If you are reading this column at noon on Tuesday, Sept. 28, stop right now. You have only 96 more hours to prepare for the Law School Admissions Test.
It's fall again at Duke University and everywhere freshmen are walking around lost, columnist's are writing about fall and seniors are wondering about that pesky inevitability called the rest of our lives. To repeat the tired jokes about the career aspirations of typical undergraduates, for those of us who are not pre-med or pre-consulting, that means law school.
All the roads to law school run through a small town called LSAT-ville, so Saturday's test is make or break experience for most of my peers. I often hear about Dean Gerald Wilson's LSAT index, where his advisees input their GPAs and test scores and receive a short list of law schools that will accept Duke graduates with those numbers. If the index were to be expanded to include the average starting salaries of graduates from those law schools, it would be possible to compute, with reasonable precision, exactly how much money a wrong answer on the LSAT will cost you. It is not often that not being able to identify an assumption in an argument can cost you thousands of dollars.
In this context, spending several hundred dollars on test preparation courses does not sound so ridiculous. In high school, I considered it unnecessary to take a preparatory course for the SAT, having already experienced the test in "talent identification searches." I knew what I needed to study and I got a book out of the library. But the LSAT asks totally different types of questions: multiple choice argument analysis that is absent in all high school and undergraduate curricula. Test designers may believe that test-taker unfamiliarity equalizes the pool of law school applicants, who may have studied anything from agriculture to zoology. However, the lack of information only creates an incentive for test-takers to educate themselves. Taking a good test prep class has become a necessary first step for all prospective law school students.
As a result, the LSAT becomes a test that is not about logic and argument analysis but more about test preparation. If you have attended the right college and earned the right grades, you still need the last piece of the puzzle-and that comes, most likely, from either Kaplan or the Princeton Review. And they do not give away test tips for free.
Your average freshman at the University is about to spend $130,000 on an education and expects that outlay to translate into a job or a berth at a prestigious professional school. In the course of four years, they come to realize that it takes a little bit more to reach those goals. An extra $1,000 here or there should not matter, especially when you are in danger of "wasting" all that money. But it mattered to me.
That's right. I took the test sans course. Despite everything I have said so far that can be interpreted as mocking Duke students for their mercenary approaches to scholarship, I admit that the real world knocked at my door at some point in the middle of last year and asked me "What are you doing after graduation?" Law school sounded OK.
So, I took the test in June. And I did sort of well on it, but not from a Duke student's perspective. I did not do well enough to be accepted at a top law school, so I might as well have not taken it all, right? Honestly, law school was no more than a fallback for me, but it hurt when I realized that my "plan B" was a state supported school back in Ohio rather than an ivy-covered institution.
Why did I not do well on the LSAT? I did not think it was important enough to spend the money and take the course. When I got to the second section on that hellish June afternoon, I found myself completely unable to work out the logic problems in time. If you gave me an extra hour, or a month to practice, I could have managed, but I could not hack it when it counted. I choked as if I played basketball for Maryland.
I am getting over my bitterness and disappointment. Mostly, I am just angry that I failed to meet a personal goal of success, not about not being able to be a lawyer. If that had been my real aspiration, I don't know what I would think of myself. But I did learn the importance of preparing for standardized tests and not relying solely on my indefinite "test-taking skills"-real or imagined-a mistake I do not intend to repeat on the GRE.
David Margolis is a Trinity senior.
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