Are you game for law school?

KNOW YOUR EXAM

The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) is an examination conducted in the United States, Canada (common law programmes only) and Australia and is administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) for prospective law school candidates. It is designed to assess logical and verbal reasoning skills and is a required exam for all American Bar Association approved law schools. LSAC is a nonprofit corporation, founded in 1947, whose members are more than 200 law schools in the United States, Canada and Australia. It was founded to coordinate, facilitate and enhance the law school admission process. LSAC has been helping law schools in several countries evaluate the critical-thinking skills of their applicants for more than 60 years and is best known for administering the LSAT.

The test has existed in some form since 1948. Since then, it has evolved significantly, with the current version starting in 1991. The exam has a total of six sections consisting of four scored sections, an unscored experimental section, and an unscored writing section. Raw scores are converted to a scaled score ranging from 120 to 180, with a median score at about 151.

LSAT-India is a standardised test, specially created for admissions to law schools in India by LSAC, administered by Pearson VUE, and adopted as an admissions criterion by multiple law colleges across India. It measures skills that are considered essential for success in law school. 

More than 25 law colleges have adopted LSAT-India 2011 as their criterion for admissions, as against 4 colleges in 2010. Prestigious institutions like, IIT Kharagpur — Law School, Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) — Sonipat, UPES — Dehradun, KLE Society’s Law College —Bangalore, JSS Law College —Mysore, etc. have signed up for acceptance of LSAT-India 2011 scores for admissions to their 2011 batches.

Law career aspirants will benefit from taking the LSAT-India, as it gives them a single exam for admission to multiple law colleges across the country. (The list of participating colleges is available under the following link http://www.pearsonvueindia.com/lsatindia/participating_colleges.html)

It is a pencil and paper based, single sitting exam, to be delivered on a single day.
Online registration for the 2011 exam is on until April 18 and DD based registration until April 11. The fee is Rs 3,500. One can take the test at any of the following centres: Chandigarh, Dehradun, Delhi, Jaipur, Lucknow, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Mumbai, Pune, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, Raipur and Ranchi.

Anyone can take LSAT-India, however, a student needs to apply to each of the participating colleges independently, hence, one should check ones eligibility for that particular institution. Since it tests critical thinking skills (no subject knowledge or GK), rote cramming is not the key to succeed in this examination. It is a 2-hour 35 minutes test, including a 15 minutes break after 70 minutes.  It has four sections  —  two sections contain logical reasoning questions; one section contains analytical reasoning questions; and one section contains reading comprehension questions.

LSAT-India aims to bring standardised, law entrance testing, matching the global benchmarks to the Indian law entrance exam space.  As an increasing number of Indian law schools adopt the test as their primary admission instrument, we expect the availability of testing sites to expand. 

(The writer is President, LSAC)