The results are in

The moment you (mostly me) have all been waiting for finally arrived yesterday.

LSAC officially said I would receive my score on Oct. 26, but I heard from a lot of people that said it would come early. A former sports reporter of mine who took the LSAT, Chuck Krebs, was on top of it. He was retweeting every bit of information that gave a clue to when the scores would come. And every tweet of his added one more butterfly to my stomach, haha.

By Monday afternoon, it was getting to be now or nothing (or the next day). Erin got really anxious, and started following the news on Twitter and got even more antsy than me. After I was done with The Daily Universe's front page meeting, an email from LSAC was waiting for me. I snuck away outside the newsroom with my laptop and called Erin.

I got a 161 (83rd percentile).

Now, all along my prediction was 162. Which I think is why I wasn't very excited at first to read "161." I spent the last three weeks wondering "What if it turns out I did really awesome?" and hoping to be pleasantly surprised. I wasn't devastatingly disappointed, thank goodness. But it was hard at first to get excited.

But the more people I told, the better I felt each time. My friend Bert had some good advice: "... feel good. Check out the long list of good schools you should be able to get into and you'll feel better." Which was true. Earlier on this blog I shared a list of schools that had 160 as a median LSAT in their freshmen class last year. And some of those schools aren't half bad! Haha. And I called my mom and dad, and they were pretty impressed. Of course, they're my mom and dad. But my dad especially was excited for me.

So what happens now? The list of schools I want to apply to, as well as the schools I've recently added to it, isn't going to change. A 162 was already questionable for Notre Dame, Texas and Virginia, so a 161 is even more so. But, maybe if I write a really good personal statement, I'll be accepted there anyway, haha. (Speaking of which ... my advice to any aspiring law students: start your personal statements way earlier in the process than I am!)

One thing that's great is that LSAC also sends you your answers and the correct answers and the test booklet, so you can go over the whole test and see where you went right and wrong. And I found out something interesting.

In calculating all the practice LSATs I've ever taken, I average

62% correct in the logic games
75% in the logical reasoning
78% in the reading comprehension and
158.5 total.

Of course, I've improved a lot since my first test in July. If I count only practices since the week before the real test (Sept. 26), then it's

67.7% in logic games
73.5% in logical reasoning (weird, I actually got worse in that)
79.6% in reading comprehension
160.4 total.

For the real LSAT, here's how I did:

87% in logic games
76% in logical reasoning and
59% in reading comprehension.

Isn't that weird? I did way better than usual in logic games, a bit better in logical reasoning, and way worse in reading comprehension.

I calculated that if I had done my usual average on the reading comprehension section, I would have had a 164 or 165.

So I'm definitely going to try the LSAT again. It will help that we've now covered reading comprehension in my LSAT prep class (I guess that's the risk that comes with taking an LSAT prep class that doesn't finish before I take the test).

Of course, all these numbers mean only one thing: charts!