Saturday, May 23, 2009

Modern Quill

Modern Quill

30-Day LSAT Blog - Day 14 pt 1

Posted: 22 May 2009 04:45 PM PDT

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Ok, so I’m not saying that there’s no word in the English language that expresses the unique combination of stress, fear, disappointment, and sheer fury I experience presently, but “diskordistressecrapular” really sums it up. I also get to know that should anyone actually Google that term, I’ll be the oldest hit.

The reason for my diskordistressecrapicity is my last diagnostic exam. I took up the Butt in Chair philosophy, voyaged to my favorite study location*, and cracked out Test 53. I did not go well.

I haven’t sat down and picked apart my errors, but I had a hot start. The first section was an Arguments section, and I only made one error. Then came Games, which was par for the course. Reading was fourth and I wasn’t too impressed. But the third section, the second arguments section, was (in the words of Sean John) unforgivable. 

I don’t want to chalk this up to fatigue, but maybe that’s what it was. I don’t want to chalk it up to the entire section throwing me a curveball, because this was September 2007’s test, for crying out loud, so it wouldn’t have done me any good if I was born in 1985. And besides, the LSAT is very good at one thing, and that’s not throwing curveballs at an informed test-taker. Otherwise you couldn’t prepare for the test. And you couldn’t expect to ever get through an argument section with only one error.

So maybe it’s fatigue, or maybe I just got sloppy. I can fix both. That doesn’t bother me. As long as I am making avoidable errors, those errors can be avoided. But jumping from 157 (Day 01) to a 160 (Day 14) isn’t really that fantastic. That’s less than 2% in 2 weeks. 

Again, there seems to be a strange recession-towards-the-mean (see Day 13). I make only one error on the first Arguments and then catch the H1N1 flu from the second Arguments? Either the test is doing its job, or I’m not. Possibly both.

So, long story short, it isn’t the stress or the burnout that’s getting to me. It’s the schizophrenia. 

* My favorite study location is the Shapiro Library at Southern New Hampshire University. Conventional wisdom (or at least Ann Levine, which is wise enough for me) is that you should weight your bat and “not study on the seventh floor of your campus library.” Shapiro doesn’t have that problem because it sees light use from the international summer students, who are a bit . . . irreverent compared to what Americans consider to be appropriate library etiquette. I don’t think they have Internet access at their apartments, because they’re prone to listening to loud J-Pop, Chinese soccer matches, traditional Cantonese opera and/or breaking into song while sitting in the study corrals. But I don’t say a word, I just smile knowingly because I know if anyone does that during test day, they will not see the light of June 9th.
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