Page 269 - WhyAsInY

Mass revival
sions that he foresaw, the 87 was his idea of the minimum required grade point average at Amherst that it would take to get you in (and was a number that was well outside the reach of most attendees), and the 790 was an astronomical score on the LSAT, assuming that it was scored as our SAT had been. It was a deflating and crude display. Yale, a law school with a very small student body, was known as a law school for poets (quite the opposite of Harvard), but Tate’s report certainly seemed to give the lie to that notion. He could have mailed those facts in, quite as easily as he ultimately, and speedily, mailed out my form rejection letter.
Notwithstanding (note: that’s a lawyer’s word) the disappointment that the session had caused me, I forged on and took the LSAT, which was cruelly scheduled for the Saturday of Homecoming Weekend, when Williams would come to town for The Football Game, not to mention all of the other competition. I believe that Smith and Holyoke curfews were extended on Friday night, but even if they weren’t, I managed to squeeze every second out of the evening (with Sue) that I could. I like to blame my subpar performance on the LSAT on that fact and, using my great powers of rationalization, on the view that I overanalyzed the “legal” part of the exam. (I was subsequently told by my very smart wife, Kathy—who did go to Yale Law School—that I should have attacked the test as if there were no subtleties in the questions at all.) Forging on, I applied to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, and Fordham and thereby set myself up for the first real academic rejections of my life (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago). At the time of my graduation, I had received acceptance letters from Fordham and NYU (which I preferred to Fordham), was put on the waiting list for Colum- bia (which I preferred even more), and left to hope that a high number of Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago acceptees were sitting with acceptance letters from Morningside Heights.
To understand the other standardized test, one must learn some “real world” history (as would also be necessary to enable one to under- stand the 1966 commencement at Amherst). When President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the United States had a military presence in South Vietnam of fewer than 17,000 troops. Then, in August
• 251 •