hard to find.

So what does this mean? First of all, I’m like the Rasputin of the LSAT, because I predicted this less than a week ago. The writers of the LSAT have a love for dinosaurs, and they finally let it spill over into games.

As for what this means in terms of things that actually matter, check out Riley’s video on to cancel or not to cancel.

But for a separate word of wisdom, don’t count on the fact that a lot of test takers found this game difficult to mean that the curve will be forgiving. Some of my students expressed Obama-like hope that a difficult game meant they could miss more points and still get a high score. However, so-called “impossible” games or RC passages frequently appear on the LSAT and historically, their presence tends not to affect the curve very much. So if you, too, were trampled by the mauve dinosaur, your best bet is to factor the points you missed into a normal curve (-10 points for a 170, -24 points for a 160, and so on) to determine whether or not you want to keep your score.

As for what this means in terms of my general health, I ended up drowning my sorrows in solidarity with my students, but probably should have stopped somewhere around hour seven. People were slapped, burritos were thrown (sorry, Eric) and I’m now heading to bed to avoid light and things that are audible.