LSAT Practice; Or, I'll Never Get that Month Back

Jan 30, 2008 - 14:02 PM PST

Full Disclosure: I decided not to go to law school. Turns out, people that go to law school are much more likely to end up practicing law, and... ugh. I probably could have figured that out, but I prefer to think that Jeebus intervened on my behalf.

Fall 2007

Day off today, so I didn't get out of bed until about nine this morning, having fallen asleep while watching a film delineating the behavioral effects of xenophobia in a rural setting on a variety of social castes, including the nuclear family, a cadre of promiscuous adventure-seeking urban youths, and two presumably related outdoorsmen poacher lovers.

It's called Pod People. If you haven't seen it, you won't.

So I got up about nine this morning and jumped on the treadmill - I'm trying to become all svelte, you see, and it's easier to get on that thing before I fully wake up and realize what I'm doing. Kind of like when your mom says she'll count to three and then rip off the band-aid but then she pulls it off in one fell swoop at the count of two. Dirty tricks, but they work. Like Stephen Root says in Dodgeball, "you gotta keep your body guessing." So I do.

So thirty minutes later I'm pumped up and sweaty, and I'm thinking, "yeah, I just burned like three hundred calories, home slice! Come GET some!" And I figure, alright, today is the day: complete LSAT practice test. BAM, just like Emeril, I'm out of the shower and I've got my Kaplan book and my sharpened Number Two pencil and I'm ready to take on the world.

Okay, hold on. I like my job alright - it's tolerable, which is all I feel comfortable asking for out of a position in retail management. I especially like and respect the people I work with, and am regularly impressed by the new things I learn about them and from them. I have good friends at work. Alright - but I have to get the fuck out, because I feel like my brain is going to dry up and blow out of my right ear (I sleep on my left side) like a tumbleweed made of all the stuff I used to know. (Look, there goes Chaucer! And Deconstructionism! And...Sylvia Plath...well, that one's okay. No one needs Sylvia Plath. Ted Hughes sure didn'tZINGZINGZING!) I'm bored, that's about it, and I want to be back in a structured environment where I have to learn stuff again. And I hear you can make some alright scratch as a lawyer, so, law school it is. I'm taking the LSAT December 1st, I'll have my application in by the new year, and I should find out shortly thereafter if I've made it in. All the books say to apply to a dozen schools, but I'm just applying here in Little Rock. I've always been an "all eggs in one basket" kind of person. I'm also an "all legs in one pair of trousers" kind of person, not to mention being an "all urine in one toilet" kind of guy. That's just the way I am. Besides, what kind of schmuck can't get into UALR?

So I sit down to take this practice test today, and every little noise around the house suddenly seems like it's being fed through Buckethead's big-ass amplifier. I've never seen Buckethead's amp, but he seems a likely candidate to indulge in any possible avenue for excess. He has a CUSTOM-MADE KFC BUCKET, which he wears on his head. So I'm assuming his amp is, like, mega and shit. Keep in mind I'm staying with my folks for a while, and their house is not exactly quiet to begin with. Let's go down the list of possible noisemakers:

1) Great Dane. Huge beast. Think "Hound of the Baskervilles meets Legally Blonde" and you have a pretty good approximation of what we're dealing with. She LIKES it when you bop her on the snout to get her to go away. This is a GAME, she thinks. You can see her thinking, "I'm gonnna find a way to get at your crotch, and you can't stop me."
2) Daschund. Small yappy beast. You know the sort.
3) Parrot. A Sun Conure, specifically. Known variously throughout the Amazon as "Shredderthroat," "UnmercyBeak," and "The Bird That Is Loud As Fuck."

Add to that the neighbor's yard guys working outside and you can understand why it might have been a bit tough to concentrate. But I soldiered on, the thought of a brighter future in the back of my mind, a future wherein I never have to provide for others the location of the nearest restroom or the artist who wrote That One Song That Goes Dee Dah.

The LSAT is made up of three different types of sections, two of which are based on reading comprehension. I can read, and damned if I can't comprehend, so these are no sweat. Questions like "which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the author's argument," and "based on the passage, you can infer that the author assumes...," and "do you like me? yes no maybe check one."

The problem for me is the logic puzzles. GT students, you remember these, right? "Marcus the Music Manager has nine CDs to arrange on three displays. Three CDs are shitty Indie Artists who can't play or tune their guitars properly, three CDs are godawful shitty New Age crap to do your Yogas or your Tai Chis to, two CDs are fucking pestilent excuses for modern new crooners, and one CD is WHAM. Each display must have at least one shitty Indie Artist who can't play or tune their guitars properly. If a display has a godawful shitty New Age crap CD, it cannot have a fucking pestilent excuse for a modern new crooner's CD. The WHAM CD cannot be placed next to a godawful shitty New Age crap CD. One display must explode at the end of the night, destroying the department's collection of Carmen Electra Fit to Strip DVDs." Then you answer a series of questions based on the parameters you've been given. Sounds simple, right? Sure, except that these questions are way harder than the similar ones I did back in fifth grade, and they ask you for things like "complete and accurate lists of the possible displays" and "seriously do you like me yes no maybe check one PLEASE I SWALLOW YOU WILL LOVE ME 4EVAR."

I've got 35 minutes to answer 24 of these questions, which breaks down into four different setups like the one I listed above. (Strangely enough, the one from above I actually lifted directly from my study book. I had no idea the folks at Kaplan got so personalized with their guides. I mean, "fucking pestilent excuse for a modern new crooner"? You're speaking my language, Kaplan!) I whizzed through the first one, no problem. It took me about eight minutes. I'll admit, I got cocky. I thought yeah, this is it. I'm gonna ace this. Then the second question came around and I didn't understand a damn thing it was saying. It had something to do with professors and teaching availability and giving lectures and conducting labs and I basically freaked, went into mindlock (which is like gridlock except, you know, on your mind), and spent the next fifteen minutes in a state of addled disassociation. I picked carefully through the next puzzle, trying to make sure I found the easy questions (there were none) so I could salvage a few points. The last one, I straight guessed at five of the six. Beep. Time up.

Shit.

The last section was another reading comprehension section, and waltzed through that. But I was shook up, folks. Shook up like a Yahoo in a backpack on a rural school bus in the morning. I don't know why it is that when people talk about doing either REALLY well or REALLY poorly on a test, they inevitably revert to tropes involving coitus, but I shall follow suit: that one section seriously fucked me. So now I'm thinking, alright, I probably should have taken one of these tests BEFORE I paid my $160 for my once chance to take the real thing before the application deadline. I probably should have taken one of these tests BEFORE I told everyone I was going to apply to law school. I probably should have taken one of these tests BEFORE I pantsed my boss while I, myself, had on no pants. The "all my baskets in one basket-holding larger basket" approach may have failed me here.

So, I started to grade the test and, lo and behold, I did alright. In fact, better than alright. I did ABOVE AVERAGE. I made a 164, which translates to the 88th percentile, a high B average. Reading comprehension saved the day, baby! I swept those sections, boom, with nary a hint of a wrong answer! (Well, a few hints. About six.) But oooh, those logic puzzles: 9 right, 15 wrong. Understand this: I'm used to winning. I hit home runs, I don't bunt to get on base. I swing for the fences and I drive in runs. I throw fastballs and hard sliders. I work baseball metaphors to a full count and then I smack a liner off the scoreboard. I haven't messed up a part of a test this bad since I got two Cs on my hepatitis test last spring*. But the good news is that UALR's average score for admitted students is 155, so I'm already in a good position. I gotta bring my score in the puzzles section up though, if i want to crack the top level and get me some of that fine fine financial aid. So I'm going to work on those logic puzzles almost exclusively - I figure if I can work my way up to getting about half of those questions right and keep up my scores on the reading sections (what I like to call my "Comprehensive Prowess", I'll be alright. Well, provided I don't mention my raging hepatitis and generally sulfuric pallor in the "personal statement" section of the application.


*Joke stolen from that Will Ferrell skit where he plays the model for the sculpture class, the one with Lucy Lawless in it.