Modern Quill

Posted: 13 Dec 2008 01:48 AM CST

0L is a senior at Toronto’s York University, who studies film production. He’s applying to law school, and he wrote a great page about the LSAT: “How to Increase your LSAT score.” You can find it here.

I will regale readers with my own LSAT experiences thus far someday, just not now. I agree with 0L’s advice: what I really want to give him credit for is some of the supplemental material:

Work through 10 or more preptests. Someone with too much time on their hands put together a torrent containing with 35 tests in pdf form on The Pirate Bay. For my moral superiors I'd recommend you buy this and/or this. There aren't substantial differences in LSAT tests from year to year (logic games get easier, reading comp gets harder), but the more recent a test you're doing the better. [Legalaims.com]

I will point out there are some more legit ways to get your hands on materials:

Student Resources: Since most students enter law school straight out of undergrad, it would be foolish not to check in with the career and grad school councilors. My school has those same 35 tests in dead-tree version. I’d be very disappointed with any student resource center that didn’t have some version of prep books and practice tests.
As of right meow, the LSAC website has a real, honest-to-goodness LSAT administered in June, 2007. It’s in PDF format.
Friends: I’m acquiring quite a library of prep books and study guides. I don’t know too many of the pre-law students here . . . some of them seem to want more of the Ally McBeal / Denny Crain track than anything else . . . but I won’t have any need for them when I’m in law school. They’ll probably get donated to that Student Resource Center mentioned above.

Don't underestimate the psychological element. I think I made this mistake the first time around. I can't offer much advice on how to minimize test anxiety though - in fact if you have any suggestions feel free to comment below. Either way, I think it's important to realize that this is a very important factor.

One particularly sneaky thing I’ve noticed, that the prep books seem to gloss over, is that there are six sections on the LSAT. The writing, and some combination of Analytical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, and Logic Games.

Most practice tests I’ve seen give you four sections: One of each of the Big Three, plus one. On the real LSAT, it would be the Big Three plus two, due to the experimental section. When I took a 5-section simulated test, I was amazed at how much mental fatigue set in.

In addition to the things I mentioned above, here's what I'm currently doing in the week leading up to the LSAT (I'm grasping at straws here, but this can't hurt):

Healthy diet: everything planned, home-cooked and nutrient-rich.

Exercise: gym every other day, hot yoga a couple times.

Supplements: ginkgo biloba and cod liver oil daily.

I haven’t tried the supplements yet, but it can’t hurt, and they’re good for you anyway.

One thing that I noticed 0L left off was Prep Courses. For the low, low price of $1,300, you can invest 51 hours you should have been doing homework with towards a class that, most likely, is only going to be useful to the middling types. But if you’re a real gunner, you could spend $1400 for twice the classtime or drop 8g’s for a six-week summer course.

I don’t have that kind of money, and that’s time I can use blogging. I’m highly skeptical of these classes anyway. I can’t knock them, because I haven’t tried them, but I wonder what they can teach you that a good book can’t.

One thing I’ve heard around the interweb is “the classes are good for people who aren’t good self-motivators.”

You’re not a good self-motivator, and you want to go to law school? Whaddaya know.

I’ll be going more in depth about my LSAT experiences and how I’m preparing in later posts.

⁂

My pre-law journey part I

Posted: 12 Dec 2008 04:09 PM CST

I’ve heard law school described as a refugee for the intellectually aimless. I can see how that can be very, very true.

As it is, I’m struggling to discern my vocation. As a Catholic, I believe that there is a “path” that we ought to be on, even if it’s as hard to find as that unmarked left turn going to Aunt Trudy’s. Next semester, I’ll be taking an internship with the State Attorney General. I think that if I can work for a semester in an underfunded, thankless state agency with two part-time attorneys to supervise me, and still want to be a lawyer, I’m on the right path.

Old gavel and court minutes displayed at the Minnesota Judicial Center. Released under Creative Commons by Jonathunder.

So, right off the bat my pre-law focus is, “Do I want to be a lawyer?” I don’t think the phrase “intellectually aimless” has ever applied to me, and I don’t want to change that habit now. While I hear that you don’t have to be a lawyer when you earn a J.D., and there are many “J.D. Preferred” jobs that don’t involve practicing the law, I’m keeping those on the backburner. I’d much rather assume that the three difficult, expensive years I’m anticipating will lead to the practice of law.

But what put the notion of law into my head to begin with?

My high school mandated a civics component, which was achieved one of two ways. One semester of a civics class, or two semesters of a senior class called “Law.” The class was phenomenal.

Mr. Walter Lubelczyk was a tremendous teacher. Unfortunately, time has pulled the plug from http://www.lubelczyklaw.org, which was maintained by a West High School alumni (Jeremy Hitchcock ‘00, now a bigwig at DynDNS) for many years. The class was a mashup of Constitutional Law, both Federal and State, torts, and general aspects of the common law. Some of the cases were strictly academic exercises (if you stab a dead guy, but you didn’t know he was dead, is it attempted murder?) but many aspects of the course had down-to-earth, important information about buying a car, renting, and so on.

The class format was always exciting. The class was broken up into groups, who were assigned cases. The three-person group would have to prepare an opening argument, an examination, a cross-examination, and a closing argument. A randomly selected “judge” would be there, to implement a summary judgment, but then it generally went on to the rest of a class, as a jury. You got extra credit if you convinced the class to your side of the case. You got triple credit if you convinced them to the wrong side of the case law.

This was when I started to think the law was interesting. Everyone in the class did. He picked some really awesome cases in true torn-from-the-headlines fashion. A kid gets flattened after he shakes a vending machine outside of K-Mart, and so on. It was really the first time I had ever been expected to carry on a logical argument, even if it was only with myself. There was a certain dance that happened in the class. More often than not, we could predict which way a case would go, because it would go in the way that didn’t make sense based on the case law we had already learned. We just didn’t know why we were wrong, and that was the excitement of the class.

“I know we’re going to lose,” I thought, “my case makes too much sense to win.”

Sure enough, we’d wind up on the wrong side of the law. We’d be shocked, outraged, maybe even appalled for about thirty seconds. Then it would click, we’d absorb it, and we’d use that same material to argue to argue the next case.

Long story short, if you went through Lubelczyk’s law class and you didn’t want to be a lawyer, there was something wrong.