An LSAT Love Story
Last weekend I got to attend Columbia University’s mock trial tournament sponsored by Manhattan LSAT and had the privilege of watching some very talented students from colleges up and down the east coast flash their argumentation skills. At one point, I found myself talking to a senior who said that despite his love of mock trial, he didn’t want to go to law school.
“I’d much rather take the GMAT than the LSAT,” he said. “I opened an LSAT book and saw logic games and was like, ‘no thanks!’”
My immediate reactions:
“But you are missing out on something great for a bad reason!”
“If you knew the test, you’d feel differently.”
“You didn’t even give it a chance!”
In other words, I responded like the LSAT was my boyfriend, first novel, or mom.
What’s so lovable about the LSAT?
I’ve written on how it makes you smarter. But that was an appeal to research showing what I already believed to be true, because the LSAT had already made me smarter.
In high school and college, I got by on my strengths, which were not, though I didn’t realize it at the time, anything resembling logical thinking. I was an insightful thinker and could write in a way that flowed, and these were enough to push me over the threshold for most teachers and professors. I graduated with high GPAs.
When I first opened a book of practice LSATs, I was a college junior doing so out of curiosity. It wasn’t an intentional move to initiate a study plan–I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to law school. Much like the fellow I mentioned above, I just wanted to see what this LSAT thing was all about. I took a few questions–maybe a whole logical reasoning section, maybe just a few pages, I can’t remember. What I do remember is that I missed the vast majority of them. I answered 2-3 right and at least 10-12 wrong. I recall seeing X’s all over the dingy pages of the yellowing, used practice book I’d bought, and closing it, thinking, “From now on, I have to hide the fact that I’m just not good at logic.” I was convinced I wasn’t a logical thinker, and that any day, someone would discover it about me.
Two years later, I was sure I did want to apply to law school, and I went about approaching the LSAT yet again, intimidated tremendously by my earlier, brief encounter with it. I enrolled in a course, did all my homework, didn’t miss a class or a diagnostic test, and began the slow, arduous process of improving my study skills: I turned off the music. I put in ear plugs. I made myself focus for thirty-minute increments without getting up for a snack or to put some wacky clip in my hair. And over the weeks then months, I watched my score go up. As it did, I became aware that I was learning a certain mode of thinking, and so my confidence went up, as well. I started to believe in myself intellectually in a way I hadn’t before. By the time I actually took the text over six months after I’d begun studying, I had gone from answering only 13 questions (4-5 of which I got wrong) on a timed logic games section–that is, leaving the other 10-11 blank–to completing a perfect logic games section.
I am not kidding when I say this is one of the greatest start-to-finish triumphs I’d ever had, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it was the LSAT, some test that was going to help me (or not) get into law school. It was, rather, that I’d learned how to think systematically, in an organized way. I’d learned how to focus through anxiety. I’d learned to trust my ability to do both of these things. And these skills transformed my life apart from the LSAT: I became calmer, more focused, more capable of sitting and reading a book for a longer period of time.
No single cause, of course, explains a major mind-transition, and the context of my study is relevant: I had also started doing yoga at the time. It was the combination of both endeavors into newness that reshaped my life and, literally, my future: I got into the schools I did because of them, and I graduated from Yale Law School because of them.
The LSAT is not everyone’s cup of tea. I know there are people who hate it, and there are people who hate the amount of weight it gets in admissions, and those groups of people overlap. I understand, and I know it’s frustrating.
But for some of you who are frustrated–you might just need to give the test a little more time to grow on you, and to teach you. I was frustrated at first, too, but then I took it slow, did the work, and watched change happen.
The LSAT will work for you if you allow it to. It’ll instruct you on how to think, how to read, how to budget time, how to be organized. In the Wax On, Wax Off tradition of Mr. Miyagi, if you let it, the LSAT will train you in skills that apply to the big, bad, unscored world outside of it. That’s going to transcend your score, no matter what it ends up being.