Why do some LSAT students struggle with reading comprehension?

In teacher Kelly Gallagher’s acclaimed book Readicide (2009), he warns against what he candidly and unsparingly defines as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” Many of us who grew up in the early-aughts post-NCLB standardized-testing era in America were young victims of readicide (NCLB is short for the “No Child Left Behind” Act signed by President Bush in 2002). 

Standardized testing is partly responsible for readicide. The first recorded standardized tests in human history, jinshi exams, were given during Imperial China’s Tang dynasty to aspiring civil service workers—the government was determined to move away from repurposing aristocrats as officials and toward cultivating an educated elite (Dickinson, 2019; Britannica, 2025). A thousand years later, standardized testing hit the American school system, with written exams replacing oral ones for the same reason they’d appeared in China: to serve in changing from a system funneling elites into power to a system that worked for the masses (NEA, 2020)

The number of tests skyrocketed, along with the outsized role that they played, with the passage of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and again after the passage of NCLB (ProCon, 2025). Reading & math compose the majority of subjects tested.

So how can reading skills go down if reading instruction goes up?

Well, in light of standardized testing, the target of reading instruction changed from comprehension to testing ability. Alongside this change, the 50-60s heralded a new era of competition in college admissions and a commensurate increase in time spent in extracurriculars; AP tests broke into the scene in the same decade. In the years since, the percentage of high school seniors who read six or more books for leisure in the last year dropped from 40% in 1976 down to 13% in 2022 (Twenge, 2024). In this nexus of factors, the systemic depths of readicide reveal themselves.

Language arts curriculums are now focused more on learning skills that can transfer to better assessment but do not result in more knowledge, and reading strategies don’t necessarily transfer across topics (Catts, 2022). This could be why many LSAT students dislike certain reading comprehension passage topics more than others.

Becoming a good reader is a kind of participative evolution in which you must incorporate consistent work far beyond the realm of test-taking. You have to learn to love reading for reading’s sake. As children, we first learn vocabulary through oral language; by third grade, we can read more words than we understand; as adults, we learn through exposure to the written word (Duff et al., 2015). The best adult readers grow up surrounded by language, hearing, seeing, and writing new words, and, through their reading, encountering new knowledge as well.

Lastly, we must remember that reading is fundamentally a biological process. As many as 4% of readers have problems due to underlying biological conditions, and more boys struggle to read than girls because adults talk less to boys in their formative years (NUST, 2023).

The point here is not to explain away your individual LSAT reading comprehension issues or reduce them to failures of the education system. The point is that, while it’s harder to learn to read well as an adult, it isn’t impossible, and becoming a better reader is largely within your control, even if your schooling failed to teach you how to love it.

References

Catts, H. W. (2022). Why state reading tests are poor benchmarks of student success. The Reading League Journal, Jan.-Feb. 2022, 17–23. https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/JanFeb2022-TRLJ-Article.pdf

Dickinson, K. (2019, February 15). Standardized tests: Finland’s education system vs. the U.S. Big Think. https://bigthink.com/the-present/standardized-testing/

Duff, D., Tomblin, J. B., and Catts, H. (2015). The influence of reading on vocabulary growth: A case for a Matthew Effect. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 58(3), 853–864. https://doi.org/10.1044/2015_jslhr-l-13-0310

Gallagher, K. (2009). Readicide: How schools are killing reading and what you can do about it. Stenhouse Publishers.

National Education Association. (2020, June 25). History of standardized testing in the United States. National Education Association. https://www.nea.org/professional-excellence/student-engagement/tools-tips/history-standardized-testing-united-states

Norwegian University of Science and Technology. (2023, December 12). You can always become a better reader, say researchers. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2023-12-reader.html

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2019). Chinese civil service | History, facts, exam, & bureaucracy. In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-civil-service

The Editors of ProCon. (2025, February 6). Standardized tests | Pros, cons, teachers, students, education, & metrics of success. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/procon/standardized-tests-debate

Twenge, J. M. (2024, March 5). Are books dead? Why Gen Z doesn’t read. Generation Tech Blog. https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/are-books-dead-why-gen-z-doesnt-read