What are the five hardest Logical Reasoning questions ever offered on the LSAT?

Knowing the worst the LSAT can throw at you can be an advantage in many ways. You can:

1. Practice on the hardest questions so you're prepared for the most devilish traps.

2. Feel a little bit better about yourself if you ran into one of these in practice and tore your hair out trying to solve it.

3. Understand what types of skillsets are required to solve the worst of the worst.

There have been a lot of these most difficult questions. Most tests don't have them, and they occur on average once every three or four tests, but they are extreme curve-breakers when they do show up. And because the LSAC has made so many tests publicly available on LawHub Advantage, there are a few dozen of the questions that I would consider harder than the usual five-star difficulty question. So we'll have this list broken down into multiple parts, with each part covering a section of tests. This will be five of the hardest questions ever given on the tests from 140-149.

First, this list is subjective of course, but these are the questions about which I find students most frequently asking. They involve the most work to solve and have, by far, the lowest accuracy rate when I have students solve blind. And these are ordered from newest to oldest:

Test: 148, Section: 1, Question: 24

The dreaded Lucinda National University question. This passage is actually relatively simple (as far as these hardest questions go), but the complication arises in the answer choices. One answer is near identical to another, and one is correct while the other is incorrect. Many students are unable to even find the difference between them.

Because this is a Parallel Flaw question, the skill of answering it comes in solving the flaw. One of those near-identical answers actually solves the flaw, while the other one mirrors the same flaw as the passage, which of course makes it correct.

Test: 146, Section: 2, Question: 20

This Flaw passages describes voting patterns that change between two different generations. It is difficult to identify what the flaw is, first and foremost, because there seems to be so much that's wrong in the passage. The evidence just seems somewhat unrelated to the conclusion, so it's hard to have a sense of what to expect when you go to the answer choices.

And once you get there, the correct answer choice is quite buried. It doesn't seem to obviously describe the passage, and it takes a fair amount of attention to realize that it is accurately (though opaquely) describing the problem with the passage. But there are other answers that are much easier to understand and so attract the test-taker much more.

Test: 145, Section: 4, Question: 20

This is one of the more famous questions ever given on the LSAT: The Selena psychic powers question. This is a Sufficient Assumption question, meaning the correct answer fully proves the conclusion.

The question is very difficult for two reasons. One, the passage suffers from a rare and subtle flaw. (I call it a heads-tails flaw in my prep work with students.) Identifying it is already quite hard. But the even more complex component of this question comes from the answer choices. The correct answer is only correct because the contrapositive plugs into the passage to prove the conclusion. Meanwhile, there are multiple incorrect answers that use terminology that sounds as though they would fit into the passage, while in fact they don't fulfill the precise goal required.

Test: 145, Section: 2, Question: 19

Paradox questions aren't usually particularly hard, and this is likely one of the easier questions on this list. But it is as hard as a Paradox question can get, so it is worthwhile to highlight. This is the daytime-nighttime nocturnal lemur question.

The complexity here comes from the multiplicity of factors in the actual passage. There are multiple types of trees, multiple types of lemurs, daytime versus nighttime, and winter versus non-winter. There's a lot going on. Just identifying what the confusing element is within the passage takes some careful reading. Beyond that, the correct answer factors into the passage in a very subtle way. It doesn't obviously solve the paradox, which means it's easy to skip over it and not consider what it is actually accomplishing.

Those are the types of traps that can make Paradox questions have lower accuracy rates.

Test: 141, Section: 4, Question: 23

This is a Principle-3 question type, which means the correct answer will fix the given application to make it abide by the given principle. And on this passage, which involves Shayna theoretically congratulation Daniel, the actual connection between the offered application and principle is very subtle. It's hard to see what element of the application needs fixing.

Beyond that, there is quite a bit of formal logic, and there's a buried trap in that two variables in the passage that don't seem the same are in fact the same variable when it comes to mapping.

There's a lot going on in the passage, but if you are able to prephrase correctly, identifying the correct answer has little complexity to it, at least.