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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at MSU chapter.

Standardized tests have always come pretty naturally to me, so I never stressed out about them. When I realized I needed to take the Law School Admission Test in August of this year, I decided to start preparing a few months out. I took my first diagnostic test and scored way lower than I had anticipated, which was very shocking to me. I practiced and improved my score by over 10 points on the next test and thought for sure that I would keep improving at that rate. However, the progress was slow-going, with many setbacks and challenges.

I still hadn’t reached my goal score by test week, but I hoped that the extra focus and adrenaline would help me to do better. I felt great about the test and I thought that I had done better than I had with any of my practice tests. I didn’t worry about it until the day the scores came out. I even had a few friends sit with me to support me while I checked the results. 

I logged into the website and saw that I had done worse than my best practice score and far worse than I had wanted. 

I was devastated, and I felt like a complete failure, even though my score wasn’t terrible. I had never come up so short on something so important to me. I was confused, disappointed, and so upset. My friends and family encouraged me to take it easy on myself and to give it another try in a month, which I greatly appreciated.

Sadly, I felt so defeated that I did not study very much. With less than a week until test day, I still had not completed a full practice test, and I did not care at all. Despite all the support I received from the people in my life, I just could not bring myself to work at it anymore. 

This experience has not gone at all as I had hoped, but I will try to do my best when the next test day comes. I learned that it is important to give yourself some time off to recover and that you don’t have to try again immediately after you don’t succeed. 

However, I also learned that completely giving up is far worse than failing. I promised myself that if this test did not go as I hoped, I would not allow myself to feel like a failure and I would remember that it takes practice and patience to succeed, regardless of what I’m doing.

Rachel V.

MSU '23

Rachel is the Social Media Director at Her Campus MSU. She is a Senior at MSU's James Madison College studying Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy with a double minor in Business, and Science, Technology, Environment, and Public Policy. After graduation, she hopes to become a public interest lawyer or work in the government sector. She is an avid camper and enjoys spending her time in the great outdoors hiking and biking. She loves ice skating and has recently been trying to learn some new moves! Rachel also enjoys reading, cooking, crocheting, and trying as many bubble tea places as she can find.