As I’ve mentioned before, DeVry University has its share of proud alums.

Interestingly, the University of Phoenix has at least one.

On my drive to work this morning, I saw a UoP license plate frame. I didn’t know they sold those. I didn’t know anybody would buy one. I definitely didn’t think anyone would actually put one on their car.

Maybe getting their own football stadium really has helped!

University of Delosa graduates have a well-earned reputation for arrogance. They often seem to believe that anybody that didn’t go there was automatically too stupid to get in or otherwise demonstrating their stupidity by choosing to go somewhere else even if they could get in. Of course, it’s not all DU graduates that thing this way, but it doesn’t take too many to give an entire alumni a reputation. The pride they feel is not completely unearned, however, as U of Delosa is the most difficult school to get into as well as the state’s flagship university.

Since graduating and having read blogs from across the country, there are apparently worse schools than DU in this regard. And worse regions. The notion that somebody went to a state university that isn’t considered an automatic exception (U of Michigan, Berkeley, etc) is a sign of diminished intelligence. Knowing nothing about it, Half Sigma said that the University of Idaho (Sarah Palin’s alma mater) sounded like a “bogus school”. The thing about a lot of people (though certainly not all) that feel this way is that they went to competitive private schools. A lot of them don’t realize that there school does not carry special weight in large swaths of the country, but they are the people that define success by the ability to make it in New York City and their degrees will carry more weight there so they don’t need to care what Idahoans think.

The most dumbfounding case of collegiate arrogance I have ever discovered, however, is DeVry University. Many of you may not have heard of it, but for those who have, yes I mean that DeVry. Formerly the DeVry Institute. Buyer of daytime TV ads across the country with those lists of areas of study scrolling across the screen.

I had never thought a whole lot of DeVry one way or the other. I had thought about going to a technical school upon graduation, but my mother talked me out of it. DeVry had the notability of being one of the first for-profit vocational schools to offer bonafide bachelor’s degrees. So credit to them for that, but beyond that, I figured that they were much like the others. I don’t mean that as an insult. I think that places like ITT Tech are unfairly scoffed at when in many cases they provide the education that the future-worker needs. I do not look down on people that have graduated from such places.

That being said, I was stunned by the number of people I knew in Deseret who believed that a degree from DeVry University was a bragging point. An argument settler, even. “You may think that you know a lot about OpenOffice because you use it extensively, but I went to DeVry University!” Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, but not far from it. Any time Teddy Forbes and I would come to verbal blows, he considered his trump card that he had a college degree. “When you’ve been to college, you realize that you being screwed and my having it easy is the way that the business world works. I made a point never to brag about my college degree when I was out there because it’s tasteless and also because it leads to the retort “If your degree is so awesome, what are you doing working here?” I wanted to ask Teddy that question. He had no such compunction about flashing his two-year DeVry degree around to prove that he was right about all things business-related.

One former coworker at Falstaff, Sal, was talking shiznit about having gone to DeVry, saying that he had a full-ride scholarship offer to the University of Deseret but had determined DeVry to be the better school and had gone there instead. Now it’s possible that DeVry has a better (or more applicable) computer science program than UDes on the merits, but I suspect that the vast majority of employers won’t see it that way. Not to mention that, for Sal in particular, he’s more likely to get a better college experience and save tens of thousands of dollars going to UDes.

One day I was complaining that the College of Industrial Technology had me taking math courses that made it difficult to change majors. “That’s why I went to DeVry”, coworker Edgar said, “because they don’t have that problem.” He may be right, though there is the issue of almost none of your very basic credits being transferable to just about any other university that is not a DeVry campus. Edgar of all people should have known this because he failed out of DeVry and could not pick up where he left off at local Beck State University. Sal might say that’s because DeVry’s classes are so far above-and-beyond anything Beck State had to offer that BSU just had nothing that could compare, but saying that you have the best degree program in the entire nation but that almost nobody knows about it is comparable to the philosophical question about a tree falling in the forest. If nobody thinks that your degree is superior, is it in fact superior?

I wish I knew who the salesperson for DeVry was in the Mocum area. Whoever they were deserved a raise. They convinced Sal, Teddy Forbes, and Edgar not only to pack up their things and go to college 1,000 miles away from home, but that a degree from DeVry would make it worthwhile. I want to know whoever that sales person is because I have this idea about selling ice to Eskimos that I think that they might be ideal for…

Last month, Transplanted Lawyer linked with modest disapproval to a new idea that’s being tried in schools across the country: Pay students to make good grades. Half Sigma has approvingly nodded to the idea.

Whether paying students for performance is effective or not I do not know. The jury is still out and the results we have so far are not particularly encouraging. Kids generally have short time horizons that make it difficult to tell them that if they work hard for the next six weeks they will get a reward then and only then. A more effective strategy might be an approach measuring small gains. Give them a test at the end of every couple weeks and see how they do. Mark Kleimann has actually recommended doing something like that in lieu of our current standardized testing performance-measuring regime. It could well be true that even paying students for performance will never be more effective than other uses for that money, but I’m all about trying new and different things to see what works. If it doesn’t work, move on to something new.

This post is not an endorsement of this particular strategy. Rather, it’s an objection to an objection to it that I’ve heard so frequently that it’s grated on my nerves. The objection goes like this: If you start paying kids to get good grades, they will do whatever they do for the money and not for their future or for the sake of actually learning.

I don’t know what my IQ is, but I think it’s fair to say that I would be somewhere in the top-third of the curve. I am also an intellectually curious person that spends a lot of time thinking about things and probably spend more time than most people out of school learning stuff. My High School GPA was solid if unremarkable at one of the more competitive public high schools in the city and I graduated with membership in the honors college of my alma mater. None of this is spectacular, but even if I’m not remarkable I have achieved more than the vast majority of people my age.

I say this not to brag (again, not spectacular), but to get to an important point: Despite having turned out much like my parents and school system had hoped, I couldn’t have cared a camel’s lick about learning when I was in K-12. I didn’t start enjoying learning for the sake of learning until I was at least a couple years past teachers and professors trying to thrust knowledge upon me. I learned what I learned for one major reason: to get good grades. And I didn’t get good grades to go to a great university or so that I could get a great job. I got good grades for one major reason: my parents expected it of me.

I did what I did for parental approval. My parents (particularly my father) had tremendous moral authority and their approval was very important to me. Getting good grades got positive results. Bad grades got negative results. Had my parents not taken this attitude, I might well have dropped out of school altogether as soon as legally capable. More to the point, had my parents not had the respect from me that they did (a respect that they did not just demand, but earned), I would not have turned out so well. Had my parents not had the time and money to monitor my progress and to assure me that I would be going to college like everybody else, things might have been different. While maybe it would have been preferable if I’d had my own ambitions and thirst for learning at a young age, the fact that I did what I did because I was (in a sense) manipulated to do it does not matter one fraction as much as the fact that I did it, regardless of my motivations. Further, had my parents relied on me to want to learn for its own sake or for my own ambition so that I’d do the right thing for the “right reason”, I would almost certainly have done the wrong thing and my reasoning would be moot.

A lot of kids don’t have my parents. They may have parents that have an abstract desires that their children go to a good college, but they don’t have a clear roadmap of what to expect when. Or they don’t have the time to monitor their kids as my parents monitored me. Or they didn’t have the moral authority to demand it or the consistency to apply the right pressures at the right time. And much like me, they don’t have the future time orientation to do all the right things on their own accord. Maybe it would be ideal if they had any and all of these things, but they don’t. And stripping them of any other motivation won’t necessarily give it to them.

To bring it to something that adults can relate to, it’s like going to work. Ideally speaking, we should go to work because we enjoy it or are making a valuable contribution to society or industry and we should consider that enough. Mostly, though, we do it to get paid. Otherwise, we’d be in a nation of 50 million writers, 20 million musicians, and no janitors. I really don’t know what position we are in to say that money should not be a sufficient motivator.

As I said above, this is not an endorsement of pay-for-performance with students. I don’t know if it works or not or whether it can be tweaked to work or not. Even if it can be tweaked, there are some questions of fairness if you give it to kids that go to this school but not kids that go to that one. And there are questions about whether we want kids to get money bypassing their parents entirely because they could likely find some destructive uses for it. But the notion that it provides bad incentives and is bad on that basis is ignoring the lack of good motivations that the vast majority of young people have.

The first day of Mr. Hiller’s government class started off like the first day of the five classes that preceded it. He started off taking roll. As anyone that doesn’t go by their formal first name will tell you, you usually spend the first day of the class correcting the teacher. He said “Alejandro” and you say “Alex” or he says Harold and you say “Trey”. So when Hiller said “William Truman” I said “I go by Will.”

He looked at me coldly and said “I don’t care.” It was not the start of a beautiful term in his class. I can’t say that I was his least favorite student because he really didn’t seem to like any of us. The guy who sat next to me, who I came to think of as “Dude”, never knew the answer to any of the questions that he was asked, which of course made Hiller ask him questions more frequently than anybody else in the class. I knew most of the answers and was anxious to answer if only to save my classmates any embarrassment, so he looked at me like a suck-up. Sitting in front of me was my friend Oswald Framingtonand sitting in front of him was a bully who later became my friend named Nick Soele. Nick would spend whatever free time he had trying to humiliate Oswald, which wasn’t hard. Hiller didn’t like Nick because he was a billy. He didn’t like Oswald because he whined that Nick was a bully.

About two-thirds the way through the first semester, some news was echoing through Mayne High School. “Did you hear about Cody Weaver?” I’d be asked.

“Who’s Cody Weaver?” I asked.

“I don’t know, some guy.”

“Oh. What’s the news?”

“He killed himself over the weekend!” someone would say. Everybody wanted to be the guy that told somebody even though as near as I could tell Weaver was no more than some guy to anybody that was so anxious to tell his story.

I happened to see Nick early in the day and he asked me the question that everybody else did except that he left off Cody’s last name. By this point I was tired of saying that I didn’t know who Cody was because as the day progressed everybody seemed to have a closer connection or relationship to the post-humous high school celebrity of the day and the fact that I didn’t know him was suddenly becoming noteworthy to people I was almost certain didn’t know who he was at the beginning of the day. So to get the conversation moving, I pretended that I knew who Cody was. “You should totally go see the school counselor. It’s a total get-out-of-class free card!”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you probably knew him better half of these jackasses saying that they were tight.”

I stared at him blankly.

He got the message. “Man, you liked loaned him your pencil every other day!”

Then the little light over my head turned on. Not just my pencil, but all of his supplies. And not every other day, but every day that he was there. Cody Weaver was Dude. “Wait,” I asked, “he hung himself?” In my own head I added the word “Successfully?”

I hadn’t made the connection for a couple reasons. First, because I’d given him a nickname I hadn’t bothered to commit his actual name to memory. I vaguely recalled it being something like Cody or Toby or Corey or something like that. He definitely didn’t strike me as a Code Weaver, though. I’d been assuming all day that Cody was some sort of preppy white kid. Dude was darkly Hispanic and rarely wore anything more distinguishable than a conspicious earring and typical thuggy attire.

Dude was one of those people that initially came off as cocky from a pretty far distance if only because he was aesthetically like people that were generally (or maybe near-universally) cocky. He had a pretty hot girlfriend and was a good looking guy in spite of himself. From a distance, he wasn’t the sort of guy that you would think would do such a thing. The more I thought about it, though, the less bizarre it sounded. Dude was three things: dumb, irresponsible, and vaguely aware that he was dumb and irresponsible. Every day he would walk in without his book or any supplies. Then, if anything was required, he would freak out over the fact that he was so unprepared and would curse himself out (with frequent assists from Hiller). One day I made sure to bring an extra pencil and some paper to give him so that it might last him for a while and I wouldn’t hear the stream of self-condemnation that was kind of a drag at the end of the day. He took the stuff home with him and I never saw it again. From that point forward I actually kept a Dude Folder with a minimum of supplies that I would give him at the beginning of the class and take back at the end. I’d also let him use my book and I would read off the book of the cute girl that sat on the other side of me or, if desperately in a pinch, Oswald. During collaborative homework assignments, I’d just give him my answers. Turned out that he and I had three of the same teachers, though Hiller’s was the only class we had together. The guy who couldn’t remember a pencil to save his life could remember to bring his homework from those other classes so that I could take a look.

I don’t know what it says about me that I really didn’t think that much of his death. It didn’t really bother me. As I started thinking about the self-criticism that in hindsight sounded more like self-loathing, it was more analytical than empathetic. Word came out that he left a note saying that he couldn’t live without his girlfriend. The thing is that his girlfriend hadn’t left him. A rival of his just convinced him that she was going to (with no substantiation). The guy, someone I was actually friends with in junior high, actually bragged about pushing his rival over the edge in pursuit of the hand of his girlfriend. It didn’t take two months before he and she actually did start dating. Just as Cody became Dude to me, that guy became Jackal.

As mentioned before, he and I had two other teachers in common as well as Hiller. One thing that I remember about that day was that of the three, Hiller was the only one that seemed affected. His sharpness and antagonism were completely gone. Maybe it was because I was there when he had the class with the empty chair where the now-dead student was. Maybe he was upset about something else entirely. Really, though, I’m inclined to believe that it was because the student that he’d spent so much time deriding as worthless had come to the same conclusion about himself. Whatever the case, Hiller wasn’t the same after that.

When I was in high school, Mr. Hiller, my government teacher, asked every girl in the class to stand up.

Then he asked every student who was not white and whose parents weren’t white to stand up. After some looking at one another, most did.

He then asked everybody whose last name ends in a vowel other than “e” to stand up. They did so.

Then he said requested that everyone in the class that is not a protestant to stand up. The couple Jewish kids in the class and a Catholic or two stood up. It was when he said that anyone that had just stood up on the basis that they’re Catholic can sit down if their parents are millionaires that I knew what he was getting at.

Then, to the three-quarters of the class standing up, he said, “You will never be president when you grow up.”

Ben Casnocha suggests:

When you’re out on the town and want to solely optimize on picking up a woman/man for sex, travel with friends who are slightly less attractive than you. If they’re more attractive than you, you look relatively less hot. If they’re absolutely ugly, you might look relatively good but such relative benefits are outweighed by being associated with ugliness.

I’m not sure that I buy this. I think the comparative disadvantage is outweighed by the perception that you are a cool enough guy to hang out with cool-looking guys. Now if you’re all wearing Neon Genesis Evangelion shirts or are otherwise demonstrating weirdness, that could be true. Likewise if you’re all displaying utter conventionality But generally speaking it seems that one of the things that women look at when appraising a guy is whether he has friends and of what stock. In those early moments of being approached or exchanging glances to invite or discourage approachment, women have little information with which to go on which means that they have to go by their gut and a sense of the guy. Who he’s with informs that. That was the conclusion I came to, anyway, when I noticed that there was a difference in the frequency with which girls would smile at me when I was out with friends, with misfit friends, and out alone in a place where people usually go in groups.

I’m reminded a bit of some advice from my brother Mitch, who is smart as a whip, was kind of nerdy before college, and had to explicitly learn what a lot of popular people learned by touch-and-feel. He said that in a bar situation, the best place to look is at a group of women that has one extremely attractive person and then pick whoever in that group you find most attractive that is not that person. It’s kind of Roissiesque, I guess, but he found that women that expect you to approach the herd (or pick off a member of the herd) for someone else are more receptive when they find out it’s them. I never took his advice because I didn’t patrol the same sorts of venues that he did and I have always had an exceptional ability at detecting compatibility with people on scant information. In other words, I already have an idea of who might be responsive to my approaches and who won’t be. In the dating scene, I’m a niche-market product in a way that my brothers are not, so I have to take care of knowing my market rather than trying to shoehorn into a market that I am not ideal for. Whenever I tried to expand my market-presence, it rarely amounted to any good even if I did have some initial success.

I am also remember back in high school when my friend Clint and I would each lunch together. Miraculously, we found these two girls to sit with day in and day out. One was quite pretty and had a way that she dressed (stockings!) that maximized her appeal. The other would have been gorgeous wearing a paper sack and clown make-up just because she was that innately beautiful. What’s funny is that even though Stockings was perfectly suitable for either of us and indeed would have been a great catch, we both fell all over ourselves trying to impress Paper Sack. A rivalry was founded upon it, even though neither of us had even a remote shot. He would give her his pudding (which sounds hopelessly grade school, but she wanted it and he had it and he gave it to her) thus leading me to call him the Pudding-Pushing Bastard or, if she happened to be present, the PPB. Because of her proximity to beauty, Stockings only barely existed. We were dopes.

So I guess it varies as to how effective it can be to surround yourself with more or less attractive people. He’s probably right that it’s best not to surround yourself with people that will embarass you. That’s a separate lesson and one I had to learn the hard way.

Tom Perrota has an uninteresting-yet-interesting piece in Slate on the Sexy Puritan:

I didn’t think too much about Sexy Puritans as a type until I began looking into the abstinence-only sex-education movement while researching my novel, The Abstinence Teacher. I expected to encounter a lot of stern James Dobson-style scolds warning teenagers about the dangers of premarital sex—and there were a few of those—but what I found over and over again were thoughtful, attractive, downright sexy young women talking about their personal decision to remain pure until marriage. Erika Harold, Miss America of 2003 (the right sure loves beauty queens), is probably the best-known to the wider public, but no abstinence rally is complete without the testimony of a very pretty virgin in her early- to mid-20s. At a Silver Ring Thing event I attended in New Jersey in 2007, a slender young blond woman in tight jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt—she wouldn’t have looked out of place at a frat kegger—bragged about all the college boys who’d tried and failed to talk her into their beds. She reveled in her ability to resist them, to stand alone until she’d found the perfect guy, the fiancé with whom she would soon share a lifetime full of amazing sex. While her explicit message was forceful and empowering—virginity is a form of strength and self-sufficiency—the implicit one was clear as well: Abstinence isn’t just sour grapes for losers, a consolation prize for girls who can’t get a date anyway.

The surprising thing about the article to me is that people bought into some archetype of the physically plain and quiet abstinant. That’s never come even close to what pops into my mind when I think about a girl that proclaims that she’s saving herself for marriage. It seems to me that the ability to make that claim – and make it loudly – requires certain things that beautiful and popular people have in spades. Eccentricity is something that only bulletproof people can get away with and that has serious social repercussions for anyone without that kind of insulation.

Take two people that I’m going to name Betty and Edna. Betty is pretty and popular and Edna is quiet and bookish. If Betty loudly proclaims that abstinence is the way to go, she will either live up to her proclamation or she won’t. If she does, she will still get dates. Guys will date her thinking that they can change her mind or because for one reason or another they care because she brings enough else to the table. If she is a hypocrite, her popularity will insulate her from accusations of hypocrisy. Guys that talk about sleeping with her will be disbelieved by large segments of the student population. Guys that badmouth her will face social costs unless they’re on better footing than she is, and since she’s on good footing, that’s not terribly likely, so a lot will stay quiet.

Edna is a different story. She doesn’t bring enough to the table socially for guys that want to sleep with her to be willing to go through the time and effort of trying to manipulate her into doing so. They’ll just move on to the next person. Guys that do date her and don’t sleep with her will badmouth her. Many will be able to use her insecurities to get her to fall down on her convictions and many will probably say they slept with her anyway just to save face. Guys that do sleep with her will brag about it with impunity once they move on or even before they move on because there isn’t much social cost to losing her anyway. It all matters less. The costs are less severe for treating her badly. She is uninsulated and unprotected by the friends and social reputation that she doesn’t have.

All of this pertains to high school and social networks in college, but dynamics from those days continue forward. Those that got away with it in high school will be more cavalier about it afterwards. Those that paid a price for it will be more quiet. The dating situation changes substantially after college, but on the all one of the things that has surprised me is how relatively rarely sexual attitudes did.

It’s funny how so many years later, the anger and the anger over the anger about OJ Simpson’s acquittal in California still lingers. The subject came up on the smoking docks of the company I worked at in Estacado. I can’t remember how Simpson came up, but almost immediately the two white participants in the conversation rolled their eyes at the idiotic California jury while the black guy immediately jumped to Simpson’s defense.

During the waning days of the trial, I was taking a sociology class where the case came up relatively frequently. The class was unusually white (I don’t remember a single minority, actually). After it had been announced that the jury had come to a verdict and before the verdict was announced, they took a hand count of how they thought the jury would rule. All but three said that they would find him guilty. I was one of those three. More-or-less from the moment that the demographic breakdown of the jury was announced, I was sure that we were looking at a hung jury. Once the jury was unhung, though, I knew that it wasn’t in favor of acquittal. Not within the three hours it took for them to come to their conclusion anyway. Shortly after, we heard the football players yelling down the hall “Not guilty!” “The juice is loose!” Having almost no black student population, the football players were the only pro-OJ demographic.

My sociology professor would relate to us the next day that she cried when she heard the verdict.

I am in the school of thought that Simpson was about as guilty as they come and I don’t believe that the defense team sufficiently knocked it down. I was of the school of thought that he got away with it because he was black. The jury was stupid.

The further away from it all I get, the less sure I am of any of that except for Simpson’s actual guilt. I still believe that I would have voted to convict and I don’t think I would have been wrong for doing so. At the same time, some of it comes down to what qualifies as “reasonable doubt”. I am not 100% sure that Simpson did it and to the jury that may have been enough (focusing on the word “doubt” rather than “reasonable” where I would focus). It’s also noteworthy that while I read daily articles on the trial and got commentary from my biased mother, I wasn’t in there for eight hours a day while the all-star defense team pounded, pounded, pounded away at the case to create just enough doubt to get an acquittal. Sheck cross-examined the DNA expert for something like eight days just hammering away at the DNA evidence to the point that it probably became difficult to hear all of the reasons that the evidence might-maybe-possibly not say what it clearly seemed to say without coming to believe that there were some holes.

The other thing I have chilled out on is the racial angle. Simpson did not get away with it solely because he was black and had eight black jurors. That’s not even enough for an acquittal and given that the non-black jurors came up with the same verdict in three hours suggests that it wasn’t purely racial. Beyond that, though, I think more important than Simpson’s race was his wealth and celebrity neither of which are attributable to his race (in any direct way). Set up the same evidence with either a poor black defendant or a rich white one and I would give the latter greater odds of acquittal. Then lastly, to the extent that the black jurors did unilaterally decide to line up in racial solidarity and the other four caved or were similarly biased), it’s worth pointing out that with a jury pool that was 40% white, there was only one white juror. That’s likely another attribution to Simpson’s deep pockets. None of this is to say that race did not inappropriately benefit Simpson, but it’s not clear to me that it was determinative at all.

So after all this time Simpson is going to jail anyway for a somewhat unrelated crime (I say “somewhat” because if it hadn’t been for the first, he wouldn’t have been in the position that invited the second). I’m sure a lot of former football players that I once knew are heartbroken.

Postscript: Generally speaking, race is a subject that we don’t cover here at Hit Coffee. I am making an exception here, so we’ll see how that goes. I ask that comments please show respect towards disagreeing parties. Accusations of racism, actual racism, and derogatory nicknames of the participants in the trial or the surrounding controversy are discouraged. Thank you in advance for not making me regret bringing the subject up.

When I was a junior in college, I was riding a pretty high tide. My grades were good; I had a steady girlfriend that I’d been dating for a couple of years; I was thinking that the sky was the limit. Underneath it all, though, all was not quite right. My girlfriend Julie had started making life decisions that were going to require that I make more money than the average computer guy. I was also starting to think that becoming a computer guy was not actually what I wanted. So I started looking at other options. I had a couple friends in law school and they encouraged me to take that route. It sounded good to me.

There was one major roadblock that I could see: The Law School Admissions Test, more commonly known as the LSAT. I was never a good test taker. I had to take remedial reading in junior high because I’d flunked the statewide standardized exam. My teacher was dumbfounded that I was even there because I was ridiculously brighter than all of the other kids in that class, but when I had to take the test again I flunked it again. We were scared to death about the SAT that I needed to take. We were so shocked at how well I did (which wasn’t really all that well, actually) that we assumed that they must have made some sort of mistake. I don’t do well on standardized tests and I am worse with timed tests.

Spungen said that taking a class rose her score five points. If I’d known that, I would have signed up for a course. Instead I simply got some books and studied. Unfortunately, after all the studying I couldn’t get the score that I was aiming for and my score had only gone up two or three points. Still shy of where I wanted to be.

At the time I was working an overnight position that was in a way an ideal college job. I could spend my nights studying, though that was hard because I was so tired. I could also steal naps, but when I fell asleep at the wheel twice over the term of my employment there in retrospect I realize that I was not getting the sleep that I thought I was. The test day was not ideally situation, unfortunately, because it came after a day of hefty coursework wherein any sleep I would get would need to be at work. When I needed sleep, I could arrange it so that I could get some. Usually. But not that night. It was one emergency after another and I got less than an hour’s worth of sleep.

I drove that morning to the University of Colosse Law School in the Capitol District and took the test. Or at least I think I did. I kept falling asleep. My pages were rife with pencil scratches where I’d fallen asleep while trying to illustrate a problem on the scratch paper. The LSAT is difficult enough when all cylinders are firing and my mental car wouldn’t even start. At the end of the test there is a little box you can check if you don’t want to be scored (with the LSAT, unlike the SAT, you couldn’t simply take your best score, so you don’t want a bad score on your record). I checked it and decided to take the test later under circumstances that weren’t quite so unfavorable. In fact, I was actually going to take the night off before so that I could get some legitimate sleep. Fancy that.

A few months later was the next test, which fortunately enough was on the Southern Tech University campus where I lived and was going to school. I took not only the night off before the test, but even the night before that so that I could get on something resembling a schedule that would have me wide awake at 10 in the morning when I was often going to bed. The test was on a Tuesday and I only had one class on Tuesdays, a phys ed course. A week before the LSAT was to occur, the instructor missed a class because of some family emergency. That meant that one of the PE “exams” was now the morning of the law test. Worse, the test in question was running a mile-and-a-half. Worse still, the professor would not let me take the test early or late. So I was going to have to run a mile and a half (in the gawd-awful shape that I was in) and then walk across campus and take the most important test that I’d taken in half a decade. Not ideal.

Running the mile-and-a-half turned out only to be a component of the problem. The problem, it turned out, was the water I had to drink to replenish myself. Or at least the water that I thought that I had to drink. It turned out that I drank way too much because I didn’t sweat it off. Rather, I had to stop twice on the walk over to the annex to take a leak. The LSAT is a pretty heavily timed test, especially for somebody like me where thinking quickly isn’t my strong suit. I’m the sort of guy that always thinks of the perfect comeback to some joke or bum argument some time during the next day. I’m also terrible at saying “I am good enough with that answer to be able to move on.” It was a struggle for me to finish the test to my satisfaction in even ideal circumstances.

There are six or so rounds of testing and there was not a single section of testing that I could get through without at least one required restroom break. In one section I had to go twice. And I don’t mean that I would leave and go just a little. The only thing that surprises me more than how much liquid I expelled was that I’d managed to drink that much in the first place. Of course, I’ve always been a thirsty person and I can rarely make it through a movie without at least one restroom break, but even so it was surprising. Almost as bad as losing 5 minutes (of 35 minutes) on every section to go take care of things was the fact that even when I wasn’t, I was distracted by needing to. I had maybe ten minutes of undistracted test taking in each round of the testing.

Having passed on the test once, I couldn’t really pass on it again without it raising serious eyebrows with admission offices. So I had to take whatever score I got. It was beginning to matter less and less to me psychologically. It was becoming apparent that I was simply destined not to go to law school. Maybe my subconscious had eradicated my bladder to that effect. I was burning out scholastically and my relationship with Julie was falling apart and without that need I was starting to want a break more than I was wanting to be a lawyer. It was possible that I could take the LSAT again to bring up my score or if I’d done too badly if you take it a second time and score more than a certain number of points better than the two law schools I was looking at would discard the first. But by that point God had spoken to me in the john and that was that.

I didn’t do as badly on the test as I had thought I had. I’d scored above average, even, though that’s of small comfort when most law schools (at least in the league that I was looking at) accept only about a third of their applicants. There was one law school I’d looked at that I might have been able to get into even without retaking the test, but I was more than happy to move on. Looking back, I think that it was the right call. So maybe I owe my PE instructor a debt of gratitude.

A not-so-hypothetical question:

Let’s say that you are taking a political science class and you wrote a paper that you considered to be A- material. You get it back and it you actually got a 98 on it. You’re initially thrilled, but then you look and see you got deducted two points for a factual inaccuracy that was not only true but provably so. The professor isn’t there when you get your paper back and before he gets back from appearing on The O’Reilly Factor you get your grade for the course, which is an “A”.

Do you:
(a) Track the professor down, point out his error, and ask for the two points back? After all, that non-error was all that stood between you and a perfect paper.
(b) Realize that you got the best grade you could for the course and that there isn’t any point going through the hassle of tracking him down for the sake of something that doesn’t make a material difference.