Score conversion: Why it's rough climbing out of the 160s
We all know the LSAT is normalized to a bell curve.
In practice, that makes it much harder to go from 160 to 170 than 170 to 180. In other words, it takes more work to go from the 70th to the 94th percentile than from the 94th to the 99th.
Look at the score conversion chart: to go from a 160 to 162, you have to get 3 more questions correct; from a 162 to 164, another 3. So, it takes 6 more questions correct to climb 4 scaled points.
Contrast that with the 170s: to go from a 175 to 177, you only need to get 1 more question correct; to go from 177 to 179, another 1 question. So, the difference between a 175 and 179 is only 2 questions.
This is what makes the 160s so brutal, but also what makes 170+ a prestigious differentiator. You have to fight very hard to climb through the 160s, whereas 170+ scores are realistically within a couple percentage points of each other in the 94th+ percentile.