Do the adcomms see your answer choices for each question? Forum

[JasonR]

Or do they just see your overall score? Or your score for each section? I had to guess at the end of a couple of sections, and I'm wondering if the adcomms will just discount any points gained from obvious guesses (a string of 5 B's, for example). Thanks.

[BaiAilian2013]

No, they will not do that. Aside from many other considerations, it's not really their place to second-guess how LSAC scores the test.

[SandyC877]

are you serious? you're lucky if adcoms even read through your personal statement without skimming.

[ConsideringLawSchool]

Also, do they see your raw score?

[GeePee]

Adcomms will not care one bit if you got a -14 170 or a -11 170 or a -8 170. All they care about from the LSAT is that number.

[driveshaft]

It's my understanding that they could, but don't.

[rv11]

Or do they just see your overall score? Or your score for each section? I had to guess at the end of a couple of sections, and I'm wondering if the adcomms will just discount any points gained from obvious guesses (a string of 5 B's, for example). Thanks.

If this were the case then the LSAT might as well be an untimed test, as people would just forgo finishing the sections in order to keep a high accuracy percentage.

[ConsideringLawSchool]

Or do they just see your overall score? Or your score for each section? I had to guess at the end of a couple of sections, and I'm wondering if the adcomms will just discount any points gained from obvious guesses (a string of 5 B's, for example). Thanks.

Also, why would they discount guessing? Guessing just shows you did not time yourself well.

[JasonR]

Or do they just see your overall score? Or your score for each section? I had to guess at the end of a couple of sections, and I'm wondering if the adcomms will just discount any points gained from obvious guesses (a string of 5 B's, for example). Thanks.

Also, why would they discount guessing? Guessing just shows you did not time yourself well.

I'm not clear on what you're saying, I guess. I'm saying that I'm worried that the adcomms could choose to discount the value of points gained by guessing if it were reasonably obvious that they were gained by guessing.

Basically I'm just concerned that they might decide that my 170 counts more like a 166 if they notice I bubbled in two strings of four or five answers with the same letter (and got pretty lucky with my guesses). If any of them take the time to concern themselves with which questions I got wrong, that is.

Just being paranoid, I'm sure.

[bblobber]

Or do they just see your overall score? Or your score for each section? I had to guess at the end of a couple of sections, and I'm wondering if the adcomms will just discount any points gained from obvious guesses (a string of 5 B's, for example). Thanks.

Also, why would they discount guessing? Guessing just shows you did not time yourself well.

I'm not clear on what you're saying, I guess. I'm saying that I'm worried that the adcomms could choose to discount the value of points gained by guessing if it were reasonably obvious that they were gained by guessing.

Basically I'm just concerned that they might decide that my 170 counts more like a 166 if they notice I bubbled in two strings of four or five answers with the same letter (and got pretty lucky with my guesses). If any of them take the time to concern themselves with which questions I got wrong, that is.

Just being paranoid, I'm sure.

If you got a 170 and guessed on 10 questions, you'd actually have a better accuracy score (for the questions you didn't guess on) than somebody who got a 170 and didn't guess at all but just answered 14 questions wrongly. IMO this should balance out the fact that you got a few unearned points from guessing. Let's look at the numbers here. Assuming we're talking about the December test, 170 was -14. So you got 14 wrong and guessed on 10. Assuming your guessed answers were right with a probability of 1/5, you got 2 of the 10 guessed questions right. So of your 14 wrong, 8 were on the guessed questions -- you only missed 6 questions out of the 91 that you answered without guessing. So the takeaway here is that you were slower than a 170 scorer who didn't guess on any questions, but you were substantially more accurate, as they outright missed 14 out of 101 = 13.8% wrong while you outright missed 6 out of 91 = 6.5% wrong. If I were an adcomm, I think I'd rather have you than the guy who completed all the questions but missed 14.

This all brings up the question of what is "guessing" anyway? At its simplest, it's choosing an answer without knowing for certain that it's the right answer. What about the dude who completed all of the sections 100% but still missed 14 for a 170? How many of those 14 questions would you say that he ended up "guessing" on, more-or-less? Maybe he eliminated one or more choices, but nobody can tell that -- the test booklets are not available to anyone. He ended up getting the questions wrong anyway. In the final analysis, anyone who ended up with a -14 must have "guessed" on an average of 17.5 questions (randomly getting 3.5 of those right, on average) because they obviously didn't know the right answer for those questions.

Furthermore, let's take a look at what you seem to be getting at with your latest reply. You say you got lucky in your choices. Looking at one section of the December test, for example, 3 of the last 4 questions had the correct answer "D". (Supposedly the LSAC loves to do this just to freak people out and make them second-guess. Who knows.) Let's take this as our example if we're the hypothetical adcomm carefully looking at your actual response sheet. Say you bubbled in the last 4 questions of this section with "D", so you got 3 right and 1 wrong. Again, since we don't have the test booklet, we cannot tell your intentions and whether you guessed or not. So if we look and see 4 "D's" in a row -- 3 of which are correct -- what are we to take away from that? Ok, so maybe it looks like you guessed. But it's equally likely that you completed the section, got the 3 correct and just missed the 4th one -- or maybe you skipped one of the questions, worked out the 3 right "D" answers and bubbled them in; then, since time was running out, and knowing the LSAC's love of strings of the same answer, you just guessed "D" on the remaining question. So you only guessed on 1 but worked out the right answer for 3. Is there any way for somebody looking at your IRR to tell the difference between this scenario and the one that has you simply guessing for all 4 questions?

The point that I'm trying to make with this little scenario is that it is impossible to discern intent from just the raw answers, assuming you got a majority of them right. If you got the answer right on your answer sheet, then there's no way to tell whether you simply guessed right or actually worked out the question and got the right answer. Maybe you skipped some intervening questions and bubbled those in later. Nobody can know one way or the other without seeing your test booklet.... which I'm pretty sure they cannot.

Now, if you guessed 5 "E"'s in a row and got NONE of them right, then that's pretty obvious that you guessed.... but it didn't affect your score, so they wouldn't hold it against you anyway.