LSAT Reading Comprehension

Class Location: The Internet.

Description: This course is designed to help students prepare for the Reading Comprehension section of the LSAT.

Objective: Score well on the Reading Comprehension test.

The LSAT reading comprehension section is designed to test your critical reading and analytical thinking abilities—skills you will need to succeed in law school. It consists of one 35-minute section with all multiple-choice questions. This section has continued to get longer over the past decade or so and now contains about 26 to 28 questions. The reading comprehension section includes four passages, each about 450 words long. You then must answer between five and eight questions on each passage.

Each of the four passages has a different topic, usually with an academic tone. The passage topics include the physical sciences, arts and humanities, social sciences, law, ethics, and philosophy. The passages purposely contain more information than you can process and retain in one reading, so you’ll have to repeatedly refer back to them to answer the questions. It’s a good idea as you read to jot down notes in the margin regarding main ideas and connections between different concepts in the text.

The reading comprehension questions test your ability to accurately read and understand long, complex text and draw insightful inferences from it. You will need to understand what the passage states explicitly, what it infers, and the implications of both. The primary focus of the questions requires you to determine the main idea, intent, tone, attitude, and the author’s writing strategy. You will need to read the passages thoroughly to answer the questions, which require you to determine the central idea of the passage; uncover relationships among different parts of the text; and make logical inferences, generalizations, and comparisons from the information provided in the passage. You will need to make inferences and identify connections and relationships between different parts of the text, so don’t rely solely on your memory from one reading. You should refer back to the passage often as you answer the questions.