Should I expect a marked increase in the overall difficulty of the upcoming 2022 LSATs?

[frozenopera]

The last LSAT that I took was a Flex test. I know that there has been a format change, but have also heard that there has been a drop in high scores. Does this mean that the test has become more difficult?

Should I expect a marked increase in the overall difficulty of the upcoming 2022 LSATs?

What are the ways in which the upcoming 2022 LSATs, with the new format, will be different from the Flex tests?

What kind of scoring curves (i.e., minus how many points for a 170) can be expect on the upcoming 2022 LSATs?

Thank you!

[Jon Denning]

Great questions, frozenopera! And I'm happy to report that I think you'll like the answers

There has been a slight tapering off of scores at the highest levels (170+) compared to the numbers we were seeing last cycle, but this seems due almost entirely to the addition of a fourth, experimental section rather than to any increase in actual test difficulty. I also think that there was a surge in highly-qualified applicants motivated to pursue law school in the early days of the pandemic (the 2020 group responsible for the Flex high-score bubble) that has dissipated a fair amount as those students have cleared out and become 1Ls.

In fact, the continued reuse of real LSATs from 2016-2020 for the current tests—like the reuse of February 2020 for this week's January LSAT, and February 2017 for this week's international tests—confirms that not only is the test not getting harder, it's not even changing: people testing the past several days received the exact same content as those testing pre-Flex in early 2020 (or early 2017 in the case of overseas attendees).

So no, you shouldn't expect any increase in overall difficulty, nor should you expect any notable changes in content and points of conceptual emphasis. And I'm confident that will remain the case for the rest of 2022, and likely beyond. No harder questions or passages or games, no tighter scaling, nothing genuinely "new" or unique...just the same LSAT as ever, with the newly-adjusted format of three scored sections plus one experimental.