sobassassin wrote:Completely agree with this. It's extremely unfair and adds randomness to the test. I agree no one can say they got a bad score because of this but I would say it Is worth at least one correct answer. It's especially harmful for reading comprehension because it's essential to have both pages open. A difference of one point is crucial on this test, and no amount of studying makes up for that. It may be unreasonable to say that an inconvenience like this was the cause of a bad score, or a significant under performance, but it is still completely inexcusable.
LSAC should be spending our fees on making test centers more equal rather than sending ridiculous robots from "caveon" testing services to make threats on Internet forums.
I lol'd really hard at the last part of this. Seriously.
On a much more serious note, this is a real issue and is one that absolutely needs to be addressed. I first sat for the October 2010 administration, and was placed in one of the auditoriums many people have been mentioning. Tiny, fold out desks where the *closed* test booklet fell over the sides of the desk, much less opening it or dealing with the answer sheet. Not to mention you've got proctors hounding you if your *answer sheet or test booklet is not completely flat on the desk* so you've got to start juggling your book and test sheet under each other and it just becomes a giant pain in the ass on ALL sections. LG games become more difficult to diagram, it becomes much harder to reference back to the passage on RC, and on LR I always answered and transferred per question...which is time suicide if you have to juggle the test booklet and answer sheet. This method of transferring really isn't a time issue when the desk size isn't absurdly small.
I just took the June administration, and I made sure that I was NOT going to take the test at ANY college (where it's normally offered, unfortunately.) Even though I took it at a university the first time, and it was offered closer at a community college (which are typically less likely to have auditorium seating) I went a little bit further and took it a hotel. Sure enough, we each had individual desks 6 feet long by two feet deep along with comfy chairs. Perfect. I'm expecting my score to jump substantially, and while it won't be all due to simply a seating change I do believe it significantly affected my performance in a positive way.
And for the moderator who moved this to the right forum and added a comment: while I agree that it might be more productive to spend the time studying because it IS something you can control, it also needs to be acknowledged that this IS a significant issue that should be looked into, even if it means spreading out test takers across more rooms at big centers.