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LSAT Score Release: After Sunset on the West Coast

If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware of the fact that scores for the September test came out Friday. This provided students with a lot of anxiety, not least because, as usual, LSAC decided to slowly release scores over the course of about six hours, starting sometime in the afternoon. This meant that everyone simultaneously developed mass OCD, feverishly refreshing their inboxes every eight seconds despite the fact that Gmail does this for you. I don’t know if this is true for people with Yahoo (or yMail as they so originally call it), but that’s only because I couldn’t ask anyone, as I don’t know anybody who lives in a cave. At any rate, not a lot of people were getting much vitamin D yesterday.

In a dick move of epic proportions, the University of Miami took advantage of this to send out an email telling you why you should go to their school. I’m pretty sure that the only reason anyone getting that email would go to their school is to blow it up.

Then, as always happens at this time, out came the theories about in which order the emails were being sent. Were they sending out the best scores first, so the longer you went without an email, the lower it would eventually be? This is always humorous, and I was seriously tempted to tell people that that is exactly what was happening. (I think it’s geographical, by the way, but I really don’t know. Maybe it’s based on your height.)

Shortly after the first few emails were sent out, someone posted the score conversion chart online. This provided hope for many, as you could miss 11 questions and still get a 170, which is generally considered an indicator of a “generous” curve (also, Matt’s predictions were exactly right). But for the yearning masses, any comfort this gave evaporated in about six minutes, and the incessant clicking of the refresh button began anew. I personally hadn’t been thinking about the score at all for the last few weeks, but I found even myself, Colin Elzie, the portrait of stoicism, starting to feel the pressure. It didn’t help that my bosses kept calling and asking me for my score, or that my girlfriend kept rudely not being utterly silent and still.

By sunset, I was getting pretty frustrated. It seemed like everyone else had gotten their score already. I had already answered a slew of emails from students, many congratulatory, a few consoling. But I was getting pretty damn tired of talking about other people’s scores, while having to wonder what mine was. I’m pretty sure I was the last person in the goddamned country to get that email. Finally it was there in my inbox, “Your September 2009 LSAT Score.” I definitely am not one to wait forever to open something for fear of the contents. I’m pretty certain that if you wait to open it, the score itself can somehow flux, since until you actually see that number it doesn’t yet really exist, like some sort of Schrödinger’s score. I pounced on it before it could squirm away. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised, but very pleased, to find a 178 staring back at me.

Naturally, the first thing I wanted to see was the misses. There were three in all. On the third game, they ask how many planes can depart second, but for some reason at the time I read it as how many planes could depart first. Next was an LR question about diseased snakes, and, looking at it now, I don’t know what I was thinking. It wasn’t an incredibly easy question, but it wasn’t incredibly hard either, and the answer choice I picked is now obviously wrong, but I guess you always see things in hindsight with 180 vision. Third was on reading comp. It was the final question on the passage about parallel computing, and I personally think it’s a really hard question. But to be honest, I’m surprised I didn’t miss more on reading comp. I got that section first, and I remember feeling really unfocused, so I’m pretty pleased that I didn’t miss more.

I then did the only logical thing possible, and got drunk. And am now (still) hungover, thanks to former students Brandon and Shannon. So that’s my story.

If you’re like me and were pleasantly surprised with your score, congratulations. If you scored lower than you wanted, there’s always December. Even if you’re not entirely sure that you want to retake the test, consider signing up for it anyway so you can save a spot, because they’re filling up. You can always pull out three weeks before with a partial refund and no record of having been signed up. So if in doubt keep your options open for the time being.

And don’t feel too bad if you scored lower than you thought you would. It’s an extremely hard test, and everyone has bad days. This can just be a wake up call to study even longer and harder for December; be glad you have a second chance. If you’ve decided that you will be doing this because your score is unacceptable to you, don’t take it personally. The LSAT doesn’t say anything about your intelligence or about you as a person. I’m definitely happy with my score, but at the end of the day, you can’t allow these three digit numbers to say anything about you; even if it seems like law schools don’t know this, there is a lot more to you than your LSAT score. Believe me, there is nobody more annoying and delusional than some asshole who thinks that the fact that his score has a 7 in the middle means that he’s smarter than other people. The only important thing is that Matt didn’t beat me.