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Mass revival
both ways, and I could catch some sleep in transit. What a good guy! No details need be filled in, but somehow Wedel was able to make the 150- mile trip to Croton-on-Hudson in less than two hours and ten minutes. The car was pretty cramped with five people having to ride back, but no one was feeling very much pain. Doug knew that he could not drive back to Amherst in broad daylight with anything like the speed that he had shown the night before, so we elected to leave at about 7:00, with coffee mugs in hand. Traffic was not exactly cooperative, however, so it was a trip that had its tensions. But Doug did manage to get us to Frost by about 9:50, giving me ten minutes to locate the examination room, pick up the exam and the blue booklets that I would write in, find a comfortable desk, and borrow two pens, one for insurance. I thanked him and the ladies, and, once I was in place, I proceeded to write eight hours worth of essays on the adrenaline created by the pressure and pleasure of the trip. This effort was also rewarded a magna by the depart- ment, with no credit having been given by the reviewing professors for the good deed that I had done for Doug. (I graduated cum laude, not magna cum laude, as my GPA was barely below the 86.0 magna require- ment, which was achieved by about twenty students; there was no degree summa cum laude awarded in 1966.)
Exit Stage Left
The Comps were not the only big tests that I took before I received my degree. There were three others: the first, a standardized test, which was a product of a decision that I don’t recall making but actually must have made at some point during the year; the second, also a standardized test, but anything but decisional; and the third and final, a non-standardized test that was completely decisional.
The first test was the LSAT, the exam that you took if you were going to apply to law school (which meant that you didn’t know what you wanted to do after college). I don’t recall deciding to become an attorney, and I like to say that I did so by default: I had learned to dislike
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