Unofficial. All practice questions on this page are original material written by Assize Careers and are not reproduced from any LNAT paper. LNAT® is a registered trade mark of LNAT Consortium Ltd, as the consortium's own site states. Assize Careers is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the LNAT Consortium. Our practice questions are written by us in the published formats. They are not the test publishers' own questions, we do not reproduce any publisher's items or convert your result into their scores or percentiles, and Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by any test publisher, assessment provider, regulator or law firm.
Read the rights holder's own position before you read ours
The LNAT Consortium publishes this, in terms, on its own frequently asked questions page: it "does not recommend that you pay anyone who claims to be able to coach you for the test", and it does "not endorse any preparatory materials whether provided commercially or free of charge".
That includes this page. We quote it because it is the position of the organisation that owns the test, you are entitled to weigh it, and a careers site that hid it would be selling you something while keeping the manufacturer's warning off the label. Our own view, which you can take or leave, is that the official material runs to two papers and a tutorial, that two papers is not much rehearsal before a 95-minute sitting, and that practice in the published format is a reasonable thing to want. Nothing we sell is coaching, nothing we sell is endorsed by anybody, and no number on this site claims an effect on your score.
The format, as the consortium publishes it
- Section A
- Twelve passage sets with 42 multiple-choice questions between them, in 95 minutes. The passages are extended prose on subjects that have nothing to do with law.
- Section B
- One essay, chosen from five prompts, in 40 minutes.
- Delivery
- On screen at a test centre. The consortium publishes an on-screen tutorial that simulates the real interface, and that tutorial was refreshed for 2026 features, so work through the current one rather than a description of an older version.
- Official practice material
- Two papers, Sample Test 1 and Sample Test 2, both published in 2010, in PDF and RTF, each with commentary and a marking scheme for the multiple-choice section. There are no other past papers. Both are free on lnat.ac.uk, and they should be the first preparation you do.
Which universities require the LNAT, the fee, and the sitting window are published by the consortium and change between cycles, so check them there rather than here. We do not reprint a deadline we would then have to keep correct.
How it is marked
Section A is multiple choice, and the official 2010 papers are published with a marking scheme and a commentary for it. There is no equivalent scheme for the essay. What each university then does with either part is a matter for that university, and the consortium's site is where the current position on scoring is set out, so this page does not characterise it further. An admissions test score means whatever the admitting university decides it means.
What it is actually measuring
Reading under pressure. Section A asks what a passage says, what it assumes, what would weaken it and what its author is doing, which is the same work as reading a judgment and separating the reasoning from the aside. Section B asks whether you can take a position on a general question and defend it in 40 minutes without wandering. Neither section tests legal knowledge, and nothing in the paper rewards demonstrating any.
How candidates lose marks
- Finishing Section A on time but not on purpose. Forty-two questions in 95 minutes is a little over two minutes each, including reading. A candidate who reads each passage twice before looking at the questions runs out.
- Answering from agreement. Several question types ask what the author claims, not whether the author is right. Readers with strong opinions on the subject misread the passage.
- Treating "most weakens" as "is false". The weakening option need not be true or even likely. It needs to bear on the step the argument depends on.
- Writing an essay with no position. A balanced survey of both sides that never commits scores worse than a clear argument with a conceded weakness.
- Choosing the prompt you know most about. The prompt you can structure in three paragraphs beats the one you have read a book about and cannot finish.
What to do about it
Sit the two official papers under the real clock, one at the start of your preparation and one at the end, and do nothing else until you have done the first. Between them, practise in the format rather than reading advice about the format. For the essay, write three in 40 minutes each and plan each one for five of those minutes: a position in the first line, three reasons, the strongest objection and an answer to it.
Practice material, written by us
Two questions on a passage of our own, and one essay prompt of our own with a worked plan. Our passage is shorter than an LNAT passage, which runs to several hundred words; the question types are the ones the published format uses.
Nineteenth-century cities were rebuilt, in large part, by nuisance. Before any public health statute took effect, the courts were already requiring factory owners to abate smoke and tanners to stop fouling streams, at the suit of neighbours with no interest in the public good beyond their own windows. Historians of regulation tend to treat this as prehistory, a weak precursor to the inspectorates that followed. The sequence suggests otherwise. The statutes of the 1870s codified standards that litigation had already established, and they were enforced in their first decades by the same local pressure, now carrying a public seal. Regulation, on this view, did not replace private complaint. It industrialised it.
Which of the following best expresses the main conclusion of the passage?
- Public health statutes of the 1870s were unnecessary, because the courts had already solved the problem.
- Nineteenth-century nuisance claimants were motivated by self-interest rather than the public good.
- Modern regulation developed out of private complaint rather than superseding it.
- Historians of regulation have misunderstood the nineteenth century because they rely on statutes.
- Litigation is a more effective way of improving public health than inspection.
Answer and explanation
C. The last three sentences carry the argument: the statutes codified what litigation had established, early enforcement ran on the same local pressure, and therefore regulation industrialised private complaint rather than replacing it. C restates that and nothing more.
B is true of the passage and is not its conclusion. It appears as a concession in the second sentence, offered to make the argument harder rather than easier, and candidates who pick it have found a statement the passage supports instead of the statement the passage is for. A and E are both stronger than anything the author says: the passage never argues that the statutes were unnecessary or that litigation works better than inspection, and a conclusion option that overreaches is usually wrong for exactly that reason. D is closer, but it describes a criticism the author makes in passing, not what the argument is driving at, and the passage does not say why historians went wrong.
Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the argument in the passage?
- Most nineteenth-century nuisance claims were brought by wealthy landowners.
- The standards written into the statutes of the 1870s differed substantially from those the courts had applied, and were drawn instead from engineering reports commissioned by Parliament.
- Smoke abatement litigation continued after the statutes came into force.
- Several of the inspectorates created in the 1870s were abolished within twenty years.
- Public health improved more slowly in cities with active nuisance litigation than in those without.
Answer and explanation
B. The argument depends on a specific step: that the statutes codified standards litigation had already established. If the standards came from somewhere else and differed substantially, that step fails and the conclusion loses its support. Attacking the step an argument rests on is what weakening means.
E is the designed distractor, because it sounds damaging and is about outcomes. It is not a weakness in this argument, which is about the origin of regulatory standards and says nothing about whether litigation improved anybody's health. A is consistent with the passage, which already concedes that claimants acted in self-interest. C would support the argument rather than weaken it. D is about what happened to the inspectorates afterwards, which the author does not rely on. Notice that B need not be true, and you are not asked whether it is: you are asked what would do the damage if it were.
Essay prompt, in the Section B style, to be answered in 40 minutes: "A jury should be told nothing about a defendant's previous convictions." Discuss.
What a strong answer does, and what we deliberately have not done
We publish a plan rather than a model essay, because a Section B answer is supposed to be yours and a memorised one reads like it.
Take a position in the first sentence and keep it. Then three reasons that are actually distinct rather than the same reason three times: a jury's task is to decide what happened on this occasion, not to assess character; evidence of past conduct invites a prediction rather than a finding; and a rule that is clear is easier to apply consistently than a discretion exercised case by case. Then the strongest objection to your own position, stated at its best rather than at its weakest, which here is that a pattern of very similar past conduct can be genuinely probative and that excluding it keeps relevant information from the people deciding. Then your answer to it, which is where the marks are: either the probative value is real but the risk of it being used as a character judgement outweighs it, or the rule should admit a narrow exception, in which case say what the exception is and who decides.
Two things to avoid. Do not recite the law of bad character evidence: nobody is testing whether you have read the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and 40 minutes spent on a half-remembered statute is 40 minutes not spent arguing. And do not finish with "there are good arguments on both sides", which is the one ending that cannot earn anything.
Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.