The LSAT diagnostic test: taking it before you are ready is the point

Almost everyone puts this off, and the reason is honest enough: nobody wants to see the number before they have done any work. But a diagnostic taken after two months of study is not a diagnostic, it is a progress check, and you have lost the only chance to know where you started.

How to take one so it counts

• Use a real past test. LSAC gives them away free, in the actual interface, so there is no reason to use an imitation.
• Full length, real timing, no pauses. A diagnostic taken in pieces across an evening measures something you will never be asked to do.
• Do not study first. Not even a video about the question types. The value is entirely in it being uncontaminated.
• Do not look anything up mid-test, and answer every question — there is no penalty for a wrong answer, so a blank is a point you gave away for nothing.

What the number is and is not

So a diagnostic is one noisy reading of an untrained version of you. It is a starting coordinate, not a ceiling and not a prediction. People routinely finish far from where they began, and people also finish near it — which is exactly why nobody can tell you in advance which you will be.

Read these four things, not just the score

• How many questions you never reached. Unseen questions and missed questions are completely different problems, and this is the fastest way to tell which you have.
• The split between the sections. A large gap between Logical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension tells you where the runway needs to go.
• Which question families the misses cluster in. Ten scattered misses and ten misses in one family need different months.
• Where in the section the misses fall. Bunched at the end is a pacing problem; spread evenly is a content problem.

The one thing not to do with it

Do not use it to decide whether you are the kind of person who can do this. It measures an untrained skill, and the whole premise of studying is that the skill is trainable. A low diagnostic is information about a starting point and nothing else — which is the same thing it is for the people who end up scoring well.