Elizabeth Reinking
Staff Writer
Do you remember taking the SATs? What I remember most about them was that feeling afterwards of relief, when I thought “Whew! Glad I never have to do that again!” Oh, I was so young and naive. If I had known then what was in store for me, I may well have turned my sights toward trucking school.
Yes, that’s right. Along with thousands of other psychologically unbalanced students and graduates, I took the Law Scholastic Aptitude Tests (LSAT) this weekend, the exam upon which my admittance into law school and all my future career plans rest. And you thought your SAT scores carried a lot of pressure.
See, with undergraduate schools, the admissions team at least pretends to care about how you were co-secretary of the Spanish Club and played second base in J.V. softball. That way, your decidedly average 1070 becomes less of a dream-killer and more of a challenge to overcome. But with law schools, we aren’t even granted that small courtesy. Yale Law could not care less that you were on the E-board of your sorority. What they want to see is an LSAT score that looks a little bit like “17_” (LSAT scores range from 120 to 180). 143, you say? Enjoy online law school.
Another difference with the LSAT is prep time. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the majority of us probably didn’t uber-prepare for the SATs. I mean, you do some vocabulary, you review your geometry proofs, and you’re pretty much good to go. But the LSAT, man, it’s intense. Unless you’re a genius, and let’s assume for the sake of this column that you aren’t, you’re going to need to crack a book, and I mean hard-core. Questions on the LSAT questions will mess you up.
How can I describe the experience of an LSAT logic game? Imagine your brain is a big wad of Play-Doh. Now imagine putting your brain through one of the grinder-things that make Play-Doh spaghetti. It’s like that.
My theory with the SAT creators is that, at heart, they really want you to do well. Sure, they throw in a couple of clever fake answers to “trick” you, but for the most part, you either know the definition of the word or you don’t. Not so with the masterminds behind the LSAT. Here, there exists more of a “weed out the weak” mentality. LSAT answer choices aren’t there to help you – they’re there to gut you. But first, they’re going to dangle little treats and shiny things in front of you, so you think you’ve got the right answer and you’re patting yourself on the back for being smarter than The Man. Basically, signing up for the LSAT at all is just an exercise in self-torture.
I know what you’re thinking. “Well, if it’s that hard, I’ll just take it more than once as a practice.” Yeah, that would be nice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, because most law schools will average all of your LSAT scores together. So pretty much, you only get one shot. It’s like “Hi, welcome to the LSAT. Here’s your test packet. Good luck with that ‘future career’ thing.”
Actually, that’s a little too “sunshine and rainbows” to describe the experience. It’s more like “Welcome to the LSAT. Here’s your body cavity search.” That’s right. Months of preparation and stress, and they require something like three forms of identification and a double backflip just to get you in the door. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea. No one is laying out the red carpet or anything.
And get this. So there are five sections. But one of them – is a fake. “Experimental.” It’s not actually being scored. Plus, you can’t tell for sure which section it is, so pretty much you just have to do them all. With the tricks and the Play-Doh spaghetti brain thing and the whole enchilada. Good times, right? But wait – there’s still more fun in store for you, potential LSAT taker, because after about three hours of that, you still have to write an essay. A small essay, to be sure, but trust me – after five sections of LSAT multiple-choice, I was hard-pressed to spell my own name, let alone construct a lucid argument.
It’s OK though – if I can survive it, you certainly can. And now that we’ve successfully gotten into law school, we can look forward to three years of one of the harder post-graduate courses of study around and at the end of it, an even bigger exam (the bar). Is it too late to switch to trucking school?
10-06-04
