r/Badlawsch

Sorry in advance because this is LONG. I’ve known prometric and LSAT are both shit but my experience today was on another level.

• Exam was scheduled for 11. I was on on time. Waited 20 minutes for a proctor to connect and they didn’t so I contacted support from my phone. The lady told me to exit prometric and restart. I did. The same thing happened. I was then told to restart my computer. I did. The same thing happened. I was then told by a third support person to uninstall the prometric application and reinstall it. I did. The same thing happened. I called prometric support and was put on hold for a while. After almost two full hours (1pm at this point) a proctor connected so I hung up the phone. I went through the security check and it was fine. This proctor also said “sorry we’ve been having technical issues”. Should’ve been my first hint that this would be a shit show.
• I had also done the test for my computer and phone before the test (days before) to make sure everything was working and that my prometric app was updated to the latest version as well as my computer being updated to the latest version and they both were. Multiple (at least 7) times throughout my ten hour experience that I had to exit and re-enter, it would tell me that my Prometric app was not updated even though it very much was. I had to uninstall and reinstall three times throughout this. I had to restart my computer four times throughout this.
• The reason I had to take the makeup August 18th exam was because on my previous August LSAT, the answer choices I had marked off as incorrect, were not marked off anymore when I went back to them at the end basically meaning I would have to restart the entire question. I submitted a complaint, they allowed me to take the August 18 test, and told me they were doing an investigation and that this wouldn’t happen again. I took my first break (stop/start accommodation) and when I came back, I went back to my flagged questions just in case the same issue happened so I could rectify it for myself early on. The EXACT SAME ISSUE happened. I paused my test and chatted with my proctor who once again, told me there was absolutely nothing they could do. I decided that since I only had 4 questions flagged at that point and had a decent amount of time left, that I would go ahead and restart those 4 questions and write down which ones I had crossed out since I could pretty easily assume this same issue would happen for the rest of my test. I then had to use my time (that I needed) to be writing down the answers I crossed out because your system, once again, was not working. This issue occurred on all three sections. (I have the accommodation to omit the experimental section).
• During my second section (LR), I was again having to write down every answer choice I crossed out because I knew it wouldn’t save, once again, taking up valuable time. My proctor experience with this section was the worst of the 3. I had one proctor tell me that my stop/start time was used for the security check when coming back from the bathroom. I repeatedly told her it wasn’t. She said she had the handbook in front of her. I obviously know this is not how it works because that would eat up roughly 10 minutes of my stop/start breaks everytime I used them. She told me she would pause my stop/start time but that she was going to tell prometric and LSAC to which I told her to go ahead. Arguing with this proctor ate up 7 minutes of my stop/start time. I then had another proctor who, when I asked him to go to the bathroom, he said he would pause my stop/start and the whole test. I told him not to because that’s against the rules and I was using my stop/start time. He replied “if you say so”. I think I had another issue during this section which required me to chat and call support, exiting the exam and restarting it. I can’t remember all of the details of section 2 because this entire experience was 10.5 hours.
• Section 3 (RC), I was feeling really good. I started section 3 at roughly 6:30pm due to all the technical issues. This was the best proctor I had. He was clear and did the security check quickly and I told him he was the best proctor I’ve had all day. I, again, had to do the same thing of writing down all the answer choices I had marked off, taking up time, because I knew they wouldn’t save. Either this proctor or a different one started speaking out loud in the middle of me reading the science passage (the hardest passage for me). This lasted about 4 seconds and threw me off but I restarted the paragraph and it was fine. He then unmuted his mic AGAIN and said “oh sorry”. So again, I restart the paragraph or sentence, I can’t even remember which one. I got through 3/4 of the RC passages and had about ten minutes left. I think it was something like 9 minutes and 34 seconds or something like that. I had also just used the remainder of my stop/start breaks because I knew I had the one passage and 6 questions left. I was highlighting the last paragraph of the last section when my exam randomly exited. I immediately started talking over the mic because I was still connected to the proctor saying to pause the exam and to help over and over. My proctor said he paused the exam immediately and that if I exited, contacted support, got it fixed, and came back, that all my answers would be saved and I would have the exact amount of time left as when my exam quit on me. I even asked his name to report back to support just in case. I exited, contacted support, they told me I could get back on and that I could start where it quit on me and guaranteed I would have that ten minutes and all my answers would be saved. I tried getting back on the prometric app, it said my version wasn’t up to date. I had to uninstall and reinstall twice and restart my computer twice at this point as well. When I finally got on and was connected with a proctor, in the middle of the initial security check, he disappeared even though I was still on the proctor screen and connected. I said hello at least 10 times and waited, then it exited me again. I went back on and AGAIN, it said my application wasn’t up to date. Same thing. I uninstall, reinstall, restart my computer, etc. I get connected to a proctor. ONCE AGAIN, they randomly disconnect. Exact same thing. I uninstall, reinstall, etc. I get back on and this time it finally goes through. At this point, it’s 8:20pm. This proctor also guarantees I will have all my answers saved and that I will have the same amount of time left as when I got kicked out. It makes me do the ten minute break again in between sections 2 and 3. I ask the proctor why it’s happening, he doesn’t know, I say okay well do you mind if I use this time then to go to the bathroom, he says sure. He PAUSES THE BREAK TIME. I get back exactly when I think the ten minutes is ending, do the entire security check again, and realize that he paused the break time. Now I have to sit in front of my screen for another 6 minutes and 56 seconds. When the time runs out, my exam comes back. It saved my answers but of course, the initial proctor did not pause my exam when he said he did and I have less than one minute left on the clock. I had already read and highlighted majority of this passage so ten minutes would have been more than enough time for me to answer 6 questions. I immediately try to pause but I’m out of my stop/start time. I’m chatting the proctor urgently telling them to pause and explaining what’s happening. By the time they pause, there’s 8 seconds left. My proctor was of course zero help and kept saying he didn’t know what to do and to contact support. I told him the only way to contact support is to either exit the exam or to use my phone so I said “are you telling me to exit the exam to contact support” because I wanted it in writing for when they go over the transcripts. The proctor kept saying that no he was not telling me to exit OR to use my phone, just to contact support. We basically had this exact conversation four times until I said okay I am exiting to contact support. I exited, I contacted support. I was disconnected from support twice. The third lady keeps saying she can’t do anything and to call LSAC. At that point, I had tried every single LSAC number and prometric number I could find on the internet. They’re closed and the message says to call them the next day. I continuously tell the support lady this, she continuously tells me to call them. After about 30 minutes of back and forth, she says “let not argue”, “I has been advise you to refer to your client”, “no point to argue and the client will check”. Keep in mind I’m going on hour 10 of this. I’m not arguing with this lady. I am saying over and over “please help. I have six questions left. I want to finish this exam today.” She stops responding and then responds 6 minutes later and says “this is an LSAT exam (web based). We cannot add time.”, “I will end this chat since has been advise to refer to LSAC client”, “thank you for using prometric isupport. Have a great day”. Then she disconnects. I call LSAC over and over but they’re closed obviously, I was just totally losing it at this point, like literally sobbing from exhaustion. I go to file a complaint on the LSAC website and it won’t even let me do that because I had to file one for my initial August exam because of one of the exact same issues I also had on this one. I send an email to the email listed on LSACs website with a brief overview and plan to call them tomorrow. I get an automated response blah blah blah and part of it gives a phone number to call “in case of emergencies”. It’s a number I’d already called but i didnt know that because I’d called so many so I gave it a try. It was an answering machine once. again. Telling me to wait until they open.
• Random/smaller issues: This is quite honestly the least of all my issues but everytime I would pause my test and ask the proctor to go to the bathroom, they would read the message, wasting my stop/start time, and wait MINUTES to respond yes or no. Besides that, there is also a massive delay between when they say they paused the test and when it actually pauses (usually about a minute or two minutes), not including the time it takes for them to type out a response. Overall, I would say about 15-20 minutes of my stop start breaks are spent waiting for proctor responses and the lag between me pausing the test and them pausing the test. The proctors also clearly do not know the rules, don’t pay attention to if you have accommodations, and quite honestly do not speak English well at all. I have never ever had a helpful experience with a proctor from prometric. They copy and paste the same messages over and over again and I always end up having to explain and re-explain every issue. I genuinely would not care in the slightest where these proctors/support people were at or whether they spoke broken or perfect English if prometric/LSAC actually trained them to know what they’re doing. It’s really not even their faults but they’re the only ones we can contact. They’re also all so inconsistent. I had one proctor today try to tell me that my phone stand wasn’t good enough and then dropped it when I said it’s been fine for every other proctor. He also made me move my phone across the room as the second camera which made no sense because you couldn’t see me or my area as well. I had another proctor tell me sweatshirts weren’t allowed (I’ve worn the same sweatshirt for my first LSAT, last August LSAT, and this one) but apparently the rules changed! (They didn’t.) I had ANOTHER proctor tell me that the toilet paper I had for tissues was too much. (In the past, I’ve always taken some toilet paper and folded it to use as tissues, has never been a problem.) he told me that it was too much and I couldn’t have all of it. I tore off 3/4 of what I had and showed him about 5 squares. He said it was still too much. I tore off two more squares. STILL TOO MUCH. He ended up making me have a single square of toilet paper to use for my tissues. (Whats one square of toilet paper gonna do when I’m blowing the snot out of my nose?????-sorry TMI.) I can honestly guarantee that I’m forgetting more issues that occurred because there was just too many. These are the ones that stood out and that I remember the most.
• All in all, this exam took 10.5 hours when it should have taken less than half that time. I had to take the day off work and work this weekend instead, give my cats Prozac that I had to (for the second time because my exam glitched the first time!) pay $79 for, keep my girlfriend out of the house for 10.5 hours while she had to pack for a trip tomorrow morning, cover my entire office room in trash bags and sheets, buy a phone stand, upgrade my wifi to now spend $220/month just to make sure I won’t have any issues on my end, etc. Beyond all this, I’ve stopped drinking, smoking, doing things w friends, etc. To prepare myself for this exam and keep my brain clear. I am so exhausted by prometric and LSAC. They do not give a fuck. People revolve their lives around this exam and put in so much effort just for them to have technical issues and not care to rectify them. I’ve studied for this exam for two years and altered my lifestyle more times than I can count. Anyone who takes this exam knows it’s a huge deal and consumes a lot of your time but the people the PRODUCE IT act like we’re 3rd graders freaking out over a spelling test. I fucking hate LSAC. I fucking hate prometric. LSAC is money hungry and greedy to a level I will never be able to comprehend. Sorry this is so long but I had to get this all out.

Anyway, it is now 10:01pm and I will be smoking a joint in the bathtub while editing this post to make it professional enough to send in an email to LSAC tomorrow. Have a fabulous night everybody, hope your experience was way better than this hell on earth!

This post is part of a series I am writing on Tier 4 law schools and the legal job market.
I graduated from a Tier 4 law school in Michigan in 2013.  Yes, at the height of the law school bubble exploding.  I won’t say the word “burst” even though that’s the generally accepted term when any kind of market bubble reaches its zenith.  I was in it, and then on the front lines of a ruined legal job market with little actual experience in the legal field. 
It didn’t just burst. 
In fact, it didn’t just explode.
It imploded first, then exploded, and the remains turned into a black hole where tens of thousands of recent law school graduates’ dreams were sucked into, never to be seen again.
I began law school in January of 2010.  I had enrolled in a corrupt, delusional, predatory Tier 4 law school because they gave me a very large scholarship to attend, $60,000, and they were near my parents’ house who wanted me to live with them while I attended law school.  I had no idea that this law school was actually as corrupt, delusional, and predatory as they were.  I thought they were just an underdog lesser ranked school and that if you graduated and worked hard for a year or two, surely to make a middle class wage at least while doing so, that you could have anything the legal job market had to offer any other graduates.  Well I was wrong.
I also thought I had a safe bachelors degree to fall back on.  I was also wrong.
Going to a Tier 4 law school at any point in history is usually a bad idea.  The only time its not, in my opinion, is if you have a full, 100% scholarship, AND you can graduate in the top 5% of the class.  Other than that, even the better performing students are rolling the dice on their future, and the lower performing students don’t even get to have dice, their fate has already been determined, this is merely a sentencing hearing.
The first year, 2010, there still seemed to be hope.  Very few people knew how bad it was outside of law firm partners and some higher education watchdogs.  We still thought if we couldn’t find a job, we’d still be able to hang our own shingle and make okay money.  We didn’t know that not only would there not be enough jobs or the saturated legal JOB market, there also wouldn’t be enough WORK for solo practitioners to support themselves.
In 2010, there were still paid internships popping up in my law school email from our career center.  Not super well paid.  I remember one, a legal intern position at the Michigan Education Association, making $10 per hour.  I didn’t think seeing that email was going to be the last time I had a chance to make any money in the legal field until nearly 4 years later…….
According to Google AI, “the primary law school bubble burst in 2011–2013, following a peak in enrollment in 2010. First-year enrollment dropped dramatically by 24% over the next four years as employment data transparency exposed poor job outcomes and high tuition debt.”
2011 was when we started seeing a change.  No paid internship opportunities being emailed to us by the career center. 
By 2012, the quality of the entering 1L class had noticeably dropped.  We had already had low quality in academics and other areas with my class.  I was shocked when I found out most of my fellow students were paying full price to attend, I had figured it would be mostly scholarship students like me, because I mistakenly thought my law school had ethics.  LOL!
When I was a teaching assistant and had conversations with 1Ls I conducted review sessions for, it shocked me how, not trying to be mean here, low-caliber they were.  I was at my law school’s Ann Arbor campus talking to a 1L from Pennsylvania.  We had arrived on the ethnic make-up of Michigan, and I was telling her how Michigan had a lot of rich cultural heritage that included Polish, Arabic, Albanian, Chaldean, and other ethnicities not found everywhere in the USA.  She responded “Well Pennsylvania is full of MEXICANS!  They’re EVERYWHERE and I HATE IT!”  I felt an atomic level of cringe in that moment.  This was a person who was going to be someone’s attorney someday?!  Who I was trying to teach criminal law? 
In the second half of 2012, I had to compete to find an unpaid externship to finish my JD.  I applied at 12 different unpaid work at various agencies and law firms.  Only one, a district court in a low-income high-crime smaller city, interviewed and hired me to work for free.  The rest didn’t even interview me because they were so full of unpaid law students and unpaid law school graduates desperately trying to get experience, that they simply did not have physical room for me.
When I graduated, I could not get a legal assistant, law clerk, or paralegal job because there were none available.  Many law clerk jobs were now requiring YEARS of experience as a practicing attorney to get them.  I remember one that was posted for the Livingston County Family Court.  It was a $42,000 per year law clerk job that required THREE years of experience as a practicing family law attorney to even get an interview.
I have personally known many attorneys from this time who worked for years as severely underpaid attorneys just to get a court law clerk job that was stable, had benefits, and had yearly pay raises.
I do not post this to be bitter, to seek attention, or to sulk in negativity.  I’ve had a great life since I left the legal field.  I post this to warn and alert others.  The legal job market is under attack from new forces, namely AI and non-attorney “legal consultants” taking away work and jobs.  We may also be on the verge of the laws changing so that non-attorneys can own law firms, which has been one of the last barriers to even lower compensation for many attorneys than we have already seen.  Because of my experience and the experience of people I know, love, and care about, I do not recommend that anyone who wants to be a lawyer attend a Tier 4 law school.
I want to close with some numbers of how bad the legal job market was after I graduated in 2013.
$35,000 – This was the going rate for a new associate attorney at any of the few law firms that were hiring new attorneys in Michigan in 2013.  And this wasn’t just for Tier 4 graduates.  Tier 3 and Tier 2 graduates were also getting this rate. 
$18,000- This was the yearly income of numerous solo practitioners who graduated law school shortly before, inside, or shortly after the bubble whom I met or was told about.  None of these people knew one another, so they couldn’t have collaborated to make up some number. 
1 for every 7 – This was the number of legal jobs for every seven attorneys searching for work in Michigan at the time.  For every 7 attorneys looking for work, there was 1 job that was hiring.
$250,000 – The amount of total student debt that around a dozen graduates whom I personally knew had after finishing law school.  Some couldn't pass the bar exam.

I was a legal research assistant in undergrad to a solo-practitioner (less than 10 years ago). They were listed as employment on my law school application, and they wrote a letter of recommendation on my behalf to the school. I’m applying for admission to the NY bar now.

The year before I left for law school, they made numerous sexual advances toward me while I was working for them. I won’t go into details, but I was incredibly uncomfortable. I ended contact after I stopped working for them and blocked them.

This past Spring, in anticipation of maybe needing them to complete an affirmation for my bar app, I contacted them. I was met with similar, if not more extreme comments. I do not feel comfortable contacting them again or having them on my bar application.

Can I write an addendum to the bar about the situation so I don’t have to contact the attorney? I never reported them for their behavior. I’m sure this isn’t a novel situation if anyone has been through something similar and has advice.

(side note: I have to be admitted in NY for my job.)

Median LSAT: 170
Median GPA: 3.97
Acceptance Rate: 13.5

Insane.

Go Gators 🐊

Anyone else not get schedules or class or book info yet??? Orientation starts Monday