dallasphi wrote:From the article that was posted:
“There’s all kinds of stuff on the blogs after the test trying to guess which stuff will show up in the future; there’s a whole cottage industry,” said Wendy Margolis, a spokeswoman for the council.
Apparently they are primarily concerned with people discussing the specific content of the experimental sections. As for the "postmortem" discussion I don't see how the guy who posted his setup could possibly be sacrificing the integrity of the test, that question is just going to be sold to the next round of test takers when they are studying anyways. But with the experimental section I could see how publishing exactly what they are playing around with and looking at for the future when its fresh in the minds of the posters could disturb them as they are still viable in some form. Apparently they must really value those sections heard a lot of people were shocked to find an experimental after the break today.
There is more to it than that. Many people are administered the same test form in different time zones as well as on different days in several countries.
See:
http://www.lsac.org/JD/LSAT/test-dates-deadlines.asp and look at the October 2011 administration dates for the various international regions.
While internationally administered tests are non-disclosed, sometimes the same test form as US/Canada test takers is administered, sometimes and/or in some locations it is not. If somebody administered the same test many hours later or even a day or two later has read student assessments of the test, it gives them an unfair advantage that can help boost their score several or more points.
It actually hurts your admission chances when you discuss even basic details of the test (which game was the hardest, which LG section is scored, etc.) online right after it is administered since other people you are competing with for admission can benefit from it by achieving a higher score than they would have without the information.
emkay625 wrote:It is pretty surprising to me how similar the experimentals are to the ones used on the actual test. I will not say which ones, but I took the test originally a while ago and during some of the later PTs found the same section that was my experiemental, nearly identical with a few changes.
That's not surprising at all. Every scored section was once administered in exact or almost exact form as an experimental section. It's what they call a pre-operational experimental section, pre-tested to see how it performs as a full section. Other experimental sections are just a bunch of problems thrown together and are designed to get initial difficulty/performance ratings about each question individually, independent from the difficulty of the section as a whole. Every question that appears in a scored section has previously appeared in an experimental section at least twice.
. Gonna be a loooong 3 weeks.
