Tonight's the Night - Sitting Tomorrow

My relationship with the LSAT might be more complicated than my relationship with my estranged dad.

I've been taking this test off and on for three years. I completely underestimated my first attempt. The tutor I hired had the audacity to look me dead in the face and say, "Oh girl, you're fine. You've got this." What she neglected to mention was that having "this" and having 300 spare hours to study for "this" are two very different things.

I'm a trial paralegal in Big Law. In 2023, every COVID-delayed trial got rescheduled at once like judges collectively said: "can't settle by now? parties didn't die? here's a docket that might change that." Every one of them collided with my LSAT date and I spent like $600 moving the things because no trial attorney is approving their paralegal's time off the week before trial. Take away their paralegal and they'll start wandering the courthouse lobby like a Roomba with low battery.

I was working 200 to 250-hour months. My sleep schedule became a whisper in the wind. At one point I genuinely thought to myself, "Just do it, pull off the stupid band-aid. You can take the LSAT immediately after a three-week federal trial. You are a MOM who was literally in labor with a soccer ball sized baby head about tear you in half during senior finals and still aced a few of them."

Reader, I could not. I knew I was bombing it while I was taking it. Scored in the high 140s. Somehow way lower than my first cold practice test. Half my blood volume was energy drink. I still smelled like airplane and redwells.

Then my grandma died four days before my second attempt. "But she was in hospice, right? Didn't you know it was coming?" Yes, Jan. She was in hospice. She had also spent roughly thirteen years refusing to die out of what I can only assume was pure spite and some weird elixir of life consisting of pork rinds, Pepsi, and cigarettes.

I pulled her off life support as her POA in 2014. She survived. Seven respiratory failures. Cardiac arrest. Every time I thought, "Surely that's it." Nope. At a certain point she became less of a grandmother and more of a Gollum (I know how that sounds, promise I loved her). But I genuinely started to believe she might outlive me, my son, and his future children. So no, despite all available evidence, I did not think she was actually going to die. I kind of thought it was more likely she was already dead and I was hallucinating her existence. Didn't sleep before the exam. Had recurring nightmares they were cremating her alive. Somehow scored six points higher, but still lower than my first cold practice exam. A win is a win. Law schools disagreed.

After that, I gave the LSAT a break and got a master's in legal studies instead because AI is coming for all of us and I'd at least like to be automated last. Loved it. Crushed my classes. Took courses alongside practicing attorneys working on their LLMs and set the curve more than a few times. Increased my earnings by like 40%. Professors kept telling me, "You belong in my JD class." I was like, "Cool, could you put that in writing and mail it directly to LSAC?" (they did). They also suggested one of the expensive prep courses. I took one that "guaranteed a 165." Logic Games got removed, which was my worst section. Trial season cooled off. I had successfully run out of grandmothers.

So I walked into my next exam feeling fantastic. Then scored exactly the same as I did the time I took it while grief-stricken, resembling a schizophrenic raccoon after a night of no sleep because I was sitting on my living room floor listening to the Bee Gees, burning a cigarette like sage, and trying to summon Grandma with a Ouija board to make sure she wasn't rising for a comeback tour before I greenlit the cremation and filed for the death certificate.

Yet somehow the score was identical.

The frustrating part is that I consistently scored in the 160s on practice tests. That's literally all I need. I'm not trying to get into Harvard. I have a kid who's going to college in the time it will take me to blink twice and even entertain the thought of having another baby. I'm barely in my 30s still recovering from a daycare bill that already harvested one of my kidneys.

So I studied another 200 hours and took the LSAT again. One point higher. Rejected again. Apparently letters from law professors, equity partners, and nearly 10 years of legal experience are no match for getting five more questions right about evolutionary biology and a guy named Trevor's commute to work. You can manage a SCOTUS appeal (that I can't name drop or half the readers will hate me) but if you confuse the answer choice that flipped the names of the two feminist authors you had 3 minutes to read about you might subsequently kill 14 years of hopes and dreams in a matter of a few hours.

The annoying thing is that I'm not even a bad test taker. JD-Next? Great. Professional certification exams? Nearly perfect. The LSAT, however... I have theories. One is that I do not think in process of elimination. Get asked a question? Answer it. I am far better at free response style testing in general when the writers aren't given the opportunity to insert a few negatives into what could otherwise be a positively framed answer choice. The other is that legal work trains you to challenge plenty of assumptions presented to you. The LSAT says: "For purposes of this question, assume the author is telling the truth."

And somewhere deep in my litigation-trained brain a tiny voice immediately responds: "Objection. Foundation" & then I dwell and time escapes me. Trap answers start to look like the IG clickbait that convinced me to buy a shower harness for my German Shepherd. Then I review it, much like the shower harness, and feel like a moron.

But honestly, I've met phenomenal attorneys with mediocre LSAT scores and brilliant LSAT takers who failed the bar multiple times. So, if you're like me and have the working-memory capacity of a half-eaten baby carrot, I see you. We do the dance. We appease the gatekeepers. Nobody asks for our LSAT score ever again. Or maybe I bomb it one last time, quit law forever after 10 years building a non-attorney dream career in litigation, move to the woods, and become an oil painter with suspiciously strong opinions about John Roberts.

Either way, I'm taking it tomorrow. My husband already removed everything from the bathroom I could plug into the wall, so I'm not tempted to bathe with it in the meantime. My highest practice score so far is a 171. If I hit my modest goal of 164, I might actually call my dad after twelve years and ask him to lunch if he answers. Which means, in a very real way, the LSAT may finally do what years of therapy could not. If you check back in with me and my score is under a 160, I will definitely be in a white padded room (where I probably belong by now).

Think like a robot. May the force be with you.