The LSAT's wrong answers: the patterns behind all four decoys

Every LSAT question has one credited answer and four decoys, and the decoys are not filler. Each is written to be chosen by someone reasoning in a specific, predictable way — which means they fall into families, and the families repeat across the whole exam.

That is the most useful thing to know about this test. If you can name what a wrong answer was trying to do, you stop re-reading it, and being down to two stops being a coin flip.

The families that account for most decoys

• Out of scope — introduces something the argument never addressed. Sounds relevant, connects to nothing.
• Too strong — right idea, overstated. "All", "never", "must" where the passage supported "some" or "often".
• Too weak — right idea, so hedged it no longer does the job the question asked for.
• The 180 — states the reverse of what is supported. Catches fast readers, because it is on-topic and uses the passage's own vocabulary.
• Distortion — takes something the passage said and shifts it. The most common family, and the hardest to see, because most of the sentence is accurate.
• Half right, half wrong — the first clause is exactly correct and the second is not. Devastating when you stop reading at the comma.
• Premise restatement — repeats the evidence rather than doing what was asked. Feels familiar because you just read it.
• True but irrelevant — a genuinely true statement that does not bear on this argument.
• Illegal reversal — flips a conditional the wrong way. If A then B does not give you if B then A.
• Could be true, not must — plausible, consistent with everything, and not established. The signature trap on Inference questions.
• Wrong comparison — compares two things the passage never compared, or compares them on the wrong dimension.

There are more — Counsel's bank tags every wrong answer against 39 distinct families, including type-specific ones like describing a flaw the argument never committed, or misdescribing the method. But the eleven above cover the large majority of what you meet.

Naming beats re-reading

When you are down to two and going back and forth, you are usually comparing which one FEELS better. That is the state the decoys were designed to produce, and more re-reading rarely resolves it.

The exit is to ask a different question: what is this one trying to be? If you can say "that's the reverse" or "that's true but it doesn't support the conclusion", you have a reason rather than a preference, and the choice takes seconds instead of ninety.

How to actually learn them

Not by memorizing the list. By labeling your own misses. Every time you get one wrong, write which family the answer you picked belonged to — and after a few weeks a pattern appears that is specific to you.

Most people have two or three families that account for a disproportionate share of their misses. Knowing yours is worth more than knowing all eleven, because it turns "be careful" into a specific thing to check before you commit.