What better way to spend a Saturday morning than sitting in a classroom taking a practice LSAT? You may think there are lots of better options: sleep, breakfast, sleep. but you would be wrong. Even if you’re a senior and already took the real LSAT, you should have been in Eads with me trying to figure out those logic games – it would certainly be nice to see a high score, no?

The practice LSAT, as well as MCAT, GRE and other abbreviations that strike fear in the heart of any undergraduate, was a special Kaplan test event. Kaplan was just trying to sell their prep course. Any possible doubt that this was the case was erased when a specific Kaplan tutor came in after the test to tell us nervous future test-takers that we needed Kaplan or else we’d be destined for a life behind a McDonald’s counter.

And who could blame them? Test preparation is a big industry. Kaplan charges $1,299 for the LSAT prep course, and that’s in the same ballpark as Kaplan’s competitors. There’s Kaplan’s 2007 edition of its LSAT book/CD-ROM package, costing $24.42 on amazon.com, as well as the LSAT 180 book Kaplan would want you to buy, spending another $16.50. Total cost for Kaplan’s LSAT preparation, if you don’t decide to buy more books or spend extra money on extra tutoring: $1339.92.

As Albert Pujols would probably say, that’s not really good. $1,339.92, just to prepare for four hours, is a hell of a lot of money. Just imagine what else that money could buy.

 235 chicken breast subs with the meal deal at Subway
 223 chicken quesadillas at Bear’s Den – at $1/point and assuming last year’s prices didn’t change over the summer
 Two pairs of field-level seats to game 6 of the Mets-Cardinals series
 167 movies at the Tivoli
 About two years worth of textbooks for a pre-med student
 A donation to your favorite cause after 10,000 people join your facebook group
 Approximately 89 CDs at Vintage Vinyl
 95 30-racks of Natty Lite at Schnucks
 63 shares of Microsoft at its IPO, which would be worth $516,196.80 as of Monday
 Starting next week, 16,749 pages of printing at the library (11,166 double-sided)

This would be the perfect time to make some grand declaration on how I won’t take any prep course, and will at most just spend $25 on the book. But the sad reality is that that’s not going to happen. I just don’t want to know if you want fries with that Big Mac.

Daniel is a junior in Arts & Sciences and the Senior Forum Editor. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]

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