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Studying with Victoria: Sweating the LSAT

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It seems that summer weather has finally hit my little corner of the East Bay with a vengeance. Apparently it’s making up for months of below average temperatures and cloudy skies in one fell swoop. To make matters worse, the streets of Berkeley now resemble some post-apocalyptic wasteland of discarded flyers and moving boxes, but instead of zombies the streets are clogged with nervous freshmen and even more nervous parents shuffling around in the sweltering heat.

The heat has an interesting effect on LSAT prep. For one, it’s too hot for coffee, and without my caffeine fix focusing on several pages worth of logical reasoning questions becomes difficult if not impossible. Secondly, approximately fifty or so people in a classroom generate a lot of heat on their own, and that added to already hot temperatures made last Tuesday’s workshop a test of endurance and willpower.

I may not be indicative of the larger group, but I did find myself being less methodical than usual such as forgetting that “explain” questions actually existed or making really dumb answer choices seem plausible in my own little world. Stupid me, as if skimming answers was going to make the time go any faster or the room any cooler. Luckily, despite using the converse of a rule, I only missed a couple of questions on the last logic game. I’d like to try that game again when I’m in my right state of mind.

But if you think about it, four and a half hours of questions in torturous conditions could have a plus side, since I now know I can, more or less, gut through it. My “go forth and conquer” mindset worked for the first couple of hours when each time I got a question right, it was like giving the middle finger to the combined forces of the LSAT and Mother Nature. And if you can get that many questions right in a disgustingly hot room, just think how nice it will be on actual test day when you get to sit in a lovely air conditioned room with a lot more space between you and your desk mates. To paraphrase my driving school instructor, that test’s ass is grass and I am the lawnmower. Not going to lie though, as soon as class was out, I booked it back up to my car and drove off in search of a slurpee. Sadly, there were no slurpees to be found, but at least Earth Mother has a radio and air conditioning so I wasn’t too upset.

So this Saturday is practice test 3, which I will be calling the blue moon test because we already had a practice test this month. Unlike the last practice test, I’m rather excited to be taking this one. We’ve covered nearly all of the new material, so this test will give me a pretty good idea of the areas I really need to focus on. Also, I’m looking forward to demolishing my previous score. If I can manage to put the brakes on and go through things methodically. Especially “resolve, except” questions, those little buggers are definitely my weakness. The Saturday weather forecast is looking good too; all bodes well.