The LSAT’s Connection to Lemon Meringue Pie.

When I was a kid, I decided to bake a lemon meringue pie.  Why I chose to do it remains a mystery.  I’m a lousy cook now.  I was worse back then.  The results were predictable (hint and spoiler alert: it wasn’t a success).

As you may know, a lemon meringue pie is a lemon pie with a “poofy” meringue topping.  You make a regular lemon pie, top it with egg whites, and bake it until the egg whites “poof” into a light, fluffy, brown and white topping.

Unfortunately, the meringue on my pie didn’t “poof.” As a result, it was a lemon pie with a disgusting, smeared egg white coating on top.  I ate half of it anyway, and it nearly landed me in the hospital (but that’s another story).  Although my pie was a disaster, the story does serve as a useful analogy to wrong answer types in certain LSAT Reading Comprehension questions.

To see why, you need to know how the sneaky minds of the “psychometricians” that create the LSAT work. They know you need to read quickly, since the LSAT is a timed exam.  So, they often intentionally include wrong answers that are tempting because they include words or phrases taken directly from the passage.  However, when you examine those words and phrases more closely, you see that they are combined in a way that misstates the point being made in the passage.

In other words, like my hideous lemon meringue pie, the wrong answers to these LSAT questions include all the right ingredients but are put together in a bad way.  So, when you see those tempting “buzzwords” on LSAT answer choices, remember my lemon meringue pie and proceed with caution!