Types of LSAT Questions

There are three types of LSAT questions: Reading Comprehension, Logical Reasoning, and Analytical Reasoning.

The Reading Comprehension sections are generally straightforward. You read an essay and answer questions about it. Some say this is the hardest area to improve, because your reading comprehension is innate. If something is too complicated to understand, practice won’t help much. But there are methods to improve comprehension, in combination with practice. While they may sound silly at first, we have found them to be quite beneficial. One basic strategy is to look up words that you don’t know in the dictionary (or on Google). While you can sometimes infer the meaning of a word from context, having a bigger vocabulary will definitely improve your comprehension. Another helpful practice is to read the questions first, so that when you’re reading the passage you’ll know what to look out for. When you get to a part that you recognize, go ahead and answer that question straightaway. This will let you avoid having to re-read, looking for an answer that you know you saw but don’t remember where. Since the LSAT is timed, any method that saves time is critically important.

Logical Reasoning gives you a short paragraph or two and asks more specific questions about what the text says. The main way to improve your score on these questions is just to practice.

The Analytical Reasoning questions can be the toughest. In these questions, you are given a series of facts and then asked to answer questions about them. They can be real brain-twisters. While you can probably answer some of the simplest ones just by thinking about them, most of them require mapping out the logic on paper. We will show you a systematic method for mapping these questions.