There I was, in my senior year of high school, clicking my pen as the final days of the semester rolled by. I was waiting for college decision letters, I was waiting for my annoying AP classes to be over and, most importantly, I was waiting to move away and live on my own.
I’d had enough of waiting. It was my only constant in life, and I couldn’t be bothered to do anything except doomscroll all day.
So I took a practice LSAT, or Law School Admissions Test.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it? How is it possible that someone could become so bored that taking the LSAT could become an interesting and worthwhile thing to do?
Apparently, I had reached that point.
I learned two things that day. The first is that the LSAT isn’t as scary as people make it out to be. The second is that — in some circumstances — the advice to wait to study for graduate school exams in your junior or senior year is misguided.
Fundamentally, the underlying issue with the suggestion that students should wait to take graduate school exams until later in their college careers is that this suggestion is based on the average student’s overall “schedule” for their undergraduate education.
In the initial years of college, students are mostly concerned with getting their core curriculum requirements out of the way. Depending on the major, core curriculum or major requirements can comprise the primary difficulty of undergraduate education, preventing effective studying early in undergrad.
On the contrary, students primarily take electives during their junior and senior years, allowing more time to study for grad school exams. In essence, that’s the basis for this strategy: Study while you have time, not early in college when you’re starting classes and becoming acquainted with college life.
There are a couple of problems with that idea.
First, some students are busier during their junior or senior years than they are during freshman or sophomore year.
It’s true that you could take a bunch of blow-off electives during your final years in college, but it’s also possible that you might want to be involved in student organization leadership, advanced research opportunities or even a job later on in undergrad.
If that’s the case, you might not have much time to study for graduate school exams as an upperclassman, leaving the majority of the time you might want to use to study for these exams available to you earlier in college.
The second issue with this suggestion is that you won’t know your standing — or your “diagnostic score” — on any graduate exam until very late into your academic career.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the most relieving parts of taking the LSAT practice exam early was that I knew where I was; I had a sense of how well I understood the exam and how much I might have to study to reach my target score.
Thankfully, I was a lot closer to my target score than I thought I would be, and that moved me to take the exam a lot earlier than I thought otherwise would. It gave me a certain peace of mind, too: I know I won’t have to go into the exam blind just a few months before law school, since I’ve already taken it.
And — in most cases — graduate exams remain valid for several years, meaning that you won’t have to worry about your exam going bad. In my case, the LSAT remains valid for 5 years after the test date. Some exams have a slightly shorter time frame before they become invalid, but unless you’re taking a graduate exam in the first semester of freshman year, you probably won’t have a problem.
Ultimately, the choice of when to take a graduate school exam is one that has to be made personally. You can take a pre-law advisor’s advice or you can take my advice, but it’s really not a decision that has a formula or a particular answer. You could even work for a few years and take your graduate exam after college.
Personally, I’ll be relieved going through the rest of college knowing that I’m getting half of my law school application out of the way in my first years here. And that’s enough for me to take the LSAT in my sophomore year.
If you’re anxiously waiting to take graduate exams until later just because someone told you that’s what people normally do, just know that you have options. And if you want to get it over with, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Kaleb Blizzard is a philosophy sophomore and opinion writer for The Battalion.
