Score to aim for

[falconbridge]

Hello,

I recognize that the following question has likely been posed a countless number of times before, yet still I am looking for a concrete answer to it: what is considered a "good" score on reading comprehension? I.e., what score should I be striving to achieve?

Yes, I recognize everyone should strive for a perfect score; yes, I recognize there are differing conceptions of “good;” yes, I recognize a person's target score is relative to their starting point, their goals, their scores in the other sections, etc; however, all of this aside, what score - across the board/relevant to the VAST majority of test takers - is considered “good”/respectable/commendable? For instance, is any score above 20 considered “good?” Is anything below 20 considered “poor/weak?”

In essence, I am looking for a figure - one concrete number - regardless of how inaccurate or how unhelpful it may be by which I can get the most general understanding of what a “good” RC score is.

Kind regards,

Falcon

[Adam Tyson]

Nobody can give you such a concrete answer, Falcon, because it is all relative. What is good for Cooley Law is different than what is good for an application to Harvard, and what is good for me may not be what is good for you. The very nature of "good" is completely subjective (and that is tested in some Flaw in the Reasoning questions on the test - beware of the Relativity Flaws!).

That said, I will give you some numbers that are, for the most part, arbitrary.

Many people would consider a 150 to be a good score. It puts you around the 50th percentile, and is sufficient to get into a lot of fine law schools. That score can mean missing about 55 questions on the scored sections of a normal LSAT, so if your wrong answers are spread out evenly throughout the four sections, a "good" RC score would be about 14 correct answers.

Others, shooting for something a bit higher, would say a 160 is good (and the median LSAT at your target school is what you should think of as good, btw). That score might mean around 28 wrong answers, so using the same assumption about evenly spreading out the wrong answers, that means around 20 correct answers in RC, give or take.

And then there are those who would say that anything below a 170 is not good. Those are the alphas, the seriously ambitious students, the ones shooting for a T14 law school. For that score, you can usually only afford to miss about 11 questions total, and that would mean a RC score of about 24 correct answers.

So, if you want one concrete number, I will split the uprights and say that 20 correct answers in an RC section is a good performance for that section. (But for anyone else reading this thread, don't let that discourage you if you have a ways to go to get there!)

I hope that helps!