An Aside: The LSAT

Ah, well, another long gap between posts. It's sad that I have many things I want to talk about, but either little time or willpower to write about it.

However, right now I am short on time but full of the desire to write, so I just smacked down my more reasonable side and have decided to write a post.

So when I last left off I was preparing for the LSAT. There's been some rumblings that the ABA might want to abandon the LSAT as a component of admissions. To this I react....

A) What the fuck
B) What the fucking hell?
and
C) You idiots!

Yeah, there's probably, by all accounts, a glut of lawyers right now, and law schools are enrolling more and more and opening more and more law schools. The LSAT remains a "barrier" (although, I'm pretty sure there are schools out there you can get into regardless of your academic statistics)

But my main bone of contention with removing the LSAT is that it's so very very clear that the academic standards are various universities are not the same. For me, getting an A at my undergrad was.... easy. I've walked into interviews with my undergrad GPA shining on my resume. Employers are impressed. I'm happy that they're impressed, but the secret truth is- liberals arts majors in general are a joke and many undergrad institutions themselves are jokes in terms of how difficult it is.

It is very easy in undergrad to use sites like ratemyprofessor or whatever it is that they're using to find the easy classes. I had one class where I think there were only a small handful of people who didn't get A's or high B's. I mean, it was friggin ridiculous. It was a required course too.

Plus, if you go to one of these state schools, no offense, but let's just say the student body does not exactly consist of the best and brightest. There are, of course, brilliant people amongst the general populace. But, taken as a whole, it's nowhere near as competitive as an elite private institution. 'Course, there's grade inflation at a lot of these elite institutions.

There's 2 counters to this I suppose. Your LDAS score report will give you an approximate percentile ranking in terms of LSAT takers from your school, or something like that. And then there's the LSAT itself, where you can find out just how good someone is academically. I mean let's not kid around, you can "learn" the LSAT. So really, the LSAT is mostly a judge of how well you can learn critical reading and logic. But, it's better than just relying on GPA and school reputation. It's just like high school with the SAT. I saw valedictorians and other highly ranked people do terribly on the SAT. And honestly, I didn't think those people were all that smart. Their high schools were not that great. Standardized testing has problems, but it does kind of even the playing field a bit.

So you didn't get into Harvard undergrad. So what? You can still make a 180 on the LSAT and then who the eff cares where you went? Otherwise, schools really have no choice but to weight GPAs differently (not that they don't already do that, but LSAT scores can help "verify" a good GPA from a questionable undergrad.

So that was rather long-winded and unfocused, but it's the best you'll get from me on a wednesday morning. I'm hungry.