Stats on when to retake?

[mfrank]

Just wondering if you've analyzed the level of difficulty of Feb vs. June vs. Oct vs. Dec exams – are certain administrations of the test harder, on average, than others (e.g., as measured by the curve, or the number of questions on given exams that less than 50% of test takers got correct, or other criteria)? Also, are harder games, RC, or LR sections typically on certain dates than others?

Relatedly, since tests are scored by percentile ranking, is there any sense of which exam dates attract the best test takers – e.g., most people taking in December are retaking, so they may have more experience with the LSAT than June test takers, though of course they are retaking because they didn’t do as well as they wanted the first time. Do you know if LSAC has ever sought to assess this, or do they just assume that distributions of test taker abilities are the same on all test dates?

Thanks.

[Jon Denning]

Thanks for the question! This one comes up a lot actually...so much so that I wrote a blog article about it at http://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/bid/237 ... he-hardest . Take a look; I think you'll find it addresses most of your questions.

To sum up: no test is consistently "harder" (or easier) than any other, as any very slight difference in overall test taker performance gets offset by the conversion scale. Similarly, there doesn't seem to be any "elite" test, where the test taking population is of an overall higher skill level (the test makers assume each exam will be attempted by roughly the same group of students, and, again, counter any discrepancy in overall performance by adjusting the scale).

Thanks!

JD