Be Gentle With Me

So today was the big day. Despite prepar­ing for the LSATs the best I could, I was still pretty ner­vous going in. Mean­ing more ner­vous than I’ve ever been for any other test I’ve taken before.

For those of you who don’t know the for­mat, the LSATs are split into five multiple-​choice sec­tions, there’s two ana­lyt­i­cal rea­son­ing sec­tions, where you read a para­graph and answer a ques­tion about it; one read­ing com­pre­hen­sion sec­tion where you read a longer excerpt and answer sev­eral ques­tions about it; one log­i­cal rea­son­ing sec­tion where you are given a set of para­me­ters and answer some ques­tions on them given addi­tional para­me­ters; and one exper­i­men­tal sec­tion which could be any of the other three types, but it has exper­i­men­tal ques­tions and doesn’t count towards your actual score. Then there’s a writ­ten essay sec­tion that isn’t graded but is sent to all the schools you apply to along with your multiple-​choice score. You are given thirty-​five min­utes to com­plete each of the six sections.

So as I was say­ing, I came into the test ner­vous, but actu­ally got on a decent roll. I had ana­lyt­i­cal, read­ing, ana­lyt­i­cal, ana­lyt­i­cal, and then logic. I thought that I would do best in logic, given my engi­neer­ing back­ground and my course­work in dis­crete math. But alas, it wasn’t to be. I spent too much time graph­ing and re-​graphing the base para­me­ters and addi­tional ones for the first cou­ple of sets of prob­lems and real­ized I had killed twenty-​five of my thirty-​five min­utes. Then I rushed the last prob­lem sets, and even started doing all Cs when time was almost called. I feel like I could have done so much bet­ter if only I had a lit­tle more time, but I guess every­one feels the same way. My essay was short, but strong, like usual.

Over­all… I dunno. There’s def­i­nitely no chance I got 180. I’m hop­ing for 170, but we’ll see in three weeks, when the results from this round are pub­lished online. I talked to Jimmy after­wards, and he told me he got raped pretty badly, too. He came into it ner­vous like me, and we had dif­fer­ent forms, and his first sec­tion must have been his exper­i­men­tal, because it had extremely hard ques­tions that shat­tered what lit­tle com­po­sure he had left, and the effects stuck with him through­out the test.

So if you’re tak­ing the test in the next round, take it from Jimmy and me… keep a cool head, and keep an eye on the clock! And depend­ing on just how badly logic games screwed me, maybe we’ll be tak­ing it together.

Tags: Games, Work