February LSAT Scores are out!
February LSAT scores are out and the curve was….

Oh that’s right, we’ll never know the curve because February is UNDISCLOSED.  Yes all you peeps in February LSAT land, one of the oddities about this test is that it’s the only one of the four yearly LSAT administrations that’s undisclosed.  This means you won’t be sent a copy of all the questions, you won’t know which questions your got right and which you got wrong, and you won’t receive a conversion chart letting you know the curve.

The upside of getting virtually no information is that you won’t spend an undue amount of time obsessing over why you missed the logical reasoning question about monkeys.  The downside is that you don’t get much more than a score, which can be a bit unsatisfying.

So why doesn’t the LSAC disclose the February exam?

The Law School Admission Council doesn’t disclose the February exam for a couple of reasons:

1.  They want to reserve the possibility of using February questions on later tests. This can save the writers time on writing questions later (a painstaking task).

2.  They use the February exam for reliability testing.  One of the Law School Admission Council’s greatest challenges is making sure the LSAT is consistent across different administrations.  In other words, they don’t want the June LSAT to be easier or more difficult than, say, the December test.  In order to make sure this doesn’t happen, giving the same question to different testing groups allows the LSAC to get a good handle on gaging the difficulty of questions.  This way, they can assemble tests with the same amount of easy and difficult questions, ultimately allowing Law Services to maintain difficulty level across different LSATs.

For all those who are happy with their scores, congratulations!  For those who aren’t, you may consider taking it again.  (See Blueprint founder Matt Riley’s video to see if you fall into this group).  Don’t forget, the good thing about the February LSAT is that, if you don’t like your score, you can apply next year.  This may sound like an odd thing to say, so I will elaborate.  If you’re applying for the 2011/2012 school year with a February LSAT score, you’re applying late in the process (most law schools begin accepting applications scores in early October).  If you take the test again for the 2012/2013 application cycle then, rather than being rushed for this application cycle, you’ll have plenty of time to prepare well for the next.

Don’t forget to check out our discussion board for more dialogue about the February 2011 LSAT.