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I know a guy (with BA in physics) who almost aced the LSAT going in cold (i.e. had never seen a practice test), on a dare, without any intention of becoming a l

I know a guy (with BA in physics) who almost aced the LSAT going in cold (i.e. had never seen a practice test), on a dare, without any intention of becoming a lawyer. At some point a decade ago I was vaguely curious to try the same, but not curious enough to overcome laziness and actually sign up for the test (and nobody dared me). My impression is that people who spend a lot of time thinking critically about text, have a solid understanding of grammar, and have done lots of logic puzzles (say, work through Smullyan’s books for fun) and other mathematics problems tend to do pretty well without any specific training. One reason many Americans have trouble with tests like the LSAT is that we spend very little time or effort up through high school on solving real math problems (as compared to trivial mechanical exercises), with the result that students’ technical reading comprehension and critical thinking also tends to be pretty poor. See e.g. http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

watwut 9y ago
I am non-American and pretty much everyone I knew who wanted to study in America prepared for those tests extensively for months. Yes, if you did the same style of problems a lot without lsat being target, then you are practically prepared. However, just being good in math in general and good in solving hard math exercises wont make it. You would spend a lot of time thinking and trying to figure things out, while if you prepare you will instantly recognize problem and "solve it fast". The only difference there is that Americans see test being learnable as a bad thing and talk about preparing on it as almost cheating. Here it was common sense, of course all tests are learnable and of course you gotta learn to do well.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Believe it or not, there exist people who can skim for key points, make fast mental diagrams, “instantly recognize” what task is being asked, and quickly solve a wide variety of standardized test questions of types they have not explicitly seen before. These people are not superhuman or anything, they just have spent a lot of time doing related kinds of tasks (close reading, competitive debate, code debugging, recreational math problems, etc.) Recreational logic puzzles get way harder than anything that shows up on the LSAT, and there are students out there who work through books of hard logic puzzles for fun, the way other people might read novels or play video games or whatever. As an individual, studying for standardized tests isn’t “cheating” or a “bad thing”. It’s often the most rational use of time for folks with specific professional ambitions. But having everyone in the society spend a significant amount of time and stress on a handful of particular standardized tests is IMO a huge waste of collective attention and focus [though perhaps there isn’t any alternative gatekeeping system for law schools which won’t be equally gamed in a time-wasting way]. One problem with the increasing numbers of standardized tests at every level of education is that time spent training for a specific test in e.g. 5th grade has very little long-term benefit for a student. The standard school curriculum (and frankly a lot of explicit test prep) doesn’t really do a very efficient or effective job of training the kinds of skills that would help someone do well on novel types of standardized test questions. Instead of training reading comprehension, working memory, generic problem solving heuristics, quick recall/matching, problem-solving time management, etc., they tend to focus on the particular features of specific types of problems, and teach memorized recipes or collections of factual information. Obviously this is a reasonable approach if the goals of the training are very narrow and specific. It doesn’t seem to me like the best generic training to do successful intellectual work. A lot (hundreds if not thousands of papers) has been written about this subject in the scholarly literature by professors who were frustrated that their high-achieving undergraduate {math, physics, engineering, ...} students seem to be able to memorize recipes for solving specific problems very well and ace their usual tests, but have great difficulty synthesizing their knowledge or solving non-standard problems, and then spent some time and effort trying to understand why that is.
  - watwut 9y ago
    > “instantly recognize” what task is being asked, That is literally aim of the preparation. You train to be able to instantly recognize the task just by skimming for key points. Being able to solve hard math problems, the ones that require days of thinking and requires you to try various approaches is entirely different skill. Novels and games have zero to do with anything. It is learnable skill and altrough there is some talent component, large part of success is right kind of training and you can get better if you train - whether because you have lsat as a goal or because something else. And precisely the people who did not went through whole logic puzzle book before but have right genetics benefit from that training the most. Pretending it is not learnable and that those 17 years old who did not spent time with same hobbies up to know are lost causes is societal loss too. Some of them are dumb and others conflate "did not spend time with this specific training yet" with "the kid does not have innate talent".
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      I don’t understand what you think my point is or what I am “pretending”, but you’re answering something different than anything I have argued. These tests are very clearly learnable, and nobody said anything about “lost causes” or “innate talent”. The top-level comment claimed that it was all but impossible for someone to get a near-perfect LSAT score without extensive targeted training on the test specifically. I claim that this is an oversimplification which overlooks people who have extensively trained related more generic kinds of skills. Then you made a point about whether having everyone do test prep should be considered “cheating” or a “bad thing”, and I responded by arguing that test prep is individually rational but a collective waste of time (a much more severe waste in some countries than it is in the USA). Personally I think we should use some other mechanism(s) for gatekeeping legal training (and other schooling), so that incentives to do well at the gate-passing task are more closely aligned with meaningful training for effective citizenship and generic intellectual work, or perhaps with student passions and aptitudes.
  - scotty79 9y ago
    > But having everyone in the society spend a significant amount of time and stress on a handful of particular standardized tests is IMO a huge waste of collective attention and focus This reminds me something that happened to me in college. I was playing with neural network controlled rat in a maze. I was hoping it will discover right hand rule. But the mazes I used for testing were small and randomly generated so sometimes rule 'just go staright ahead' worked perfectly because exit was facing entrance. I solved it by removing such simple mazes from test pool.
dvt 9y ago
I'm not saying this isn't true, but I take stories like this with a grain of salt. Every now and then, you'll have someone claiming that they got a 170+ with no practice on TLS or reddit. Since the LSAT is multiple choice, even a completely random outcome has a nonzero chance of scoring a perfect 180. I'd argue that what makes the LSAT difficult isn't the raw difficulty but rather the time management. Most people could probably do decent on it if they had as long as they needed, but the fact that you need to pick the best answer in like 2-3 minutes when the question is like two paragraphs long makes it very unlikely that a neophyte will score well. Once you study it, you learn to look for certain things and only end up skimming questions for the key information. Without having ever seen the test, you will most likely do what any sensible person would do: read the question carefully, read every potential answer carefully, come up with your answer, eventually run out of time, and blindly guess on the last 5 questions on every section.
- graeme 9y ago
  It’s probably true. My girlfriend took a timed LR section and LG section, and got 1 wrong, I think. I’ll give her a full test eventually. She is a physics/comp sci major. I expect a sizeable chunk of the physics department could do the same. But, they normally don’t take the LSAT. (I’m an LSAT instructor, so this is a bit more than a random anecdote)
- ABCLAW 9y ago
  I did the test cold, expecting it to be in-situ practice for a 'real' test which I anticipated to write a year later. I scored over 170 easily. I later trained to become an LSAT instructor on the basis of my scores and realized I didn't have any aptitude for it because none of my strategies for dealing with the test were explicit - they were just my test taking routine. If you did logic puzzles for fun as a kid and read enough to develop a large vocabulary, good test taking practices will take you the rest of the way. For what it's worth, in my experience most of the kids who did the LSAT coming from the sciences considered it a joke and prepared minimally with good results. They, however, constituted maybe 1/100th of the test takers.
mywittyname 9y ago
The LSAT sounds an awful lot like an IQ test. In fact, the scoring looks suspiciously close to IQ * 1.5 with a similarly scaled standard deviation, seeing as the range is 120-180 (which would correspond to 80-140 on a typical IQ test) and the median score is 153. So it wouldn't surprise me if a person with a BS in Physics aced it. Math/Physics majors tend to have the highest aggregate scores on standardized tests, be it GRE, SAT, ACT or even ASVAB.

watwut 9y ago

I am non-American and pretty much everyone I knew who wanted to study in America prepared for those tests extensively for months. Yes, if you did the same style of problems a lot without lsat being target, then you are practically prepared. However, just being good in math in general and good in solving hard math exercises wont make it. You would spend a lot of time thinking and trying to figure things out, while if you prepare you will instantly recognize problem and "solve it fast". The only difference there is that Americans see test being learnable as a bad thing and talk about preparing on it as almost cheating. Here it was common sense, of course all tests are learnable and of course you gotta learn to do well.

jacobolus 9y ago
Believe it or not, there exist people who can skim for key points, make fast mental diagrams, “instantly recognize” what task is being asked, and quickly solve a wide variety of standardized test questions of types they have not explicitly seen before. These people are not superhuman or anything, they just have spent a lot of time doing related kinds of tasks (close reading, competitive debate, code debugging, recreational math problems, etc.) Recreational logic puzzles get way harder than anything that shows up on the LSAT, and there are students out there who work through books of hard logic puzzles for fun, the way other people might read novels or play video games or whatever. As an individual, studying for standardized tests isn’t “cheating” or a “bad thing”. It’s often the most rational use of time for folks with specific professional ambitions. But having everyone in the society spend a significant amount of time and stress on a handful of particular standardized tests is IMO a huge waste of collective attention and focus [though perhaps there isn’t any alternative gatekeeping system for law schools which won’t be equally gamed in a time-wasting way]. One problem with the increasing numbers of standardized tests at every level of education is that time spent training for a specific test in e.g. 5th grade has very little long-term benefit for a student. The standard school curriculum (and frankly a lot of explicit test prep) doesn’t really do a very efficient or effective job of training the kinds of skills that would help someone do well on novel types of standardized test questions. Instead of training reading comprehension, working memory, generic problem solving heuristics, quick recall/matching, problem-solving time management, etc., they tend to focus on the particular features of specific types of problems, and teach memorized recipes or collections of factual information. Obviously this is a reasonable approach if the goals of the training are very narrow and specific. It doesn’t seem to me like the best generic training to do successful intellectual work. A lot (hundreds if not thousands of papers) has been written about this subject in the scholarly literature by professors who were frustrated that their high-achieving undergraduate {math, physics, engineering, ...} students seem to be able to memorize recipes for solving specific problems very well and ace their usual tests, but have great difficulty synthesizing their knowledge or solving non-standard problems, and then spent some time and effort trying to understand why that is.
- watwut 9y ago
  > “instantly recognize” what task is being asked, That is literally aim of the preparation. You train to be able to instantly recognize the task just by skimming for key points. Being able to solve hard math problems, the ones that require days of thinking and requires you to try various approaches is entirely different skill. Novels and games have zero to do with anything. It is learnable skill and altrough there is some talent component, large part of success is right kind of training and you can get better if you train - whether because you have lsat as a goal or because something else. And precisely the people who did not went through whole logic puzzle book before but have right genetics benefit from that training the most. Pretending it is not learnable and that those 17 years old who did not spent time with same hobbies up to know are lost causes is societal loss too. Some of them are dumb and others conflate "did not spend time with this specific training yet" with "the kid does not have innate talent".
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    I don’t understand what you think my point is or what I am “pretending”, but you’re answering something different than anything I have argued. These tests are very clearly learnable, and nobody said anything about “lost causes” or “innate talent”. The top-level comment claimed that it was all but impossible for someone to get a near-perfect LSAT score without extensive targeted training on the test specifically. I claim that this is an oversimplification which overlooks people who have extensively trained related more generic kinds of skills. Then you made a point about whether having everyone do test prep should be considered “cheating” or a “bad thing”, and I responded by arguing that test prep is individually rational but a collective waste of time (a much more severe waste in some countries than it is in the USA). Personally I think we should use some other mechanism(s) for gatekeeping legal training (and other schooling), so that incentives to do well at the gate-passing task are more closely aligned with meaningful training for effective citizenship and generic intellectual work, or perhaps with student passions and aptitudes.
- scotty79 9y ago
  > But having everyone in the society spend a significant amount of time and stress on a handful of particular standardized tests is IMO a huge waste of collective attention and focus This reminds me something that happened to me in college. I was playing with neural network controlled rat in a maze. I was hoping it will discover right hand rule. But the mazes I used for testing were small and randomly generated so sometimes rule 'just go staright ahead' worked perfectly because exit was facing entrance. I solved it by removing such simple mazes from test pool.

dvt 9y ago

I'm not saying this isn't true, but I take stories like this with a grain of salt. Every now and then, you'll have someone claiming that they got a 170+ with no practice on TLS or reddit. Since the LSAT is multiple choice, even a completely random outcome has a nonzero chance of scoring a perfect 180. I'd argue that what makes the LSAT difficult isn't the raw difficulty but rather the time management. Most people could probably do decent on it if they had as long as they needed, but the fact that you need to pick the best answer in like 2-3 minutes when the question is like two paragraphs long makes it very unlikely that a neophyte will score well. Once you study it, you learn to look for certain things and only end up skimming questions for the key information. Without having ever seen the test, you will most likely do what any sensible person would do: read the question carefully, read every potential answer carefully, come up with your answer, eventually run out of time, and blindly guess on the last 5 questions on every section.

graeme 9y ago
It’s probably true. My girlfriend took a timed LR section and LG section, and got 1 wrong, I think. I’ll give her a full test eventually. She is a physics/comp sci major. I expect a sizeable chunk of the physics department could do the same. But, they normally don’t take the LSAT. (I’m an LSAT instructor, so this is a bit more than a random anecdote)
ABCLAW 9y ago
I did the test cold, expecting it to be in-situ practice for a 'real' test which I anticipated to write a year later. I scored over 170 easily. I later trained to become an LSAT instructor on the basis of my scores and realized I didn't have any aptitude for it because none of my strategies for dealing with the test were explicit - they were just my test taking routine. If you did logic puzzles for fun as a kid and read enough to develop a large vocabulary, good test taking practices will take you the rest of the way. For what it's worth, in my experience most of the kids who did the LSAT coming from the sciences considered it a joke and prepared minimally with good results. They, however, constituted maybe 1/100th of the test takers.

mywittyname 9y ago

The LSAT sounds an awful lot like an IQ test. In fact, the scoring looks suspiciously close to IQ * 1.5 with a similarly scaled standard deviation, seeing as the range is 120-180 (which would correspond to 80-140 on a typical IQ test) and the median score is 153. So it wouldn't surprise me if a person with a BS in Physics aced it. Math/Physics majors tend to have the highest aggregate scores on standardized tests, be it GRE, SAT, ACT or even ASVAB.