<p>I've been reading that the LSAT is the biggest factor in making or breaking your law school application. Just a hypothetical situation here---- let's say I get my scores back, and they're significantly lower than what I was expecting, and I lose my desire to go to law school. Does that mean I shouldn't have been considering law in the first place? I know I'm not that brilliant, so I'm not even thinking about Harvard, Yale, etc. but what does this say about my motivation?</p>
<p>Should I be so dead-set on law as a profession (because I know a lot of people go into it for the money and end up unhappy) that I don't care which law school I go to in the end, so long as I'm <em>in</em> law school? I'm not trying to sound elitist or anything, I was just curious. I want to be doing this for the right reasons. </p>
<p>Maybe only I can answer that question, but I honestly don't know what I would do in that situation. I'm confused and scared. If I crap it up on the LSAT, I don't really have a solid back-up plan besides teaching high school..... if I can find a job. It's depressing, really.</p>
<p>Oh, a fellow humanities/ social science major (am i right?). I was actually considering some options before I got my LSAT score back, and well the options aren't that bad. Personally, I enjoy teaching/ tutoring so I wouldn't have had qualms, but if you get a bad LSAT just retake. If your LSAT is on the borderline for a schools admissions, use the time off to do something productive and pamper your PS and resume. But before you even take the LSAT, you should take some significant time to consider why you are going to law school. Going to law school just in order to have the experience of law school is not a good reason. If you want prestige, why didn't you just go to an ivy for undergrad. If you are already at an ivy (or even at a top liberal arts or public engineering school currently), I don't really understand why you would need to spend 150,000 just to get a law degree that you have no significant desire to use.</p>
<p>Prestige isn't all that important to me. What matters more is the professional circles that are open to me after I graduate. I don't want to end up as some kind of shady, broken-down ambulance chaser. It seems like I'll be kind of limited in career prospects if I don't meet some kind of arbitrary standard and go to a first-tier school, whatever that may be. Sure, it would be nice to be able to tell people people "oh, I went to Harvard Law School" but in the end I just want the maximum amount of professional options. </p>
<p>And, understandably, the number of post-grad options seems to increase proportionally to the prestige-level of your law school. I guess I have a couple of options here--- lower my expectations, sacrifice my humanity and bankrupt myself studying for 'the single-most important test I'll ever take', or just blow it all off and teach high school Latin. I'm still confused and worried. If I open up that envelope and it says '157', I know I would be inconsolable.</p>
<p>Plus I've heard that, if you take the LSAT more than once, the law schools just average your scores. This seems like it would kind of defeats the purpose of taking it again in hopes of getting a much higher score seeing as how the new, higher score would just be brought down the lower, previous score. Is there any truth to this?</p>
<p>..... also, no offense intended to anyone who actually <em>did</em> score a 157 (or lower), that's just a lot lower than what I would have hoped for. Maybe I am an elitist pig after all, my apologies.</p>