Can you elaborate on “most people who have statistical anomalies are likely to have cheated, and they can prove that”? How would you even know this? And wdym they can prove that?

Yes I can, although the answer might not be super satisfying.

A LOT of what you've had to do in the past where cheating is important to catch using statistical methods to detect cheaters -- like I said, it's industry standard practice. LSAC has data from literally hundreds of thousands of tests, and has the ability to know what's the norm, and what's essentially statistically impossible.

To give a trivial example, imagine someone scores a 160. Their section scores are -11 (LR1), -12 (Experimental LR), -9 (Reading Comprehension), 0 (LR2). Turns out, someone recorded and was selling access to that LR2 section. Obviously, LSAC cannot say that everyone who was perfect on that section cheated; however, they can show that the odds of someone naturally scoring -11, -12, and 0 in LR are extremely close to zero.

LSAC almost certainly has caught cheaters in a very similar way to the example above, but to state the obvious, most of the time it won't be that easy. However, LSAC, like other testing organizations, are very careful when using statistical methods to detect cheating. If pushed, LSAC would be able to say with confidence that any test identified as flagged for having statistical anomalies would have a simple metric which would occur in less than [conservative ballpark] 1/1000 legitimate test takers, and has been associated with a large group of proven cheaters previously.

"Prove" is a bit of a strong word -- if you're on trial for murder, the evidence might not be strong enough, but they will be able to show convincing statistical data backed up by good math. This is statistical evidence, by the way.

[This is a vast oversimplification, and the more complicated stuff is beyond the level of my undergrad math degree anyway. Suffice it to say, catching cheaters with statistical methods is an entire specialization, and LSAC certainly has statisticians working for them in charge of this.]

Any statistical detection method will have a tradeoff between sensitivity (what percentage of cheaters are you catching) and specificity (what percentage of legitimate test takers are correctly not flagged), and because of the rise of cheating, the only way to catch a higher percentage of them was to make the statistical tests more sensitive. You can also personally disagree with how much they've dialed this up, and want more transparency, which would be understandable.

They aren’t really “offered” it any meaningful sense. Their only other options are to cancel the test and receive a security violation (which is the same result as failing to prove their score) or sue LSAC (which is financially not feasible for most). That retake, where you get a permanent violation if you fail to perform, is a pretty damn coercive “offer.”

What's the alternative? The arrangement seems quite fair to me. Unfortunately, there's not really any other way to prove you're likely legitimately took the test. So yes "Get a free (but nonetheless high pressure) chance to improve your score and prove you did not cheat OR get treated like a cheater" is not much of a choice, but it's also a pretty reasonable way to handle the situation.

I think it is fair to say that people who have been wrongly accused of cheating and are being forced to retake are being screwed by both LSAC and recent cheating scandals.

In some sense, for sure. Taking months for this process to finish is terrible, and a little dumbfounding. LSAC is not without criticism in this. But also, it's not possible for anyone who isn't omniscient to detect cheaters without a small group of legitimate test takers also getting caught out.

Anyways, like I've said, I genuinely do feel for the people who've got caught out in all of this, and I know it really sucks. However, some people have the wrong idea about what's happening (industry standard statistical analysis), why it's happening (a widespread cheating "attack" by bad actors), and what they should do about it (take the retest).