The SAT. The SAT II. The ACT. The LSAT. The GRE. The MCAT.
Sound familiar?
As I prepare to take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) this Saturday, I can’t help but feel a déjà vu from my junior and senior years of high school.
The same nerves, questions, concerns and overall mess that was my life prior to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), I once again feel for the LSAT. This sense of melancholy has given me time to evaluate my education to this point and come to this harsh realization: it has been nothing but a hypocrisy.
True, that is a bold statement that has perhaps come from months of intensive work for a single test, but it is still a valid observation.
As a student, my life has been dominated by tests. Always in constant competition with my peers and classified by a mere number. How do you stack up? (Did you break the elusive 1400 on your SAT?)
However, my teachers always preached well roundedness, learnedness, and the ability to do your best, even if you don’t succeed. You all remember those lectures; but today, as a college student, it is laughable. If you don’t make the grade, you don’t succeed.
Even the college motto of “serving your community,” “broadening your horizons,” and “making the most of your education,” is a fallacy. When three years of your four-year career are dedicated to mandatory courses, how much exploring can you do?
Similar to high school, you are placed in a never-ending battle against your classmates to achieve the highest student ranking. Too bad, because I would have loved to have taken a language course in Chinese.
As an eternal cynic, skeptic and realist, even I took a while to realize the true meaning of education and it is the root of all evil: money.
As much as educational institutions hate to admit it, they are a business and they are in it to make money. Never before have I seen it so clearly until this fiasco with the LSAT.
Consider this, before you even take the test, let alone get into law school, you are in considerable debt. You start off by paying a service to allow you to take the test and apply to law school, the Law School Data Assembly Service and Law School Admissions Council (LSDAS and LSAC).
After that, they so humbly allow you to pay for the LSAT itself. So to this point, I am hundreds of dollars in debt and no closer to law school.
Then there are the inevitable study costs. They’re optional, but you won’t see a kid without at least a study guide. So if you take a course, there’s a few hundred more dollars down the drain.
This process can continue through hiring college counselors, taking the test multiple times, etc., still, none of it guarantees you admission into a law school. So what are you paying for? A better chance?
Is there no greater business scheme than education?
Despite all of this, in the end the student still loses, as there are no feasible outs or alternatives to the college or post-college process (believe me, I’ve tried). We must rest our laurels on our hopes and dreams that the monotonous, tedious, daunting and seemingly hypocritical world that is our education pays off in the very thing that oppresses us: the major paycheck.
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