I mentioned in Monday's post that not only have I finally gotten my acceptance letter to UK, but I've also been offered a merit scholarship. As if that wasn't wonderful enough, today I got an e-mail from the associate dean of admissions asking me to schedule an interview for the College of Law's two highest scholarships, one of which is $15,000/year (you'll recall that tuition is ~ $14,000, so this is basically full tuition + books), and the other of which is full tuition for all three years, plus a $5,000 stipend each year.

I am amazed. Essentially, this is all due to my LSAT score, since my undergrad GPA from seven years ago is alright, but nothing to brag about.

I've always tested well without putting a whole lot of effort into it, particularly on standardized tests like this that measure your ability to take tests as much as they measure anything else. For example, I did moderately well (31/36) on the ACT when I took it in high school, and I took it pretty much cold. I knew I could get into UK undergrad fairly easily, so I didn't put a lot of work into it. I had planned to take the LSAT straight out of college in 2000. But I realized as they test drew nearer that not only was I not ready for the test, but I wasn't ready for any more school at all. So I just didn't go on test day, figuring that, since they averaged LSAT scores for a crazy number of years (I was told seven years at the time, I'm not sure if that's accurate; this is something UK Law no longer does, by the way), I'd just shut that door until I was ready to deal with it, sometime in the far future. Obviously, I've decided that I'm now ready.

Funny story - this realization actually came to me at a sports bar, sitting one night with my friend Shawn after Veronica had been put to bed (Lori stayed home with her, and yes, I feel the need to point out that I'm not completely irresponsible). We were both talking about how much we were (ahem) mildly unsatisfied at our jobs, and we both mentioned that at one point, we had planned to go to law school. We'd had a few beers, and I started mildly entertaining the idea of quitting and going back to school - the kind of conversation that starts with "wouldn't it be great if I could..." and generally ends with "oh well". But the idea stuck, and within a few weeks, I was taking that first practice LSAT and scheduling visits to UK Law's open houses.

From the time I took my first practice test until I took the real thing, I practiced harder for the LSAT than I've ever done for any kind of test in my life. I worked at least one section each night for two months, often doing more than one if I had time. I was lucky in that even early on, I was consistently missing no more than 1-2 answers on the reading comprehension, so I was able to focus on logic games and analytical reasoning. I found that I had a lot of room to improve on both. I love logic games, and I do well at them, but I didn't do very well at all when I had to do four in 35 minutes. And as far as the analytical reasoning questions went, the biggest problem I had was looking for the best answer instead of the right answer, since so many of those questions had either multiple or no right answers in the given options. Every weekend, I took a full test (though sometimes I mixed it pu, and took four argument sections, or two arguments and two games, etc.), starting with the most recent test available from LSAC and working my way back through the published tests. I used this book of tests (19-28) and Test 51 from December of 2006, but this collection is actually more recent (29-38) (these and all the links to books that follow are indeed Amazon affiliate links, so I get a little kickback if you use them; did I mention I'm not allowed to work my first year of school?). These are the actual LSAT tests given to prospective students, and include the grading conversion charts for each particular test. It was neat to see how different my score might be after missing the same number of questions as I had on the previous week's test.

As far as test prep books went, I also purchased and/or borrowed from the library almost every LSAT prep book available. I ended up getting the most out of the book from the Princeton Review, primarily because of the extensive section on strategies for each type of argument. In case you're curious, I found the Barrons book to be the most lacking in this department. I think that's mainly because of the approach the books took; the first was written assuming that you wouldn't be taking the LSAT anyway if you weren't a bit intelligent, while the latter spent so much time on the basics that there simply weren't many pages spent on advanced improvement techniques. I worked through the logic game strategies in the different books as well, but I didn't get as much out of them, as I was already pretty familiar with the different game types. I got a lot out of Kaplan's Logic Games Workbook, which I carried with me and worked through in my spare time.

Anyway, I worked hard on this. All of the books, and the other test prep materials I read, either implied or flat-out stated that one could only hope to improve 4-5 points over a cold test score, but my hard work paid off: on my first real practice test, I got a 162. On the practice test I took the Saturday before the actual LSAT, I got a 176. I ended up with a 174 on the real test, which suited me just fine.

I guess, in addition to putting me in this fantastic position where I'm being considered for these scholarships, this effort and payoff really made an impression on me. I'm applying the same effort now to my running, and that seems to be working well so far. If I was asked for advice on the LSAT, I'd tell people to simply make a plan, and then work themselves into the ground. It's pretty simple advice, but it worked well for me.

Tags: books law school LSAT preparation scholaships

Posted by Dan on February 7, 2008 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)