The LSAT is Two Weeks Away and I’m Not Scoring Where I Should Be: To Take or Not to Take?

by Mary Richter Sep 17, 2013

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Say it’s officially late September and you’re still ten points under what you want to be scoring. What do you do? Do you take October? Or do you push it off a few months?

I’ve written before on how sometimes you just need to be brave and postpone. But how do you decide? Once you’re in law school (and you will be, so breathe), you’re going to learn about a tool the Supreme Court often uses to establish its rules on issues: the balancing test. In balancing tests, the Court will issue a few considerations that are to be weighed. The Court doesn’t specify how much weight. It just says here they are, use them to make your decision.

If your LSAT is two weeks away, here’s a balancing test for deciding whether or not to take it. Weigh these considerations accordingly, since you know yourself better than I (or probably anyone else) knows you.

1. Are you scoring within 2-3 points of your goal score? If not, move on to consideration #2. If so, congratulations, and also move on to consideration #3.

2. How far away are you? 10 points away from your target score is too much. So is 7. So is 6. I would say so is 4 but I actually got 4 more points on my official test than on most of my practice tests, so I can’t say that. So let me rephrase that: if you’re scoring 6 or more points under the lowest score that makes you viable at a law school you’d actually attend, see consideration #3.

3. What’s your score improvement curve? We all have one. When I started studying for the LSAT, my diagnostic score was a 159. By the time I went into the test, my practice tests scores were fluctuating between 170 and 173. For how long did I study? That’s messy. I studied for two months then postponed then came back to it for a few weeks six or so months later, and I think that time in between did me critical good. (Basically, I stepped away from the LSAT when it was adding to my already high anxiety and came back to it when I could think clearly again.) There at the end, my score went up remarkably. So it looked something like the global warming curve or the tip of an elf’s shoe. But here’s the thing: In those last few weeks, I knew that the slope of that curve was getting steeper because I could feel myself getting better at the test—and I predicted, based on my progress, that I would be where I wanted to be by test day. Whether it was a state of mind or a reality that I was on my way to a higher score, I actually believed it. And you need to believe it to if you still have distance to close. If you have a good feeling about your prospects of improvement—great! (But still go ahead to consideration #4.) If not, move on to consideration #4.

4. What’s the rush? Ask yourself this honestly and answer it the same. Lay out some answers and see if they make sense to you. If there is a rush—if, say, in exactly 4 years and 2 months from now, your Aunt Annabel is going to die intestate (somehow you just know this) and the family will need a lawyer but won’t be able to afford one (somehow you just know this, too), you’ll need to be their lawyer which means you need to pass the bar less than four years from now, which means you absolutely must apply this cycle hands down…well then, okay. Factor that in. If you are applying to law school because you think you probably want to go, but mainly it’s because you have an intolerable job that also keeps you from studying as much as you’d like, factor that in. (Maybe you should look for a better job and keep studying to apply next year, if you still want to go then.)

Put all of these considerations into the pot. If the answer doesn’t materialize, go to sleep. My bet is that you’ll wake up with an answer. ?

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Mary Richter is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in New York City. Mary has degrees from Yale Law School and Duke. She has over 10 years of experience teaching the LSAT after scoring in the 99th percentile on the test. She is always thrilled to see students reach beyond their target scores. At Yale, she co-directed the school’s Domestic Violence Clinic for two years. After graduating she became an associate at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP in New York City, where she was also the firm’s pro bono coordinator. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and more. Check out Mary’s upcoming LSAT classes here.