LSAT-iquette
Asking someone what they got on the LSAT ranks somewhere between asking someone what they weigh and asking them how much money they made last year
The whole deciding, applying and accepting process for law school is a long and arduous process, of which the most time-and-mind consuming of it all has got to be studying and writing the LSAT. *
If you ever need to disabuse your mind of the notion that knowledge of the law is a prerequisite for law school, take a gander at a sample LSAT one day. The six-sectioned, nearly-five-hour torture exercise has precisely nothing to do with the law and everything to do with one’s ability to generate locker assignments for oddly-alphabetically named fifth graders who are possessed of complex social structures that would erupt were Betty forced to share with Carly.
Still, it’s mandatory. And thus, it becomes all-consuming for those considering law school, between studying for it and asking other people how they studied for it and obsessively checking law schools’ median LSAT scores for last year’s entering class against your practice results, et cetera.
The strange thing, though, is that even though the only point of writing the LSAT is to award test-takers a score which they will use to apply for school, asking someone what they got on the LSAT ranks somewhere between asking someone what they weigh and asking them how much money they made last year on the list of societally unacceptable things to inquire of people that will always garner you cock-eyed disapproving looks but rarely get you an answer.
I started studying for the LSAT last February and wrote last June, and for the first time in more than a year since I received my score, someone flat-out asked me what I got. I’m in Victoria at the moment, setting up my place for the forthcoming school year, and while opening an account at the video store around the corner, the clerk asked what brought me to the city, and upon hearing my answer the first words out of his mouth were “What did you get on the LSAT.” Literally, just like that. I almost high-fived him for being so forthcoming, being someone who is both naturally nosy and was just previously paid to ask strangers intrusive questions.
It turned out that he’s in the middle of studying for the LSAT himself, which is exactly the position I was in more than a year ago. Just like our curious video clerk, I too constantly asked previous writers how they did on the LSAT, only to frequently receive such maddening non-answers as “Well, I did well enough to get into law school.”
Even on the Internet, where everyone is cloaked in a veil of anonymity, there is a reticence to share LSAT scores unless prompted**. Over at lawstudents.ca, each Canadian law school has its own message board, and each of those has its own variant of an IN! thread, in which applicants post messages when they get in to said school. Now, every single one of these threads is populated by applicants who haven’t yet heard back, and every single time the same thing happens over and over throughout the life of the thread:
1. Someone posts that they’ve been accepted to school X, with very little other info.
2. Someone else immediately responds, asking poster 1 what their stats are, ie, LSAT score and GPA
3. The original poster responds, gladly willing to furnish such info on request, but almost never having put it in the original post, despite knowing that these are the only things the people who use these boards really care to know, so that they may judge their own chances of getting an acceptance letter in the near future.
I suppose the reason that it’s so verboten to either voluntarily disclose one’s LSAT score, or to ask what someone else’s is, is that if the conversation is taking place between two applicants or law students, unless they got the exact same score, such a discussion immediately ranks the participants in a supremely uncomfortable way by which the superior score-getter fears being seen as smug or a braggart and the inferior score-getter immediately feels subpar and both are keenly aware of both their own and the other’s feelings, neither of which are pleasant.
Accordingly, even though the LSAT is something for which people prepare for months, and which the only point is to get a score, once you’ve got the score you’ve worked so hard for, the only people who ask what you got are those who have no comprehension of the whole process or what a score between 120 and 180 even means, and so just nod pleasantly and blankly when you tell them and then immediately ask what kind of law you want to practice.
*The second-most is the personal essay, which I actually hated far, far more than the LSAT and accordingly spent far less time on, but will be discussed in a later blog post.
**Which is exactly why I have just written a 750-word post on the LSAT without voluntarily disclosing my own score.***
*** In case it hasn’t become obvious, I’m about 300 pages into David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest right now, which is why I’m probably going to be moderately annoying for the next month or so w/r/t using footnotes and so such.
