LSAT blues
In my 27-year career as a student*, I must have taken approximately 4,527 standardized tests. All of my scores have looked more or less like this:
READING COMPREHENSION/LANGUAGE: Quite high percentile
LOGIC/REASONING: Reasonably high percentile
MATH-RELATED ITEMS: -2 percentile
Seriously. I took the ACT as a junior, and did well enough on the first two areas to get a full scholarship**. I did badly enough in the last area to have to take six extra hours of remedial college algebra***. The GRE, which I took ten years later, wasn’t all that much different. First two areas: good enough to get into Ph.D. programs. Math: low enough to drag the cumulative score and my test-taking self esteem down to a barely-grad-school worthy level. I was so thrilled that it was the last standardized test I would ever ever ever have to take for the rest of my life. No more, not never.
So, of course, I signed up to take the LSAT in June. (Never say never.) This happened for several reasons: 1) I really enjoyed my copyright law class last fall, and went into law-school-withdrawal after it was over, 2) my research area is in a bizarre intersection of rhetoric and law, and 3) I am susceptible to career suggestions that will likely drive me batshit insane. But I figured hey, it’s a standardized test, and I’ve always done well enough on those, and this one doesn’t have any math! And sure, my really smart Law professors told me it’s totally impossible and everything, but no math! Maybe I’ll even study for it****!
So I cracked open the LSAT book my friend G. gave me as a gesture of support last Christmas and look the diagnostic test. And Oh My Lord, I sucked. It’s theoretically not possible to fail the LSAT, but it is definitely possible to scrape the bottom. Logistics demand that if I’m going to go to law school, I’m going to have to do it here, and the UMN Law School is among the top 20 in the country. They have Standards. And there’s no replacing an LSAT score — every one of yours is reported each time.
Being generally intelligent is not enough for this exam. Now I understand why people like my Law mentor, who is one of the most brilliant women I know and who regularly flies to Europe to consult on international copyright issues, spent so much time and money on preparation books and courses and tutors and whatnot. She warned me about this, but I was too busy breaking my ankle and worrying about the semester to take it into account at the time. And I should have, because this is absolutely the most impossible thing I’ve ever seen. No math makes no never mind in my case. So I studied in May, interspersed with procrastination. Study, procrastinate, rinse, repeat. The material is all the things my students complain about: long, and hard, and boring. I have no inherent ability for it.
And studying turned out to not be enough. Two days before the exam, it became abundantly clear that I was woefully unprepared. So I rescheduled for the October 1 exam date, and I have now plunked down $1200 for an LSAT prep course that starts Monday. This disgruntles me in a number of ways: I don’t really have $1200 to spare at the moment, I don’t want to go to school in the summer or feel like I’m adding six weeks to my fall semester, I don’t want to have to alter my travel plans. I just don’t wanna. But I do want to go to law school, and so here I am.
*Because I started Montessori when I was 2.
**Which I then proceeded to lose, but that’s an entirely different story.
***As a capstone on my career of remedial high school math. One bright spot, however, was the Arkansas Rising Junior exam, which all college juniors are required to take. I had no idea how to do almost any of the math questions, and so made skull designs out of the dots on the Scantron sheet. I got a certificate for one of the most outstanding math scores out of that year’s testing group.
****I have never studied for any standardized test. There are two reasons: pure laziness, and the fact that I somehow I got it in my head that studying for this sort of test is cheating. I have no idea where I got that from.