It’s been a weekend of questions. For many students, there were 101 on that delightful little test. For me, there were even more as those 101 got repeated back in pieces, interspersed with inquiries about cancelling and calls for my evaluation concerning entrance scores to every school from Online U to Yale.
In case you are interested, here are the Cliff notes versions of my responses: 1) I’m good at the LSAT, but I still need more information than “it was about bears and either a must be true or a weaken” to predict the correct answer choice. 2) You should check out the video about cancelling. 3) You should check out the video about using the LSAC calculator.
Of course, after a while I got tired of repeating myself and began to respond to everything anyone said to me with “How about I buy you a shot, and we’ll talk about it later.” This tactic leads to another life lesson learned: This is a very effective method when dealing with stressed out students. It is not such an effective response to random people at the bar.
The upshot was that I ended up quite a bit poorer, my students were one step further to not remembering anything, and half the bar thought they’d be getting some action later that night. So after a while I decided to ask my students a question of my own. It looked something like this:
Me: “Imagine you were reading a blog about law school. In this imaginary world, what kind of topics would you want to see? Keep in mind, this is just imaginary.” (As you can see, I’m very good at preserving my anonymity.)
Student: “Oh you mean for that blog that you write for the Most Strongly Supported site? Yo, why don’t you just use your own name? You’re so lame.” (Or not).
Me: “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Student: “No seriously, your blogs are so boring. You should write like that two birds guy, or Riley. His last blog was really funny.”
Me: “I appreciate the loyalty.”
Student: “I know, how about you write about sex or something. I’d like to read that.”
Once again, I take a second to curse God and HBO for inventing Carrie Bradshaw.
Me: “Umm well so far, sex hasn’t played a huge part in my classes. I mean, it could get real awkward, what with the Socratic method and all, if I tried to combine the two.”
Student, after a moment where he tries to understand the joke and fails: “Oh ok. Well then how about you write about whether or not people actually talk about the LSAT in law school. Like, do you all compare scores or something?”
Finally I found myself with a topic. Unfortunately it’s an easy one, hence the huge intro, since the short answer is no. It’s pretty much a taboo subject. It’s like the deep dark secret we all share, but are afraid to talk about.
Honestly, I have heard the LSAT discussed exactly once so far. In that instance a student claimed, more or less out of the blue, that no one in the room had scored higher than his friend. Immediately you could almost see the thought bubbles pop up above our heads. Half of them read, No way that jerkoff scored higher than me and the other half, Oh my god, is that guy smarter than me? At that moment, we all had our swords half drawn, ready to fight until only the best remained standing.
Then, after a few seconds charged with competitiveness, the subject was quickly abandoned, since no one actually wanted to know the answer to either of those questions. Instead we all cast some suspicious looks at each other, and turned the conversation to either Supreme Court Justices or Second Life, I don’t really remember. But not a score was said, and I haven’t seen the topic since.
Perhaps law students view our LSAT scores as part of that life where we were just dreary little nobodies, not big bad law students, and we can thus pretend they don’t exist. Plus, our scores are probably all pretty similar, and nothing is worse than when someone who tries to act superior because he got a 170 instead of a 169. That’s really a one-way ticket to having your invitations to parties “get lost in the mail.” By mail, I mean defriending you on Facebook, and by lost I mean telling the bouncer you’re really a 16 year old with a really good fake.
So I hope you all will be receiving the score that gets you into your dream school next fall, but you’re not going to be making a lot of friends if you are still talking about it come orientation. And you might want to cancel that appointment you made to get it tattooed on your bicep. Or better yet, keep the appointment and get this instead. Then you’ll never have trouble making friends again.
