Kellye Testy nearly forgot about the Law School Admission Test entirely.

It was 1987, and Testy, who leads the organization that designed and administers the LSAT, had just bought her first home, located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains outside of Sacramento.

The house was a fixer-upper and Testy and some friends worked into the wee hours of the night, stripping dated wallpaper from the kitchen. But all day long, she had a nagging feeling that she was forgetting something. Around 2 a.m., a light bulb went off in her head.

“It dawns on me that the next morning, I'm supposed to take the LSAT in Sacramento at 8 a.m.,” Testy recalled more than three decades later. “Oops.”

She had to make a quick decision: Should she try to get some rest or do a last-minute cram session? She opted for a short nap then looked over the instructional booklet for the exam before hopping into her car for the 45-minute drive to the testing site. She arrived in the nick of time.

Aspiring lawyers have been running the LSAT gauntlet since 1948, when the exam was developed to help standardize the way law students are admitted. And for the past 71 years, the test has been delivered via paper and pencil. Not for long.

The final all-paper LSAT is being administered across the country on June 3. The Law School Admission Council announced last summer that it would move toward an all-digital version of the test, making it the final graduate-level entrance exam to move to computers. (The GRE—a recent competitor to the LSAT—has been delivered via computer for years.) The next administration of the LSAT, on July 15, will be a hybrid. Half of the test sites will use the paper version, half will be digital. (Takers won't know ahead of time which version they will get.) By September, all testing will take place on tablet computers. The LSAT is also in the midst of its expansion from four tests a year to 10.

To mark the occasion, we asked some legal educators for their LSAT recollections. A few, like Testy, had vivid memories of their testing experiences. But for many others, the exam left little impression beyond the agony of studying—or their devil-may-care attitude toward test prep.

Though Testy can recount the night before her LSAT in detail, she has long forgotten what score she achieved. All she knows is that it was good enough to earn herself a spot at Indiana University Maurer School of Law-Bloomington—the only campus to which she applied.

“It's not what you'd necessarily expect from the person who is now the head of the [Law School Admission Council],” said Testy, who noted that as a first-generation college student, she didn't have a clear understanding of the path into law school or the stakes of the exam.

Trevor Morrison, dean at New York University School of Law, can't recall much about taking the LSAT except for one unfortunate mishap.

“I spilled an entire thermos of coffee on myself about three minutes before the LSAT began,” he said. “Otherwise I have no memory of it!”

Similarly, University of Pennsylvania law dean Ted Ruger doesn't remember much of the exam itself. But the run-up to the LSAT has stuck with him.

“I do remember preparing for it, with phone book-sized books of past practice tests filled with logic questions involving fictional dinner tables where someone was wearing a red hat and sitting to the left of the person having fish, who was across from the dentist, and next to someone named Beatrice,” he said. “That certainly comes in handy now when I look at seating charts for alumni banquets and faculty dinners.”

Michael Hunter Schwartz, dean at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law, is a little embarrassed about his cavalier attitude toward the LSAT in his younger days.

“I didn't grasp the significance of the whole thing,” he said. “I figured I'd do fine because I always did fine on standardized tests. I was happily oblivious.”

For Dave Killoran, who runs PowerScore Test Preparation, the move to the digital LSAT is a mixed bag. He says he won't miss the “terribly thin and cheap paper that the test was printed on,” nor the “arbitrary timing” of test proctors. But the inability to write directly on the exam will hurt some test takers, he said. (Going forward, LSAT takers will enter their answers into a tablet using a stylus, and the computers centralize the timing. Once the time for a given section ends, the exam content disappears from the tablet.)

The digital exam reduces the opportunity for cheating and proctor errors, said Jeff Thomas, director of pre-law programs at Kaplan Test Prep. And takers will no longer have to worry about bubbling in their answers incorrectly. But moving to tablets won't eliminate the environmental stressors that often hang up test takers. He's heard stories of marching bands playing outside of testing rooms (this tends to come up in the fall, when LSAT examinations coincide with campus homecoming festivities), and other logistical problems at venues.

And then there are the issues that are impossible to prepare for.

“I had one student last administration who walked in and saw his ex-girlfriend taking the test,” Thomas said. “They hadn't spoken since the breakup and she was three seats away, and he was freaked out. He ended up canceling his score because they were so freaked out by it. That kind of thing won't go away with the digital exam.”