The Law School Admission Council announced in October that the logic games section will be removed from the Law School Admission Test, starting in August 2024.
The non-profit organizaition provides the LSAT to all accredited law schools and offers products and services to help candidates and schools through the law school admission process.
The change comes after the organization faced a lawsuit in 2019 where two visually impaired test-takers claimed they were disadvantaged in the logic games section because they could not draw diagrams to solve the questions, said Mark Brown the associate director of pre-professional advising
The council was then given four years in the settlement to fix the issues surrounding the logic games section. Instead, the organization decided to remove it and replace it with a second logical reasoning section, which focuses more on text analysis rather than problem solving.
But the changes coming to the LSAT have been received with mixed feelings.
Brown has aided students on the pre-law track since 2008.
Removing the logical games section helps make the test more inclusive to those with disabilities, he said.
"The logic game section really requires you to be able to use a writing utensil to map things out in such a way that people who were blind couldn't do it," Brown said. "It's good, positive, that it's gone, so it's no longer affecting those people."
But the logic games section was also very important to the LSAT, he said.
"The logic games were what made the LSAT a good predictor for how somebody was going to do during their first year of law school,” Brown said.
Logical reasoning seems easier than logic games at first, because it requires less visual mapping to get to the answer, said Trinity Barata, a third-year environmental studies student and the co-vice president of Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity.
Logic games, however, can be easily practiced and improved upon, while that is not as easy with logical reasoning, she said.
Logical reasoning requires a completely different thought process, making it the one people historically scored the lowest on, Barata said.
Because of this, she said she believes test scores will be lower with the two logical reasoning sections.
“You’re teaching yourself something entirely new," Barata said.
But the Law School Admission Council has done its own testing with the new exam and found that the difference in scores was extremely small, Brown said.
"LSAC has done a number of — and when I say 'a number,' I mean multiple, multiple thousands of — tests with the new exam," Brown said. "What they found is that the score on those new exams was different by less than a hundredth of a point."
Ava Baber, a third-year criminal justice and religious studies student and the treasurer of Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity, said she does not want to see the logic games section leave the LSAT .
The logic games section, she said, is the easiest, because it is the one section you can learn, and it is a lot less reading compared to the rest of the test.
“I get excited whenever I get to do that section just because of how terrible the rest of it is,” Baber said.
Barata said she is worried about how the test change in August will affect people's performance. She said that while she believes the change is an overall positive, it will make the transition for students taking the LSAT now harder due to the changes being implemented in the middle of a standard testing cycle.
Ella Uhde, a third-year criminal justice student and the secretary of Phi Alpha Delta Pre-law Fraternity, said she is worried about how law schools will compare test scores from those who took the test before the changes happened to those who took it after.
"You're (going to) have an advantage and the other students are going to have a disadvantage for not doing that, especially because it is something new," Uhde said.
The logic games section can be an easy way to get points, Barata said. Because of this, students who want to take the LSAT soon are trying to get it done before August due of the changes, she said.
"I think having two sections of that is going to be lower scores on average," Barata said. "But also that's not necessarily going to put people at a disadvantage because everybody's scoring lower."
Brown said he won't be making any changes to his advising process regarding the LSAT.
"It won't change my advice on how to take the LSAT in general," Brown said. "You still have to take it. And it's not going to affect many people other than people who are applying to law school early next year, or in the next cycle."