Law School Admission Test Day

The LSAT is probably the most important part of admission into law school. I often thought about how many hours and literally years I spent working on my GPA to motivate myself to devote a lot of time to study and prepare. The LSAT consists of 6 timed sections of 35 minutes each. The order is random other than the last section, which is a written essay that isn't a factor in the score. The other sections are a logic games or analytical reasoning section, two logical reasoning sections, a reading comprehension section, and one experimental section which isn't included in the score. You don't know which is the experimental section so you have to do your best on all of them and hope the one you did the worst on is the experimental section. This is getting boring so I'll move on.

Korea's only place for taking the LSAT is in Seoul at Yonsei University. Yonsei is about 3 hours away from us. I needed to be there by 8:30 in the morning. Luckily the Oldroids, a nice family in the English Branch live within walking distance of Yonsei and let us stay at their house the night before the test. We are very grateful for their help. They fed us dinner that night, breakfast in the morning, gave me some fruit to take with to the test, lunch after and some cookies in a bag as we went home!

I was ready with the name of the building and had made sure to memorize the phrase "Where is..." to make sure I found it on time. I had also brought a little snack and some cough drops so if anyone was coughing I could share. Becky was nice enough to walk me to the test. Although we had been to the university before we came in the other side of campus than before. We were walking fast and I kept asking people where the building was for my test. I think I was asking them more to feel good that I could speak in Korean than to get help finding the building. I did end up having a nice man sweeping the road point me in the right direction. It was in a large building with several floors of classrooms all dedicated to the LSAT. We went up to my assigned classroom and waited in line. I did a set of logic game questions that I have successfully done before to help build my confidence and so my first questions would be stress free. Out of the 7 questions or so that I breezed through with ease I only got 4 correct. I was kind of shaken so I quickly checked to see what I did wrong. Shocked at my results I laughed, albeit a little nervously and determined not to be so stupid on the real test. I said my goodbyes to Becky and she took the cellphone and papers I had, they are very strict about what can be brought in the test room.

As I waited for the test to begin I tried to be positive and think of how well prepared and ready I was. My mind wandered and I noticed that many of the test takers had Korean passports. I started thinking how much of an advantage I would have against those in the room since I was probably one of a few taking the test in my native language. I started to notice many of the Koreans had U.S. passports and I thought, "Oh no their Asian American, they're all going to ace it!" The air was a little tense and so I tried to lighten it up a little and jokingly told the student behind me that whatever he does he should just make sure not to throw up on me, he laughed and we wished each other good luck. Students continued to file in and many of the desks were a little wobbly so staff and test takers alike were picking up desks and exchanging them with unused desks and others were folding up paper to stick under the shortest legs in an effort to stabilize their desks. I looked at my desks legs and realized that they were designed to get longer or shorter by spinning the bottom of the legs. I explained it to the guy next to me who was trying to get a staff to get paper for folding up under his desk. After spinning it the wrong way I showed him how to spin it the correct way and his desk was just fine. I tried to get the attention of the staff to show them how easy it was to fix rather than playing musical desks and their paper folding games, but I don't think they spoke English. The students obviously are trying to go to law school not engineering grad school.

The test was administered by a guy over an intercom. I was really happy to be taking the LSAT in Asia because testing is one of the things they do best, the staff didn't talk or disrupt us at all during the test and the timing was all perfect. As the test started I felt pretty good about all but one section. After we had our halfway break I ended up doing an extra section that was the same type as the one I did bad on so I am hoping that it was the experimental section. After the test was over the kid behind me said, "Sorry, I hope I wasn't coughing too much." I told him I didn't even hear him once. I must have been really focused. He was surprised, "I thought that's why you told me not to throw up on you." I felt so bad and apologized, I could've given him cough drops had I noticed. I hope he didn't spend too much test time worrying about what I had said as he tried to muffle his coughing. Oops, at least it was all over.