Dammit! It's mid-November already. I'm looking at 3 classes where I'll be lucky if I get a B, my fiancee just left me for somebody who can't even dance, and I just found out how bad I sucked on the LSAT. Well, OK, I didn't suck, exactly, but 155 ain't stellar. And now it looks like I'll have an even harder time getting into UT Law next fall, thanks to Dean Sharlot and his band of merry shysters over at the law school.
You see, I've had it pretty easy in life. Both my folks went to college (if you can call Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas a college) and they do OK. By the time my old man screwed up my brother's life, he had the parenthood thing figured out fairly well and so I managed to make it out of the nest without shooting anybody. Personally, I count that as a sign of success.
Seems like the do-gooders over on the law school faculty might count it as a sign of success, as well, based on the new admissions criteria to take effect for next fall. As a recent newspaper article discussed, getting into UT law school will once again become more than a matter of acing the LSAT and maintaining a high GPA. Now students will also be evaluated based on "personal challenges or disadvantages faced in their lifetime." The publicized factors included the following:whether you're the first dope in your family to go to college; whether your folks know how to speak English well enough to use it at home; whether there are a lot of lawyers where you live.
Question: if you are fortunate enough to live some place where there aren't many lawyers, will that now count against you when you apply to law school? Nah, it's probably the other way around. I don't know where they come up with this stuff, though. The apparent incentive is to make yourself look like the worst hard-luck case possible, and the harder you've had it, the better off you'll be in terms of getting a better chance of admission.
I am wondering though just how they'll be able to verify these hard-luck stories. People can sneak things by fairly easily, it would seem. Just last week, a black judge in California, a Mr. Ware, lost his chance to move up to an appellate court when it turned out he'd made it a long-standing hobby to make himself appear more disadvantaged than he actually was. Ware had been claiming publicly for years that when he was growing up in the South, he witnessed his own brother's murder at the hands of white racists. In public speeches he'd talk about how he'd had to wrestle with that all his life. True, something like that would be a mighty big thing to wrestle with, and the audiences Judge Ware spoke to were no doubt moved by the story. He must have made quite an impression when he talked about that heart-wrenching event. Only trouble was, it never happened. He'd lied all along, and the truth finally caught up with him.
But hell, he made it to the federal bench before they found out, so to some people, maybe he did fairly well for himself. I personally don't encourage lying, but I think it's my duty to point out just how easy it would be to do so now when applying to the UT law school. Last night someone slipped under my door an envelope marked "confidential." I want to tell you what was in it, not so you get any ideas about cheating, but just so you know what MAY be some of the other new criteria for getting into law school here. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the envelope's contents, but based on what I've read about the radicals over on the law faculty, I wouldn't be surprised if it's genuine.
Supposedly, (now this is true) when you apply to law school, you end up with a certain number of points based on your LSAT and GPA. You take your GPA and multiply it by, what the hell, say 50. Then you add that product to your LSAT score. So if you have a 3.5 GPA, multiply that by 50 and you get 175. Then add that to your LSAT score, call it 155. That gives you a total of 330. Under this year's system, that's all there would be. If you got a 330 and some other applicant got a 340, they'd be ahead of you. But under the revised system, you can get points added or deducted based on what kind of life you've had. Here are some of the other factors, as reported in the contents of the confidential envelope:
If neither of your parents went to college, add 20 points.
If either of your parents went to an Ivy League school, subtract 10 points.
If your dad was an alcoholic, add 20 points.
If your dad was an alcoholic and beat your mom, add 30 points
If you are an alcoholic, tough shit - subtract 50 points.
If your dad beat you, add 30 points.
If your dad beat you off, add 60 points.
If your parents sent you to private school, subtract 20 points.
If you were raised in a single-parent household, add 25 points.
If you were raised in a single-parent household but refer to it in your application essay as a "broken home," subtract 10 points for being judgmental about alternate lifestyles.
If your parents belong to a country club, subtract 10 points.
If you've done volunteer work such as tutoring prisoners, add 15 points.
If you've done volunteer work such as serving as altar boy, subtract 15 points, you intolerant, superstitious twirp.
If the foreign language spoken in your home is French, subtract 10 points.
If the foreign language spoken in your home is Ebonics, add 50 points.
If you are HIV-positive, add 25 points.
If you suffer from Gulf War Syndrome, subtract 25 points, you militarist bastard.
The envelope contained several "sample essays" for the admissions committee to consider. Here are paragraphs from two of them. See if you can figure out which one would enhance an applicant's chances for admission.
Sample 1:
"I've wanted to be a lawyer ever since my grandfather, a federal appeals court judge, used to tell me about his work when we summered together on Martha's Vineyard. It was wonderful. Then when I was in high school at St. Mark's, our housekeeper Maria backed right into mummy's brand new Mercedes SEL, destroying the paint job on the front bumper. One of Daddy's friends from the law division of his corporation showed how we could dock Maria's pay since she didn't have insurance. So since then I've really been into using the law to achieve social justice."
Sample 2:
"My interest in the law began at the age of fourteen after I was raped by our white landlord at the orphanage I grew up at. After the trial, I did not speak for two years, and spent the whole time reading Katherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. During the rest of high school, I served as office assistant for the local part of Legal Services, working with other quadraplegics like myself to help them find justice in the American legal system."
You get the idea? Remember now, no cheating!