. Forum

[civis]

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[dowu]

After my underwhelming performance in October, I sat down and wrote this out in order to get myself in the right mentality before I received my scores and geared up for a December retake. It's a little sappy but I thought I'd share.

Hit the books bro stop screwing around

[goldeneye]

You might not be a number but it's really all that matters. It's a learnable test. Study more and you can be financially rewarded. There's no rush to apply to law school.

[PourMeTea]

Post removed.

[civis]

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[RhymesLikeDimes]

Keep telling yourself that you're better than your performance shows. Keep telling yourself you're a bad test taker. Keep telling yourself the law school you go to doesn't matter. Keep telling yourself your class rank doesn't matter. Keep telling yourself your first job out of law school doesn't matter.

It's people who think like this who wind up being insignificant 'numbers' to the rest of society. The LSAT is a number that matters, and is strongly correlated with effort and ability. Step your game up, and drop the hipster crap.

[jingosaur]

The first step to improving on a retake is that your underperformance was entirely your fault. If you start coming up with all of this "I'm not a good test taker" stuff, it will hinder your performance on retakes. I think the biggest key to my improvement was just calming down and trying to enjoy other things in life in the days leading up to the test.

And in life, you are not your LSAT score and it has no indication of who you are or how good of a person you are. But on the law school application, you are your LSAT score.

[toshiroh]

OP, if your original post is what gets you motivated to keep studying, then by all means, stick with it. Don't let random cyber people deter you from your philosphy. If it works for you, it works for you.

[magickware]

heh, drivel below

It's not drivel, but rather you're being irresponsible to yourself.

You should never just blow off something that shows a huge weakness in you. Everything accounts for something. You should be recognizing that you have some flaw within yourself and you should be either fixing it or accepting it and moving on.

That's why I find the whole "You're not a sum of some numbers!" absolute bullshit. Yes, the LSAT is not who you are. Obviously it doesn't speak to who you are as a person; but that's not the point. The LSAT is meant to make a very accurate account of your ability to deal with basic logic, pattern recognition, reading ability, and other things. It is representative of the time and effort you've spent preparing. I mean, the score couldn't have just come out of nowhere.

If you did poorly in UG, then it's because you slacked off. End of story. If you did poorly on the LSAT, then either you're simply not built for it or you didn't prepare enough. Are there exceptions? Sure, but there are exceptions to most things and they're not worth considering.

Take the poor score as a learning tool to re-evaluate your abilities and yourself. But don't blow it off by saying that it's not who you are. Again, of course it's not who you are, but that's not the point. That's never the point of any test or score, so don't go speaking platitudes to make yourself feel better.

Being responsible is owning up to your actions and their consequences. This includes the score you got on your LSAT.