LSAT Diary: LSAT Preparation and the Mormon Faith

This installment of LSAT Diaries comes from Mike, a practicing Mormon. In this LSAT Diary, he writes about how his faith served as inspiration and motivation for his LSAT prep.

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Please thank Mike for sharing his experience below in the comments!

Mike's LSAT Diary:

So, I’ve been studying for the LSAT for the past few months, and I just took the test in June, so I had to really buckle down. Since I didn’t have much time to spend on keeping up with current events, I don’t really know what’s going on in the world these days either, so I thought I’d write about what I have been doing, preparing for the LSAT, and I’ll relate it to faith as well.

Faith is an active principle for Mormons. Let’s say we have two farmers. Both purport to believe in God. Both pray that God will bless them with a bountiful harvest. The first goes out and plants and fertilizes and waters and weeds his crop and the second doesn’t. Even if the second was spending all of his time praying to God to bless him with a harvest, we believe that the first has more faith because he went out and did the work necessary for God to bless him. That doesn’t mean that we earn God’s blessings with our works, but that we put ourselves in a position in which God can bless us. After all, God generally won’t make seeds grow if they have never been planted.

With that same attitude I approached studying for the LSAT. I prayed and fasted for God’s help and lived in a way to keep him on my side (doing my best to obey his commandments). But I didn’t stop there. I knew that I had to do the work in order to get God’s blessings. Note: don’t read the next paragraph if you have no interest in the details of LSAT preparation.

First, I took an actual, official LSAT PrepTest (these are LSATs that have been administered in the past). I was pleased enough with my score that I decided not to take a LSAT prep class. Instead, I hunkered down and started familiarizing myself with the different types of questions and the timing that each section requires. My goal was to complete a test section every day and to complete an entire simulated test (four 35-minute sections) every week. In this process, I wasn’t happy with my performance on the logic games section. I could either do really well, or really poorly. I wanted to have more stability in my performance, so I bought the Logic Games Bible (I am not being compensated by PowerScore to promote their book, I’m just explaining explicitly how I prepared). It helped me get a handle on these games and stabilize my scores.

The Saturday before the test, I left the day open to replicate my test day schedule as best I could. I awoke at the same time, went through the same morning routine, ate the same food, and went to the same place. That’s right. I traveled all the way down to the testing center, just to be sure that I would know how to find it on the test day. I wanted to be sure that I eliminated all of the surprises that could pop up on the test day. After I found the testing center, I went home and took my final preptest and got a score that I was satisfied with.

For those of you who skipped the paragraph above, let me just say that I did a lot to prepare for the test. Did it improve my score? I will find that out in about three weeks. But I can tell you what it did do: it gave me confidence. Not confidence that I would necessarily get a great score, but that I had done all that I could to prepare myself for the test, both intellectually and logistically. Unless an act of God like a meteor impact on the street in front of my house prevented me from getting to the test center, I was going to get there. And I wasn’t going to get there only to find that I had brought the wrong kind of pencils. At that point, I could put my performance in God’s hands and be confident that he would help perform my best. As it says in the Doctrine and Covenants, “if ye are prepared ye shall not fear” (38:30).

Sometimes people shy away from mixing spiritual stuff and secular stuff. They seem to think that God simply tolerates their going to work and earning a living while what he’d really like them to do is read the scriptures and pray all day. But God knows better than anyone else that we need to make a living. In fact, God’s command is that “if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thess. 3:10). If God has commanded us to work, and if we do all that we ourselves can do, he will bless us so that our work is “for the welfare of [our souls]” (2 Nephi 32:9).

I don’t know exactly what God has in store for me, what path he will lead me down, but it appears as though at least part of that path includes a career in law. Or at least a stint in law school.

*If you want to warn me against the evils of going to law school, let me save you some time and effort. I already read Above the Law regularly, I’ve read the New York Times and the Economist articles about the trouble law grads are having finding jobs, and I know that being a lawyer isn’t like how television portrays it. In short, I have exposed myself to everything I can to dissuade me from going to law school and nothing has worked yet, so don’t waste your time.

Photo by bdorfman