You did it! You studied for months, training your brain to think about information in way you never thought you’d have to. You’ll never look at the word “unless” the same way again. You put those skills to the test by doing tons of practice exams. You made sacrifices along the way — to your friends, your better halves, your hobbies, your Saturday mornings that could have been spent doing literally anything other than a full practice exam.
But this afternoon, you entered your test center and finished the one that counts — the real deal. The true test. The June 2019 LSAT. And after you spent four nasty, brutish, and somehow still too-short hours reading some stuff and coloring in some bubbles, you emerged. And that is cause to celebrate.
…And yet, you’re here. On a blog. An LSAT blog, even. Looks like you’re putting the celebration on hold until you unpack that exam a little bit more. Maybe get a few things off your chest in the comment section. Or just figure out which section was your experimental section.
But that’s all right! We’re here for you. As we do following every exam, we’re using this post to address what we’ve heard about this exam, to see how our predictions fared, use our well-honed powers of deduction to figure out which sections was your experimental section, and more.
And yet … we can’t get too specific. We are free to discuss how difficult certain parts of the test were, how your proctor and the quality of your test center fared, and what were the topics of passages, games, and LR questions. We can even try to identify the experimental sections used on this test. We cannot cannot discuss the answers to the questions or how to get them, lest we incur the wrath of LSAC. If your comment is removed, it most likely violated some kind of rule or was close enough that we didn’t want to risk it. Here’s a pretty good guide of what’s acceptable.
But, based on reports from test takers, here’s what we know about this June exam (and are allowed to talk about).
Logical Reasoning
Well, we might as well get the embarrassing part out of the way: we were super wrong about our prediction that the multiple-prompts-per-stimulus-style questions would return on this exam. I haven’t even heard that those appeared in anyone’s experimental section. But as they say, shooters shoot, and you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
That said, there was a weird thing that happened in this test’s scored Logical Reasoning sections: both sections had 26 questions, according to test takers. If Reading Comp had the typical 27, and Logic Games had the typical 23 — as test takers are also reporting — that’s [pulling out calculator, running the numbers, waiting for the response] a total of 102 questions. Which, if true, is tied for the most questions to ever appear on a single LSAT. Almost every LSAT has 100 or 101 questions. They’ll sometimes dip down to 99 questions — though it’s been a long time since that’s happened. The last time an LSAT has had 102 questions, though, is December 2010. So, June test takers, we’ll apologize on behalf of LSAC that you had to endure at least one more question than almost any other test taker.
Now, we won’t know exactly how the Logical Reasoning sections shook out until the exam gets released in a few weeks, but we did hear many reports of the questions’ subject matter. One question that seemingly everyone remembers is the one about spiders from Guam. It remains to be seen, however, if these spiders — like the spiders from Mars — accompanied Ziggy while he played guitar.
Other questions referenced dieting pilots, evil vampires, cheetahs and whales and endangered birds, bus routs and bike lanes, chemicals that cause strokes, and healthy oats. So, you know, normal dinner table topics. Also, because the people who write this exam love to get topical (and also because questions can take years to actually appear on an exam after they’re written), there was apparently a deeply 2016 question about journalists using polling data to incorrectly predict the winner of a election.
Logic Games
On the real, scored Logic Games section, there was a game about oil and watercolor paintings, a game about product commercials, a game about people’s occupations (and apparently they were really classic occupations, like doctors, lawyers, judges, and nurses), and a game about people attending movies at a festival.
Most reports about the game section do not suggest it was especially difficult (so we were wrong about that prediction, too). But some are saying the last game was a bit of a slog — the kind where there aren’t a ton of deductions or an opportunity to make scenarios, and you had grind it out in the questions.
There was a game in the experimental logic games section that some got about putting decorations on four walls that people hated. Like, people who were subjected to that game expressed a level of antipathy towards the “wall” game that’s usually reserved for walls proposed by 2016 presidential candidates that no journalist who’s looked at the polling thinks can win that election.
Reading Comprehension
Finally, the Reading Comprehension section was just about universally regarded as the hardest section on this exam. On the real RC section, there was a passage about reproducing films, a passage about fish farming, the requisite legal passage about the reliability of witness testimony, and a passage about, apparently, everything from African storytellers known as griots to the musical traditions of Wolof-speaking people to the blues. The fish farming passage seemed to be the most difficult to most.
Final Takeaways
The good(-ish) news from this exam is — 102 questions aside — there wasn’t anything especially novel or unique or panic-inducing. No reports that I’ve heard would suggest that your score on this exam would be substantially different than your recent practice exam scores, barring any test center disasters. If those diagnostic scores were around your target score, it’s time to party. If you want to keep that party going all the way to the June 27 score release date, no one (other than perhaps your liver) is going to stop you.
There’s not much else to do now except sit back, stay busy, and wait for your score. If you’re not too thrilled when you get your score back, then chill. It’s going to be ok. You won’t be penalized for retaking the LSAT. You might want to try a different kind of prep. For example, if you exclusively went to an LSAT prep class, try doing an online LSAT course. If you did purely online, try a hybrid course where you get live instruction streamed live to you. Or, if you’ve done all the above, let’s talk about tutoring. Our Academic Managers can help match you with a tutor that fits your personality!
If, on the other hand, you’re thinking about canceling this score, you have some time to make this decision. You can read up on LSAC’s official cancellation policy here. The official cancellation policy according to LSAC: you have until 11:59 pm EST on the sixth day after the exam to cancel using your LSAC account. In layman’s term: you have until Sunday, 11:59 pm Eastern to cancel. So sleep on it. Take a look at this video, for the advice from Blueprint co-founder Matt Riley.
Before canceling, you should also be aware that nearly every law school will simply use your highest LSAT when constructing your academic index, or whatever calculation it uses to assess you as an applicant. Although law schools will see every score you got on the LSAT, the vast majority of them won’t hold having multiple LSAT scores against you to a significant degree. For most test takers, our recommendation is … don’t cancel. Choose to receive your score, just on the chance that you’ll be happy enough to with the score that you don’t have to study for the next exam. For more thorough discussion of this issue, check out this blog post.
Either way, you deserve a hearty congratulations. So get off this post, leave your computer for a little bit, and enjoy the life you’ve neglected to study for this test! If you decide you’d like to take another shot at the exam in July, we’ll be here for you, ready to help.
