Okay, back from the LSAT. Some general thoughts/impressions/etc:
On UMass Boston: The place is one of the most horrific examples of architecture/planning I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. It’s like City Hall Plaza, but without the good parts, and without coffee. The only thing that can possibly be said in it’s favor is that it’s near Dorchester Bay. But the way the campus is constructed, you can’t even see the water. It closes out the outside world by presenting a blank, brick face to anyone not already within the confines. And then it makes the inside of the complex claustrophobic by preventing even a view outside.
If you’ve ever read Neal Stephenson’s “The Big U”, it’s almost the way that he describes American Megaversity, but without the dorms — add a couple of towers and you’d have the perfect representation of the Plex.
At the time that I walked into the test building: “Damn, but that’s a lot of white people.” Out of 27 people taking the LSAT in my test room, 26 were white. 1 was asian. I’m beginning to have a little bit of sympathy for places like the University of Michigan Law School when they complain that they can’t maintain racial balance because of a lack of candidates who aren’t white or asian. There were probably 500 people taking the test at UMass this morning, and no more than 3 or 4 were not white and not asian.
Walking into the test room: Probably more than anything else, the LSAT gets easier when you know that you’re the smartest person in the room. The converse of this: the LSAT gets a lot harder when you realize that everyone else is much more prepared. (A corrolary: wearing the “Princeton Review LSAT Prep” T-shirt that you got free at the end of the prep course to the actual exam immediately removes all possible benefit of having taken the prep course.)
The test itself: Basically, there’s a little bit too much mind-reading involved in the LSAT. You’re given 5 possible answers on each question, a normal ABCDE format. However, on the “Arguments” sections, more than one of the possible answers may be right. In fact, more often than not there is more than one answer that’s correct. The task that you’re given is to find the “most correct” answer. The correct answers may differ by virtue of addressing different holes in the given argument, or by as little as a distinction in the relative strength of a qualifier (“some” vs. “most” being the relevant distinction on 3 of the argument questions on today’s test). The actual selection of the “most correct” answer relies on your opinion of the strength of the qualifiers in the argument agreeing with the opinion of the question author on that same point. It’s a little bit silly.
Basically, the Arguments section of the test is just application of Aristotelian logic. It’s not that hard: if-then statements; causality; assumptions; argument from analogy. It’s pretty basic stuff. But it’s also very, very hard to test in a multiple choice format. Much more useful would be an open-response type test, one that asked you to analyze/justify/explain/weaken/strengthen/etc an argument, and then allowed you to do so — instead of the LSAC folks trying to come up with some possible answers, and then leaving you to guess which of the two right ones is the real right one.
Riding the bus back to the train station: Funny how easy it is to tell when there’s a comic book convention going on at the Bayside Expo Center.
Overall: Assuming that I got all of the questions wrong on which I took wild-assed guesses with 30 seconds left, I’m maxing out at around 172. Best bet, probably somewhere around 165 or so, but it could vary anywhere from 145 to 170. See the above explanation of the LSAT’s stupid “guess what we’re thinking” approach.