Did the August 2026 LSAT Break？ LSAC Gets to Decide.

The Law School Admission Council promised in writing twice that the new LSAT interface would show you which question numbers belong to which reading comprehension passage. But then, for the August LSAT, the first time that software ever ran on a live LSAT, test takers are reporting those markers weren't there. Now, back on June 18th, LSAC published a post on its own website. The first line reads, and I'm quoting, Finalized, that was their word. Then, the post lists what's in the finished interface, and there it is, separators in the question bar marking where each reading comprehension passage starts and stops. And then, seven weeks later, that platform ran on the first live LSAT. Now, of course, software always has bugs. That's not the part that should bother you. But there is one sentence buried in LSAC's complaint policy that decides whether LSAC pays for LSAC's policy, mistake, or you do. Now, I'm going to read it out loud, word for word, and I want you listening for who does the deciding. Now, there is also a second policy sitting on LSAC's site that opens in two days and closes on August 24th. It is the one piece of this that is still in your hands, and almost nobody who tested in August is using it. That one I'm going to save for the end, and it's the part you can actually act on. Now, I've been teaching the LSAT since 2005. I've watched LSAC roll out countless changes before, but this one's a little bit different, and I'm going to show you why. Now, back in February, LSAC announced it was moving the LSAT onto a new test delivery platform with new software, a new look, and a lot more security. The reason they gave was test security due to cheating, which was a real problem, of course. Materials got out, unreleased LSACs were leaked, so I'm not going to pretend LSAC had no reason for changing things. Then they put out a preview of the new interface in LawHub in March so students could practice on it. Then a few months later, on May 19th, they published an update listing the improvement they've made after the March feedback. And one of those improvements, I'm quoting here, the question bar will also have separators to show the question numbers associated with each of the reading comprehension passages. Then June 18th, they made another post with the word finalized with the line separators line again, sitting on top of the list of what the finished product does. Now, if you've never sat through a timed reading comp section, this might not sound like a big deal. Basically, some lines are missing from the question bar at the bottom of the screen. But those lines have a real benefit because reading comp gives you four passages and roughly 27 questions in 35 minutes. The questions aren't split evenly across the passage. One passage might carry five questions, one might have eight. Same reading comp passage length, but a very different payoff. And so one of the first real decisions a lot of people make in that section is knowing which passage to attack first. If you know that you're tight on time and you might not finish the section, you start with the bigger passage first and with more questions. If you're getting eight raw score points for one passage, that beats getting five points for another passage. It's simple math. And so a lot of people took the Argus LSAT planning to do exactly that. But if you take the separators away, you can't see the question counts per passage. Then there's also the flagging function where you mark a question to come back to later. So let's say it's minute 31 out of 35 and you're jumping back to question number 14. Without the separators, you don't know which passage question 14 belonged to. So you're guessing or you're scrolling back through the text you already read, trying to get your bearings while the time's running. Let's say that costs you 20 seconds multiplied by four or five times across this section. That becomes a minute and a half out of a 35-minute section. And you're spending it at the worst possible moment when you're already behind and you're feeling a bit rattled. Then let's say there's the cost of the unfamiliarity, the surprise. You practiced on one interface. You got a different thing on test day, on the highest stakes warning of your entire law school application cycle. It's costing you a few minutes while you figure out what you're looking at. Now LSAC has a page called LSAC Test Day Complaints and Feedback. It describes two different things you can file. Feedback, which helps them approve the test and does nothing for you at all. Or you can file an official complaint, which forces a response. To file the official complaint, and I'm reading straight off the page here, you've got to submit it through JD Services within two calendar days after the date of your applicable test. Two calendar days. So let's say you walk out of the test fraud. You genuinely don't know whether the strange thing you saw was a glitch or just what the new test looks like now because it's new for everybody. This was the first LSAC administration ever run on this platform. So you have no baseline. So let's say you go home, maybe you sleep on it. Then a couple of days later, you finally look at a forum and you see that 40 other people have the exact same experience. And you're realizing this three or four days later. Now, I'm already recording this after every window from the August administration has closed. And I don't know how many people had this experience. All I know is anecdotes from students who reached out to me. LSAC is the only organization that really has the actual number. And as of today, I can't find a single post on LSAC's side or their social media acknowledging that anything went wrong on the August LSAC. They've posted plenty about the interface itself in February, March, May, and June. All detailed, all saying they're taking everyone's feedback into account. But the day it ran live for test takers and had issues, I've got nothing from that. Now, of course, the reading comprehension problem got the most attention because it hit the most people. But reports from the testing week were not limited just to the reading comp issues. Because beginning with the August LSAC, almost everybody tests in person at a prometric testing center. If you want to take it remotely, that is an exception you have to qualify for. You get it if you get a disability accommodation that requires remote testing. If you're active duty military stationed abroad, if you're more than 180 miles or a three-hour drive from a center with open capacity, or if your center is closed for weather, if you're given that exception, LSAC now requires you to run your smartphone as a second camera pointed at yourself for the entire testing session. That is their second camera policy starting with the August LSAC. Now, I understand the security thinking here. And I also know what happens when you make a high-stakes test reliant on two devices instead of just one. For a lot of test takers, their phones would die mid-section and run out of battery because you're running a camera for over two and a half hours. Or if your phone falls over in the middle of the test, which of course could happen, I could totally see that. If the proctor has to get involved, you have to pause your test, then you're negotiating with their test support in the middle of the LSAC. So keep in mind that the people who got these exceptions to take it remotely are people with disability accommodations and people who live in many cases remotely with the shaky internet. They're in rural locations. And so they're the people with the least margin for error who have the most technology to figure out themselves. Now, a lot of people who had approved stop-start-break accommodations came back from a break to find out that their answer choice eliminations were wiped completely. So they had to redo work they had already finished while the clock was ticking. For a lot of people, the test restarted on its own around the 10-minute intermission before they even sat back down. A lot of people who went to report a problem found the reporting system itself had crashed. And I'm laughing here because this is so just absurdly awful. It's like a comedy of errors here. I think this is terrible. And I hope that they improve things for folks taking the LSAC in September, October, November, and beyond. And so take these for what they were. Of course, this is a select group. Not everybody had a bad experience, but I hope that LSAC can learn from these mistakes for the future. Now, when LSAC was previously describing the new interface, they told everybody in advance that their platform cannot do single-click answer elimination. Their phrase for it is, quote, radio button functionality, where basically going from picking an answer to crossing one out takes an extra click. And they said, flat out, the underlying platform won't let them change it, which is honest of them. At least you got to give them that. But this costs you time. If you've got to cross off wrong answers across three scored sections, four sections in total, that's a hundred questions. Every extra click is costing you seconds. That adds up to be a couple minutes. Maybe it's real time off the clock that you can't get back when things are strictly timed. And so know what happens after you file an official complaint. Because in many cases, that's what you're going to want to do is your only recourse here. When you file a complaint officially, it puts a hold on your file while they investigate. Their language is at the hold, quote, may delay the reporting of your LSAT score. So step one of you asking for help is the consequence that your score may not come out on time. It's placing a delay on your file. Then when you file, they ask you to pick an outcome. If you added an issue on test day, you could either keep your score or cancel it and register for the next administration a month or two later. Or if you're eligible, retake on a make update during the current administration, meaning you're taking it like a week or two later. Then comes this. I'm reading it word for word. Quote, if LSAT's investigation does not confirm your complaint, you will still have the option to keep or cancel your score at that time. However, you will be responsible for paying your registration fees for a future LSAT and you will not be able to retest during the current administration. Meaning LSAT picked the platform and they wrote the complaint policy. They set the clock at two days. Then they run the investigation into their own administration and they're the ones who decide whether your complaint gets confirmed. Nobody outside LSAT refuse any of this. There is no objective third party investigator. And if it comes back on confirmed, look at what you've got now. You paid over 250 bucks to register for this LSAT. Now you're paying again for a future test. You can't retest this administration. And if you cancel, LSAT records it on your file as a candidate cancel and counts it against your test taking limit, which means a bug in their software just used up one of the attempts you're allowed to have. Now, I don't think anybody at LSAT did this on purpose. I think it's worse in a more boring way. I never assume malevolence when it could just be incompetence or lack of caring. Or lack of forethought. But if you look at the consequence here, this is a process with no outside check in it. And it's running on a mistake the organization itself made. And you as the applicant are the one who's got to prove something happened that was not your fault. But I want to give you some actionable advice here, not just give you a litany of errors and horror stories here, because there is something you can do to take control of the situation or at least make the best of it. There is an option called score preview. I mentioned this earlier. I alluded to it. Basically, a score preview lets you see your score before it goes to the schools. You get to see your score before deciding whether to keep it or whether to cancel it. And this is actually pretty cool. If you want the cheap version, it's 46 bucks. But you've got to buy it before the first day of testing. So for August, of course, that option's gone. LSAC also sells it after the fact. For this administration, that window opens in two days, August 15th and closes August 24th. And after the fact, it costs $87. But if you have an approved LSAT fee waiver, it's free. Now, August LSAT scores come out Wednesday, August 26th, approximately two weeks from now at 9 a.m. Eastern time. With score preview, you get six calendar days from the moment you see your score to decide whether it goes on your record. Now, there is an LSAC FAQ on their site, which tells you what happens to those six days if there's a hold on your score. LSAC's answer is that the six days start when you get your score back, not on the general release date. And the example they wrote to illustrate it is a score held up by, quote, a review of technical difficulties. So LSAC knows this sort of thing is never gonna happen. So basically, if you filed and your score is stuck behind an investigation, if you buy a score preview, it doesn't waste your money and doesn't burn out your window. Your clock starts when you actually see the number. Now, keep in mind that canceling counts against your annual LSAT limits and your elective LSAT limits, same like any cancellation, and it shows up as a candidate cancel. If you spend the 87 bucks, you get information to make a more informed decision. Now, even though we're past that two-day complaint window, it's still worth sitting down and writing down what happened if you did have a bad experience in August. You wanna know when you took the LSAT, which testing center, what section, what happened, what was on the screen, what you expected to happen instead, what you did about it, whether you talked to the proctor and what the proctor said. So do all that now while you still remember before your memory gets fuzzy. You can still submit feedback through JD services, and hopefully it'll at least improve the situation for everybody going forward. Now, there are some people arguing that retaking the LSAT is risky because a retake somehow costs you scholarship money. I wanna kill that myth right now. Schools only take into consideration your highest LSAT score on your record. The highest score is what drives their medians. It determines their standing in the US news rankings, and so that's what they ultimately care about. And that's what dictates the scholarship money they're gonna offer you. The cost of retaking is really just delaying your application by a month or two. Which is an understandable concern because law school admissions is conducted on a rolling basis. Applications open in the fall. If you took the August LSAT scores, come back at the end of the month, you can apply the second applications open in September. If you've gotta push it back a month or two, it will delay your application a little bit. But the good news is that September, October, even November is still early enough in the cycle to get scholarship money, to get into better schools. And it's better to apply a month or two later with a higher LSAT score than earlier with a lower LSAT score. So think about what score you need to be above the medians, to offset a relatively lower GPA, if that's your situation. If you could get just a point or two more on the LSAT, it's worth delaying by a month or two to get a higher score. And if you want my help getting your score up, getting more scholarship money, getting to better schools, I'm happy to help you out. I'm offering free LSAT tutoring for everybody watching this now or later. You can book that free LSAT tutoring lesson with me at unpluggedprep.com slash start. The link is below the video on YouTube, pinned in the chat on YouTube, in my bio on TikTok and IG. I've also put together a free LSAT cheat sheet to help you jumpstart your LSAT prep. It's a quick reference PDF on everything logical reasoning and reading comprehension. You can grab that free cheat sheet at unpluggedprep.com slash cheat sheet. Free PDF download. Now, $45 is what LSAT charges to send your file to one law school. And it's the smallest fee you're going to pay in an application that costs you hundreds or thousands of dollars. Now, law schools will tell you they read the whole application. And of course, they do look at the entire thing. But every December, those same schools file a form with the ABA that only includes two numbers, your LSAT score and your GPA. And those two numbers, rather than, say, your essays, decide which schools compete for you. And that $45 fee reduces your law school list before your GPA ever gets considered. Now, a list of 15 law schools you're applying to will run you $675 in law school reports before you pay a single application fee. And so people will trim their school list and cut it in half down to, say, seven or eight schools. But they'll cut exactly the schools sitting a few points below their LSAT score, which are the ones that would have given them scholarship money. Now, I pulled 15 years of those ABA filings. And there were two numbers in there that actually surprised me. I want to talk you through that. Now, every ABA school files a standard 509 report. It's public information. You can see it yourself. It lists the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile LSAT and GPA of the class they just admitted, how many students got scholarships and how big those scholarships were, their tuition, and where their graduates ended up working. So everything that you want to know is sitting in a table on that form. Takes only a few minutes to read. Most applicants never even open it, though. Now, holistic is a nice idea, but the reporting form is focused on those numbers, the LSAT median and the GPA median. Those numbers get published, they get compared, and they get ranked based on those numbers. Personal statement does not get quantified. Doesn't make it worthless, of course, but it makes the essay more of a tiebreaker than what gets you into the group. Now, let's look at the other fees you pay. The LSAT fee. $253 is the LSAT registration fee for the 2026-2027 testing year. Now, at the median private law school, tuition is over $60,000 a year. And so the LSAT registration fee costs you less than two days of law school if you prorate it. And the LSAT is the single biggest thing you could still move in your application and the only area where more effort rather than more money will actually change your output. If you retake, you pay another $253, but it's worth it. According to LSAT's own data, the second time test takers gain an average of two to three points per retake. Now, if you get two, three points more higher on your LSAT, that's going to get you into better schools. It's going to get you more scholarship money. Points, even just two or three of them, can move you into an entire different category of schools with better outcomes for employment, better bar passage rates, and more scholarship money. If you want to reduce some of your fees, you can ask law schools for a fee waiver. Law schools charge application fees, but many of them will waive those fees and all you've got to do is ask. Individual schools waive their fees constantly, often just because you attended an info session or you emailed them and asked. People decide they don't qualify and they disqualify themselves. Now, in the 2025 filings, the median law school reported an off-campus living allowance of over $27,000 a year. The highest reported figure was roughly $57,000. That is what the school itself says it costs to exist while you're enrolled to pay your room and your board, and people will leave that out when they tell you a law school costs $60,000 a year. Now, you should know that grad plus loans are gone as of July 1st. Law counts as a professional degree under the new rules, and so federal borrowing is capped at $50,000 a year and $200,000 for life. Students who are already borrowing under the old system get up to three more years. Everyone starting today does not. That is the single biggest change to law school money in a decade, and it barely got covered. Now, median private tuition is already $10,000 over the cap before you're considering rent, and so you're already short on year one based on tuition alone. You've got to fill in that gap with scholarships, private lenders, or family. Those are the three options, and of course, there's no income-driven repayment and there's no forgiveness. Now, Columbia, for example, their sticker tuition is the most expensive in the country right now, over $85,000 a year. Cornell's over $84,000, same with USC and NYU's around the same area, same with Georgetown. And so you want to get scholarship money is the long story short. You want to get half tuition scholarship, full tuition scholarship, whatever you can get, you want to go for it. Don't just say, I'm going to go and figure out the money later. That's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars. And though, of course, the best way to reduce the tuition that you pay is by getting a higher LSAT score. Your GPA is probably already pretty fixed at this point in time, but your LSAT score is still the big needle mover available to you. If you can get a better score, you can get more scholarship money. Law schools will offer you that money because they want to raise their standing in the rankings to attract more applicants for the future. And so retaking the LSAT, well worth it. If you want my help getting your LSAT score up, getting into better law schools, getting more scholarship money, that's exactly what we do. I'm happy to offer you a free LSAT tutoring lesson to help you jumpstart your prep. You can book that free lesson with me at unpluggedprep.com slash start. The link is below the video on YouTube, pinned in the chat on YouTube, in my bio on TikTok and IG. I've also put together a free LSAT cheat sheet to help you jumpstart your LSAT prep free PDF download. You can grab that at unpluggedprep.com slash start. Links below the video, pinned in the chat in my bio as well. Cheat sheets at unpluggedprep.com slash cheat sheet. In the meantime, I wish you all the best and take care. Thanks for joining.