The LSAT pays off in law school, too.  And other Thundercats lessons.

First things first: I just got a set of Thundercats DVDs and they are rocking my world even harder than DuckTales did. Aside from the seemingly unnecessary and sometimes annoying inclusion of Snarf, the series is an animated pièce de résistance. In addition to allowing me to recapture the action figure-playing glee of my childhood, those DVDs got me thinking.

When Lion-O (leader of the Thundercats for the uninitiated) sees a challenge, he doesn’t back down. Quite the opposite. He views the challenge as an opportunity to prove himself and triumph. When Snarf sees a challenge, he becomes a sniveling ball of fear and high-pitched snorting sounds. Aside from the fact that making such noises will probably get you ejected from a testing center, you want to be more Lion-O than Snarf when it comes to preparing for and taking the LSAT.

In order to succeed, it is necessary to view the test as an opportunity, rather than a necessary evil. With some convincing (and possibly a few more allusions to 1980’s cartoons), I think you’ll be able to do so.

If you’re taking the LSAT, you presumably want to go to law school and become a lawyer. Hopefully you want to be good at what you do. There is no better way to prepare for the challenges of the first (and second and third) year of law school than studying for the LSAT. According to this little blurb from LSAC, the LSAT is a far better predictor of law school success than GPA. The best predictor is a combination of the two.

You wanna know why? The LSAT is a test of logical skill. So is the first year of law school. Aside from a few tangents where you learn how to research and write memos, the first year of law school consists almost entirely of picking apart arguments. The better you analyze those arguments, the better your grades will be.

Argument analysis is precisely what you learn while studying for the LSAT. You learn to take an argument (premises and a conclusion) and strip away the dross to find the logical essence of what you’re looking at. You can then tell whether the argument is good (valid) or bad (invalid). If you can do the same when reading case law, you’ll be able to take your metaphorical Sword of Omens and lay waste to the Mumm-Ra that is your Contracts final.

In other words, don’t look at the LSAT study merely as something you have to do in order to score well. Rather, be like Lion-O and look at the LSAT as an opportunity to gain a new skill: the ability to use formal logic to pick apart everyday arguments (and evil mutants). Then, after you’ve torn the LSAT asunder, you can burst through the doors of the testing center and yell, “Thunder-, Thunder-, THUNDERCATS, HOOOOOO!!!”*

*Standard Disclaimer: Sword of Omens not included with purchase of LSAT ticket or Blueprint test prep package.

Article by Alex Davis, UCLA Law School graduate and Blueprint LSAT instructor.