Admit One...
Oct. 10th, 2019 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogIt's not like it was destiny or anything. I was no Oliver Barrett IV, born and bred to follow in the legal footsteps of I, II and III. Hell, just getting a B.A. was the immediate-family record on my side until Emily tied it five years ago. But after my first three years of a broad undergraduate education, I'd discovered several things about myself:
- I couldn't play, write or even listen to music with skills that would be professionally useful (I was assisted in figuring out the "listening" part of that by a primordial Internettish system called PLATO, which Cornell officially allowed me to use in my sophomore year for ear training but which unofficially introduced me to Star Trek-related video games);
- One introductory computer science course told me I had an aptitude for programming, but not the intestinal fortitude to keep up with the science and engineering majors who'd been, yes, programmed from a far earlier age to go into it;
- I would never speak or understand Spanish beyond a rudimentary ¿Dónde está el baño? kind of way;
- Although I'd declared as an English major from the get-go, I did not have the deep desire to read enough for graduate school, the creativity to become a full-time fiction author, or the tolerance of smart-ass 19-olds to spend the next 40 years teaching smart-ass 19-year-olds.
And so, armed with some limited knowledge of one weird building on our campus, one student therefrom who still wrote for the Cornell Sun, and a brief reading of Scott Turow's nonfiction account of being a 1L, I checked out the requirements for a J.D., which, back then, I pretty much took to stand for Just Delaying.
----
Unlike medical schools, which largely began dictating prepatory curricula from nursery school onward (Bio 000000000.3- How to Sterlize Your Pillow During Nap), law schools neither required nor even recommended particular courses or majors. Get a well-rounded education!, they said. (We want those skulls all full of mush so we can mess with them ourselves!, they meant.) Whether a result or prelude, only one of my first three years of undergrad courses had the word "Law" in the title- Communications Law, taught by a Sun advisor and Ag school professor named Dale Grossman, retired but still kicking as of a year ago:)
But there was a test. There's always a test. I'd done well at these. In elementary school, I blew the doors off third-grade assessments so loudly, they offered to ship me to a gifted student program at a nearby elementary school in the district and accelerate my graduation by a year. We passed on that, but years later my SATs were Cornell-worthy, so this next round in 1980 would now be taking the law school equivalent of that assessment- then, as now, known as the L_SAT.
(Fun fact: there is no underscore in that, but my blogging software keeps autocorrecting the four letters L, S, A and T to "Last." So D_E_A_L when I refer to it with that extra _.)
Although "known" by the same name back then, the test itself was not the same as it's been for most of the decades since. The 1980 admission exam I took was essentially an amped-up cousin to the verbal section of the college-entry SAT I'd taken four years before, and scored on the same scale minus a digit, so 20-to-80, not 200-to-800. It included reading comprehension, analogies, and similar verbal-burbles you could work out entirely in your head. The only scoring difference from the SAT is the Legal Eagles took points off for wrong answers, so guessing was discouraged. Another difference: undergraduate programs accepted your highest SAT score, but law schools considered your average L_SAT score after repeat takes- unless, say, something weird happened on the day you took it.
As, of course, it did for me.
----
A Saturday, in the Hall, I think it was the middle of June.
For my second straight summer, I was living in Ithaca, working in the dining facilities, living on Highland Road and honing my nooz skillz for the upcoming semester on The Sun- but I'd dropped whatever the then-modest fee was to take the L_SAT at Myron Taylor Hall, home of the Cornell Law School.
No Kaplan course, no sample exams beyond the questions in the book they sent with the registration materials. This was a lark, and I treated it as such. We took our seats in Myron's cafeteria, were thumbprinted (don't recall that for the SAT, but law school stakes were higher, apparently), handed our bubble-covered answer sheets and DO NOT UNSEAL AND BEGIN UNTIL TOLD TO DO SO exam books, and, we were off.
Two pages in, we were WAY off.
There, at the bottom of page three, no bottom of page three. Question 5 on the bottom, and Question 7 behind it on page 4, were missing. You could see the hand-torn tear in the page. This was no printer's error; this was what Bugs Bunny once referred to as
Okay, maybe not that much.
Instead, I was well and truly forked. As in fork in the road. The proctor said, in essence:
You wanna be a lawyer? Well, here's your first lesson in election of remedies: You can stop right now, no score reported, and get a free retake next time, still in time to apply for the fall of 1981. Or you can siddown and shaddap and not answer two freakin questions out of however many are in that book.
I had less than 30 seconds to decide. Final Jeopardy! gets you more. Hmmmmmbupbupbupbup That retake would be during the fall semester, with classes and newspaper and 20-plus hours a week of work and maybe even a girlllllll, and I'm here, and it's just two questions, and I really don't care anyway, and.....
I saddown. I shaddapped. I finished the incomplete exam and turned in my page of bubbles.
Weeks later, I got my score. I forget what it was. Something equivalent to mid-to-upper 600s on SAT verbal. Enough to sail into UB. Not enough for Cornell or NYU. Just below Columbia, who waitlisted me (I'd committed to UB before they ever got to me).
(I said there was a second Sign From God about this whole process. I'm saving that for another post.)
-----
What reminded me of all this was something that wasn't on my L_SAT, and which, after many changes, isn't on it anymore.
The test itself, and the scoring scale, went through many changes after they took it off the stone tablets which I was subjected to (try filling in bubbles with a chisel;). For one thing, the reported scaled score stopped tracking the 20-to-80 SAT analog sometime in the 80s; you now get something between a 120 and a 180, with 150 being the median. They also added a writing sample component, but also, until recently, threw in a section that included series of problems referred to as "logic games."
Wanna try one? Click this. Or just look at the sample setup of one from that example and the first two questions based on it....
An advertising executive must schedule the advertising during a particular television show. Seven different consecutive time slots are available for advertisements during a commercial break, and are numbered one through seven in the order that they will be aired. Seven different advertisements � B, C, D, F, H, J, and K � must be aired during the show. Only one advertisement can occupy each time slot. The assignment of the advertisements to the slots is subject to the following restrictions:
B and D must occupy consecutive time slots.
B must be aired during an earlier time slot than K.
D must be aired during a later time slot than H.
If H does not occupy the fourth time slot, then F must occupy the fourth time slot.
K and J cannot occupy consecutively numbered time slots.
1.Which of the following could be a possible list of the
advertisements in the order that they are aired?
(A) BDFHJCK
(B) CJBHDKF
(C) HBDFJCK
(D) HDBFKJC
(E) HJDBFKC
2. If advertisement B is assigned to the third time slot, then which
of the following must be true?
(A) C is assigned to the sixth time slot.
(B) D is assigned to the first time slot.
(C) H is assigned to the fourth time slot.
(D) J is assigned to the fifth time slot.
(E) K is assigned to the seventh time slot.
There are four more questions based on that just that one fact pattern. The L_SAT, when it included this craziness, expected you to do four such fact patterns in just over half an hour.
The testers recently announced they are dropping these "games" after a discrimination lawsuit was brought on behalf of blind applicants. It's generally understood that to succeed at these problems, you need to work them out with diagrams, which require (or at least benefit greatly from) seeing the diagrams you've worked out.
That's entirely fair. What may or not be just as fair is, there are different kinds of "seeing." And for all my mad test-taking skills, visualizing has never been big among them. If these games had been on my L_SAT, I fully expect my score would have been in the 50s (500, or dead average on the SAT equivalent), if not lower. I fully doubt I would have gotten into UB. And I fully wonder if I would have spent the past almost 40 years working at a Pudgie's Pizza in Cortland while trying to get my first novel published and not having the life, the wife, the child or the memories that have come since that strange experience.
Wonder with me, and come back for the law school application- we're gonna do.... MAINFRAMES!
no subject
Date: 2019-10-11 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-12 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-14 07:00 pm (UTC)Duly noted. (Also read, appreciated, and commented on.)