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.