The Odyssey, or, the Education of a Law School Applicant

My ambivalence as a law school applicant was my grandfather's fault. He grew up in a German-speaking home, and as an undergraduate he slyly enrolled in (and aced, naturally) courses in basic German. He got his JD from the University of Michigan in the 1930s, and I can only assume law school admission requirements were a tad lower in the days of Prohibition than they are today. That's the only explanation I can come up with for the fact that he spent his nights running booze over Lake Michigan. Then there was his stint as a solo practitioner immediately after law school, when on some days he left his "Out to Lunch" sign in the window from morning until night.

If he wasn't as hardworking as most lawyers, my grandfather carried himself in a way that made me want to be one. He wore double-breasted suits, swung a pocket watch, and had his groceries delivered. He bought chocolates and music boxes for strangers. On a deeper level, I saw an ennobling sense of tradition in the diploma on his wall at home, a veneer of professionalism, of belonging. To a kid with a hippie college professor for a dad, Grandpa's colleagues comprised an enticing club. My early admiration for lawyering, you see, had nothing to do with the actual job of being a lawyer.

I didn't get a notion of that until I started my first job out of college as a gofer at a big personal injury firm on the top floor of the tallest skyscraper in Minneapolis. I hadn't yet decided I wanted to be an attorney, but for some reason I wanted to fetch their Reubens. Again, judging strictly by the lifestyle, this was the place to be. The credenzas were cherry, the coffee cups were made of bone china, and even the paralegals had window offices. But just as obvious as the perks was the workload that paid for them. Shelves everywhere sagged under the weight of accordion folders stuffed with documents. And the lawyers! Good people who once maybe held dreams of writing fiction, of playing pro tennis — heck, of trying cases — muttering into Dictaphones all day, their backs to the beautiful view of the Mississippi River. The work of a lawyer seemed to come down to a lifetime of cranking out letter after letter stating the same basic thing: that the plaintiff had suffered a 20 percent permanent partial disability and would settle for no less than $147,598.63.

All of which is to say, no one goes in fully informed when deciding to become a lawyer. You may have an uncle in patent law, you may have taken a great college class in constitutional history, or you may be responding, as I was, to a secretary who says one day, "You would be good in front of a jury — your voice sounds like you're stupid, but you say smart things." But when you send out your crisp law school applications, you can't possibly understand what you're signing up for.

While the only profession with its own writing pad draws you in for half-baked reasons, however, the law school monolith is crushingly straightforward. From the test-writing and application-sorting Politburo known as LSAC (the Law School Admission Council) to the commercial test-prep empire to the schools themselves, the gate-keeping system greets all who enter with the same limp handshake and faceless smile. You may be selecting a school, but only in the way a fly selects which way to tumble when it's sucked into the airshaft outside a Sam's Club. They — the test-prep people, the LSAC, and, of course, the schools — do the choosing.

I didn't know any of this on the quiet afternoon in the last heady days before 9/11 when I found myself typing the words "law school application" into Google. What followed were three months on what seemed a solitary road — the application process — that actually was traveled by 90,900 people that academic year. It was a road that required LSAT cramming, school brochure scanning, college transcript requesting, reference letter hustling, and more than a little handicapping. I pondered the big questions that came with my decision: Should I shoot for a nationally known school, or one good enough to land me at a decent firm near where I lived? Should I look for an area of law that would enable me to make the world a better place, or one that would enable me to drive a better car? I caught a buzz from the scale of these questions and from the potential for renewal that would surely accompany my life change. I wanted to drop my dreams on the doorsteps of good schools and wait for them to come true. I wanted a bright, white diploma like the one my grandfather hung on his dark-paneled wall at home. I wanted to change the world. I wanted someone to fetch my sandwiches. I wanted to be a lawyer.

You need only three things to apply to law school: an LSAT score, an undergraduate transcript, and two letters of recommendation. The clearinghouse for the whole process is the LSAC, a 55-year-old nonprofit corporation based in Newtown, Pennsylvania, whose website is the access point for every law school from Yale to the University of Hawaii. With a credit card and an Internet connection, you can purchase everything you need during a Law & Order commercial break: the service that compiles your records (the Law School Data Assembly Service, or LSDAS; $109), LSAT registration ($108), actual previous LSATs to use as practice tests (in collections of 10 for $30 or newer ones at $8 apiece), software that lets you apply to any school without having to answer the same question twice (LSACD-ROM; $59), and the definitive handbook on everything you need to know about the schools (the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools; $24). Three hundred bucks and you're almost an applicant.

There's a downside to the fact that essentially all you need to show is a GPA and an LSAT score, though: The application process can convince you that all you are is a GPA and an LSAT score. The schools do require a short essay and some written answers, your job history, and, sometimes, interviews. But as an applicant, you get the feeling that while these may tilt the scales, they aren't what puts you in the hunt. The fact that you feel like a number may be just dandy for people who like that kind of thing — the kids in high school who lived and died by their SAT scores. But some people don't quantify so easily, and not all of them (er, us) are slackers. Because of this undeniable fact, you have to wonder if the seeming numerization of every applicant isn't the first of many ways the process passively weeds out certain types of bright people.

My numerization began in late August, when the initial thrill of applying was tempered by the envelope that showed up from my college registrar's office. Far removed from the reality of my college years, I had come to think of myself as the kind of student who had made dean's list every semester. And since college I had put together a freelance writing career worthy of an Ivy League 4.0. Yet here was my transcript, reminding me that I was still a Macalester College 3.01. Scanning the median GPAs for the top-ten schools, I had to ask: Who were these Mary Lou Rettons scoring 3.8s and 3.9s in college? And what was I thinking back then, a history major taking Russian and computer programming? I wanted a box on the applications to indicate that mine were the long-ago grades of a would-be Renaissance man. I began to think that maybe I really was my grandfather's grandson, born in an era when you could no longer fool the University of Michigan.

But although my GPA had been decided long ago, there was infinite hope for my LSAT score. LSAC, the makers of today's three-hour, five-part, roughly 100-question, 180-scale exam, say that it's not an IQ test. Nor, they point out, do LSAT scores predict who will pass the bar, much less who will become a good lawyer. What the test measures, they contend, is the likelihood of success in your first year of law school. But for me it was hard not to conclude that the LSAT measures little more than your ability to take the LSAT. Even LSAC estimates the test accounts for only 16 percent of the variance in law school grades, and its critics put the figure as low as nine percent. Still, LSAC takes pride in its product. According to LSAC spokesman Ed Haggerty, "It's the best predictor known. Grades, family background — all those things are less predictive than the LSAT."

Counterpoint: "Of all the standardized tests, LSAT is the one that rewards gamesmanship the most," says Robert Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, a Cambridge-based organization that advocates alternatives to standardized testing. Schaeffer calls the widespread practice of LSAT coaching "the equivalent of steroids — it boosts your test scores without getting at the underlying trait."

LSAC produces its own research arguing that the effects of coaching are marginal. Whatever the case, of the three ways of thinking tested by the LSAT, the first two — reading and logic — are moderately distorted representations of things you do every day. The third — analysis — Schaeffer calls "an esoteric mind game." I have to agree. It's a series of analytical-reasoning problems in which a typical question might ask test takers to organize a garden full of vegetables that can or can't be planted this way or that. My Princeton Review book had taught me to scribble little pictures, graphs, charts, and symbols to eliminate the obviously wrong answers from the multiple choices. I wanted to suggest calling the guy at the garden store, but I swept aside such cynicism; as testing day approached I wasn't self-aware enough to distance my ego from the challenge. I wanted to study like hell. I sat at my dining room table and tore through 16 different three-hour practice tests in four weeks. At first I cheated on the timer a little, and I found that giving myself just five extra minutes on one 35-minute section could elevate my scores from regional-best to national-best percentiles. It was a small enough fudge to make a person optimistic and resentful — optimistic that he was close to greatness, resentful that the small remaining barrier seemed insurmountable. What kind of test uses five minutes to separate the As from the Bs?

By the middle of October, after I had taken the LSAT for the first time (more on that in a moment) and while I awaited my results, I began to divide schools into piles that represented my idea of what kind of lawyer I wanted to become. These piles were, looking back, ridiculous. I can thank the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings issue for hammering a few ball-peen dents into my internal compass. I logged on and printed out the lists like everyone else, and I began to ogle the schools on the magazine's first tier with the misplaced reverence usually accorded the girl in high school you don't really know but covet anyway because everyone else does. I felt I belonged in that first tier. And in addition to throwing off my perspective, the Rorschach blot of school rankings wasn't helping my humility, either. Where I went to school was eclipsing in importance the act of going to school at all, and maybe even the idea of becoming a lawyer. Were the numbers to blame for the alternate universe I was entering, in which the goal is to get a high number so you can get into a school that has a high number? I pondered this for about five seconds, then began filling out applications.

At about $50 an application, I figured I could afford six schools. I picked them geographically, sticking close to home: the University of Chicago (a top-10 school); Northwestern and the University of Minnesota (top 20); Loyola University (ranked 63rd); and DePaul and William Mitchell (both tier threes). Each had its own appeal: Chicago seemed freakishly smart. U of M was big on international law. Loyola sat on a beautiful corner in the best part of downtown Chicago. DePaul seemed like a place that prized good values and public interest. William Mitchell had a reputation for being a feeder school to the money jobs in Minneapolis.

Then there was Northwestern. I wanted Northwestern bad. It was ranked high but not inhumanly so. It required an interview, which I'm usually good at. It had stone courtyards. Newcomers averaged 167 on the LSAT and a GPA of 3.6. On some of my home tests, I was getting mid- to high-160s. Northwestern seemed reachable. Or the LSAT score did, anyway. Sort of.

Around the time of the Northwestern admissions interview, I found out my first official LSAT score (I had paid 10 bucks extra to hear the results early over the phone). Based on the home tests, I figured my score could have been as low as 158 or as high as 164. The line was busy all day, but I got through at about 10 p.m. After punching in an interminable series of directory buttons, my Visa card number, and my LSAC identification number, I heard the three digits that held my fate, spoken with excruciating slowness by an automated female voice:

"...One...

...Fifty..."

Shit!

"...Nine." As soon as I heard the "fifty" I knew I'd have to take the test again.

According to the Princeton Review booklet, which aspires to be as much a self-help tome as a study manual, a good score is the score that gets you into the law school of your choice. Thanks, guys. My score seemed so wrong that I immediately signed up for the next scheduled test, $96 and four weeks later. (Most schools take your average score.)

To distract me from my 159, there was the Northwestern interview, a mid-afternoon chat in a glass office, which I reached by passing through the school's glamorous entrance on Chicago's Gold Coast and a majestic courtyard. I walked through an atrium and gazed at the students gathering between classes. Perhaps they would become human someday were I to join them, but for now they were 167s. People who could organize a garden in a hurry.

I showed up early, wearing a smart Hart Schaffner Marx charcoal two-piece with a power tie and white shirt. My conservative shirt choice stung me the moment I saw Johann, the admissions officer. His dark suit was paired with a much cooler, dark-blue shirt. He was younger than I, and good at what he did: The time flew, but I left with no clear idea of whether I was brilliant or he was that nice to everyone.

I should say at this point, in my defense, that law school applications nationwide jumped 17.4 percent the year I applied, the largest spike in wannabe lawyers in 20 years. The increase was likely a symptom of the bad economy, says LSAC's Haggerty: "A lot of people coming out of college were having a difficult time getting jobs and tended to think perhaps that the thing to do is to sit out bad times in law school."

The trend continues — this fall LSAC was forecasting a double-digit increase in applicants over last year, with the net result being an ever more competitive pool. When I applied, Northwestern had seen a 25 percent jump in applicants over the previous five years, and their LSAT median had held steady at 167 from 1999 through 2001. Why couldn't I have applied a little eariler in the tech boom, when the 167s were riding Razor scooters around dot-com offices? I had to focus. After spending the month of November prepping feverishly for my second LSAT, practicing on my weakness (analysis) and polishing my strengths (reading and arguments), I took the test, my last chance at the kind of score that would make Johann sit up and take notice. On a clear blue Saturday, I drove to a generic auditorium on a generic state school campus. After months of studying, I had forgotten the strange banality of test day. The people administering the exam acted more like grocery checkout clerks than the guardians of America's law schools that, to everyone else in the room, they were. I looked at the 50 kids around me, who could have been struggling for a 145 for all I knew.

Who were they? Had they wanted to be lawyers since they were little? Or were they taking the test on a whim? Had they sat at the bar — the drinking kind — like I had the week before, chatting up a guy their age who tried cases in court for corporate clients, and wishing they were him?

I roared through the first arguments section. I would later learn that I answered 19 of the first 20 questions correctly, only to sink five of the last six. The reading comp section came next, and I knew I needed to pound it like a flank steak if I was going to make up for my certain shortcomings in the analytical-reasoning Rubik's cube that would be the test's finale. One wrong out of 26. By the third section, another batch of arguments, I was tired but focused, and hauled in 23 out of 26. Finally, I slogged through the analysis monster, organizing fruit stands, radio call-in schedules, bus seating arrangements, and co-worker assignments. Thirty-five minutes disappeared, and then poof — "Please put down your pencils."

The next thing I remember, it was just before Christmas and I was placing my second call to the automated LSAT scoring service. After the same interminable punching of numbers, there was a pause, and then the same torpid robot voice:

"Your LSAT score is...

"...One...

...Sixty..."

Yes! Come on, baby. Keep going. Come on!

But that was it. She was done. One-sixty. I had raised my score one point.

It turns out that in the last games section, I had gone on a wrong-answer streak that defied the odds of chance, getting 15 out of 23 wrong, including 14 out of the last 15 questions. "You hit a wall," is what Haggerty told me later when I recounted my incredible backward end run. Maybe he was right. Then again, maybe he was being nice. Maybe the test knew me. Maybe I really was a 159-to-160 kind of person. And maybe that was the real wall I hit.

"We have placed you on our wait list," read the postcard from the University of Minnesota. (Was Grandpa ever placed on a wait list? Did they have wait lists back then?) Loyola and DePaul said yes quickly, which felt good. Chicago (and eventually Minnesota, after the wait-list charade) denied me, and after what seemed like the longest wait of all, so did Northwestern.

Trailing the academic parade through my mailbox was an entirely unexpected surprise: a letter offering an 80 percent scholarship to William Mitchell. And they weren't the only ones to make me feel wanted: I began to receive a steady stream of requests to apply to lesser-known schools, schools that were probably very good but whose names I hadn't cared enough to learn. I mention this good fortune without fear of coming off as a gloating goon, because while I know that many worthy students would love to get a scholarship from such a fine school, or to receive all those nice letters from the other schools that sought me, they also know the nature of the law school game: The love of virtually any school is cancelled out by the rejection of virtually any other.

Or maybe that's just the case for applicants who take it all up out of fear and ego and boredom. Just as I was coming to see the advantages of attending a school where I knew I would be able to thrive, the human object of my desire — my wife — received a great job offer in a small town many miles from both Chicago and Minneapolis. Almost instantaneously, hopping off the wild law school ride felt right.

I hadn't come to know the test any better the second time, but I knew a lot more about why so many people take it. I'd learned that those people muttering into Dictaphones had been through something much harder than playing pro tennis or writing fiction or even trying cases. They had stepped onto an assembly line with the hope of making themselves into something bigger and better than they were. They had confronted a baffling test and agreed to abide by what it found. They had struggled to piece together a personal essay justifying their decision, the one human element of the whole process, and then wondered whether it even mattered.

And — here's the part that really shook me — they had done all this just to reach the starting line.

Now I had done it, too, and found there was a place for me, a club in which I was not only accepted but wanted. For me, that was enough. For everyone who accepted an offer, it was only the beginning, a beginning they had probably been anticipating since they were kids. I called William Mitchell, thanked them for the scholarship, and told them I would not be attending. But I asked them to hold on to my records. Just in case.