Reading Comprehension
The Standard Info
Like the logic games section, the reading comprehension section of the LSAT is comprised of four distinct passages, each with 5-6 questions. Each passage is around 60 lines long, divided into 3-5 paragraphs. You need no prior knowledge of any particular content area to perform well on this section, but you will see one passage from each of four categories:
| Category | Potential Topic |
|---|---|
| Law | legal history, international law, legal theory |
| Natural Sciences | biology, physics, chemistry, medicine |
| Social Sciences | history, political science, economics, sociology |
| Humanities | art, literature, film, music |
The Mastery Info
Many people believe that in order to improve their Reading Comp performance, they must read faster. This is true to an extent, because the time pressures of this section are quite challenging. However, the pursuit for speed leads many students down the road of impractical strategies. Some try not reading the passage at all, soon thereafter discovering how ineffective this approach is on the LSAT, however well it may have worked for the SAT. Some try skimming the passage to save time, choosing to spend the majority of their time wrestling with the answer choices. And others try reading the questions first, hoping that it’s possible to seek out the answers instead of understand the passage.
None of these approaches is ideal. Masters utilize a method that maximizes speed and accuracy, and they do this by familiarizing themselves with the structure of LSAT passages and the nature of the questions. The secret to success is not to simply push yourself to read faster, necessarily, but to learn what to read for. You see, LSAT passages, like legal cases, contain a bunch of details surrounding one central issue. Your task on this test, as it will be in law school and later, in your legal practice, is to see through the details to the underlying framework of the passage. Grasp the central issue at the heart of the passage (typically two sides to an argument), understand which details support which side, and identify which side the author of the passage stands on, and you’ve got it!
This is what we call The Scale, and your success on the LSAT Reading Comp will depend entirely on how well-formed your conception of the scale is. This is exactly what law students and lawyers must do when presented with the myriad details of any particular case. Using the Scale alone, skilled test-takers can correctly answer many questions. For more detail-oriented questions, the Scale is used as the overall framework that guides the search for answers within the passage, and sometimes, as tie-breaker for two seemingly equal choices.
In fact, it is the Scale combined with a thorough understanding of the kinds of questions the test will ask that allows a 170+ scorer to reach perfection on the Reading Comp section. These questions can be divided into three categories: Identification, Inference, and Synthesis.
Each of these question-types requires a distinct approach, though they build on each other, beginning with Identification. This type merely requires that you understand the meaning of a specific detail or piece of text. The second type goes one step further, asking you to identify the relevant text and then derive other truths from it. Finally, Synthesis questions ask you to identify text, make valid inferences from it, and then put multiple inferences together to arrive at a greater understanding of some sort.
Mastery of the Reading Comprehension section comes naturally to those lucky folks whose reading styles already match the kind needed for LSAT reading. For the rest of us, improvement on this section comes with thorough (often slow) practice, beginning with understanding the Scale inherent to LSAT passages, and the tendencies of the questions.
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