All reports in LSAC’s Research Library are available upon request. Executive summaries are available below for the latest LSAT Technical Reports and other research published within the last 10 years.
Current Research:
When a test taker has prior knowledge about an administered test question (item), then this event is called item preknowledge, the test taker is called aberrant, and the item is called compromised. Item preknowledge negatively affects the corresponding testing program and its test score users (universities, companies, government organizations) because the scores produced for aberrant test takers will be invalid. The performance of eight statistics for detection of item preknowledge (five existing, two modified, and one new) was studied via computer simulations.
This study was conducted to evaluate the predictive validity of each of the current Law School Admission Test (LSAT) item types as well as the interrelationships among them. The current LSAT consists of three item types: Analytical Reasoning (AR), Logical Reasoning (LR), and Reading Comprehension (RC). Even though the correlation of overall LSAT scaled score with first-year average (FYA) in law school is examined on a regular basis at the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), the separate correlations for each of these three item types have only rarely been studied.