Goodbye Pencil, Hello Stylus. The LSAT Is Officially Digital
The Law School Admission Council has deemed its first digital LSAT a success, despite a few hiccups caused by low tablet batteries and network connection woes.
July 16, 2019 at 03:09 PM
6 minute read
The era of the digital LSAT has arrived.
About 24,000 people nationwide took the Law School Admission Test on Monday—half of them on paper and half on tablets. It was the first large-scale rollout of the updated exam and the last time the paper-and-pencil test will be offered. The LSAT will be fully digital by the next time it's administered in September.
The introduction of the new format was “very successful,” according to the Law School Admission Council, which has been focused on digitizing the 71-year-old test since 2012. (It has been contemplating the change for more than 20 years.)
“I was delighted that we were able to come up with this methodology. It's an industry-leading one,” said council president Kellye Testy. “And of course I was delighted to see that it worked so well.”
At the 453 test sites Monday, 250 offered the test entirely on paper while 203 gave the digital version. Test takers were not told beforehand which version they would get, though July's cohort was given a one-time offer: They would have the option to cancel their score after seeing it and retake the test at no cost until April 2020. That option was meant to encourage people sign up for the July test and give them the option to stop schools from seeing LSAT scores test takers earned under a format they weren't expecting. The council usually requires takers to cancel their score before they see it.
But those who opted to take the July test will have to wait six weeks to see their score—about three weeks longer than is typical.
The LSAT is the last of the standardized graduate-level admissions tests to be offered digitally. The GRE, which has recently emerged as competition for the LSAT, was offered via computer in 2007.
Dani Silva, a recent graduate of the University of California, Davis said she had been hoping to see the paper version of the exam when she entered the test center at the University of Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. Instead, she found the room set up with black Microsoft tablets.
“I had prepped for the written version,” said Silva, who studied on her own rather than enroll in a formal prep course. “One of the biggest differences is that you can't write notes in the margins when you do the reading comprehension section. As an English major, I love writing annotations, so that was a big change for me. I just prefer writing in pencil, but it wasn't that big of a deal.”
The tablet version of the exam allows users to highlight text in different colors and adjust the size of the text and brightness of the screen. Test takers are given a blank booklet to use a scrap paper, but Silva said switching between the pencil for the scratch paper and the stylus for the tablet was cumbersome.
The digital LSAT rollout was not without hiccups. “There's nothing in the world of technology that ever works perfectly, but, boy, we were close,” Testy said.
A test site in Central Florida had to cancel the exam after administrators turned on the tablets too early and they didn't have the required battery life to begin the exam. (The council requires a certain battery threshold to ensure the tablets don't run out of power before the end of the exam.) In Tampa, Florida, another test site had to cancel when the tablets would not stay connected to the local area network controlling the exam. Both exams will be rescheduled, as will a paper test center in Calgary, Canada, that experienced issues with an ongoing fire alarm.
There were no major difficulties in Sacramento, California, according to administrator Annemarie Meyer, who is a senior admissions counselor at McGeorge. One tablet froze partway through the exam, and she was able to quickly switch it out with a spare. Because the time of the exam is tracked digitally, the affected test taker didn't lose any time once the computer stopped working.
Emma James, a current UC Davis student, said she was also hoping for the paper test. But she had prepared for the possibility that it would be the digital version at the urging of instructors in her Kaplan test prep class.
She found it quicker to tap her answer instead of filling in a bubble, and she liked the ability to cross out answers on the tablet version. The digital version also made it easy to track the remaining time in each of the five exam sections, she said. She also appreciated the warning that popped up on the screen when there were five minutes remaining in each section. “I did like the timer in the right-hand corner,” she said. “That was so nice.”
Evan Lovell said he was pleased to find out that McGeorge was a digital test site. The current University of California at Los Angeles undergrad said he already plans to retake the LSAT in September and that having one digital LSAT under his belt should be an advantage. Plus, he wouldn't have to worry about bubbling mistakes.
“I bubble in darkly and I tend to make a lot of last-minute changes,” he said of paper tests. “Even when you erase a bubble there's a small chance it will misread it.”
Meyer, who has years of experience proctoring the paper exam, said she was a bit anxious Monday morning in the run up to overseeing her first digital exam, despite hours of training. But as the test wore on, she saw distinct benefits. For one thing, she didn't need to roam the test center looking for cheating. Each test section disappears once time has ended—eliminating the chance to bubble in answers after time has ended or return to previous sections. (Meyer said she would typically catch one or two cheaters a year on the paper exam.) Instead of walking around the room, LSAT administrators can now monitor each test taker from a central computer.
Matt Riley, chief executive officer Blueprint Test Preparation, said that while the introduction of the digital LSAT caused some initial confusion and anxiety, the rollout has been relatively smooth. He credited the council with providing test takers with a lot of information about the transition over the past six months.
“We have been very surprised by the student reaction this year,” he said. “We expected a huge number of students to take the June exam out of anxiety relating to the new digital format—to beat the test change. But test takers in June were down significantly, and registrations for July are up nearly 100% from last year.”
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