taxguy

My son just finished applying to over 13 law schools and heard from all except one. I wanted to share what we learned about the admission process,which should help a lot of people.

1. Unlike undergraduate studies where the SAT is about 50% of the admission process, the LSAT represents about 65-75% of the admission process. I can't emphasize this enough. It is the king, queen and prince of admission. A super GPA and bad LSATs are NOT going to get you into a top school. A fabulous LSAt and mediocre GPA will way outperform the reverse. You might question the reason for this significant importance of the LSAT. The main reason is the rankings. 25% of rankings take LSAT score, median GPA and percentage of appicants accepted into account. Thus, law schools will do anything to raise these factors.

2. Because the LSAT is so important, I recommend not only taking a course but preparing for it at least 6 months before you actually take the test and preferably a year or more. It is really that important. Be advised that the LSAT, unlike that of other standardized tests, is very hard to finish. It is a very time sensitive exam, almost like an IQ test in some ways. Amazingly, a few points on the LSAt make HUGE differences in admission chances, similar to the ACT. Seriously, there might be a three or four point difference between those in the bottom 25% of admitted applicants and the top 75% of admitted applicants.

3. If your LSAT is below the median shown for the school, your GPA should be substantially above the median.

4. Only the undergraduate GPA counts in admission. Graduate school grades are irrelevant. Yes, grad school grads might count as a decent soft factor,but they honestly don't filter much into the admission equation regardless of how well you did in grad school.

5. Soft factors such as peer tutoring, college athletics, student body representation and work experience, even with a law firm, internships, and charitable endeavors are pretty much irrelevant. Although the longer you have been working , the less the undergrad GPA may be counted.

6. Some "soft" factors might have a slight effect on admission. Examples might be designations such as CPA, CFA etc. Other decent soft factors are superlative grad school grades, awards from employers ( with proof), written published books etc. Even with these, they only have marginal benefits. Your overall GPA and LSAT should be enough to make you competitive,which means near the median of accepted applicants. They won't make up for low LSATs. Again the LSAT and GPA are kings and everything else is almost irrelevant. Say that five times. This includes work experience. Now if you were applying to a very top law school, these factors might give a slight edge at best.

7. I do want to say something about the personal statement. A well written, interesting personal statement can be worth a few points ( such as one or two) on the LSAT. Spend some time writing a strongly written statement.

8. Law school admission officers LIE. Make no mistake. If they can decrease their admitted student percentages based on total applications, they will because it factors into the rankings. We went to a law school career fair. We gave the admission officer my son's stats along with other factors. Every school that noted that my son had a good chance for admission, rejected him. These admission officers lied right to our faces in order to increase their statistics. Yes, you can argue that I didn't tell them everything, but I really did tell them alot. Also, he had great recommendations and had a strongly written personal statement. Trust me, many of these admission officers' statements can't be trusted.

Also, attending a top undergraduate school seems to be irrelevant. The main factors are LSAT and GPA and Personal Statement. Most other things , especially the cache of the school name, doesn't matter. Please repeat this five times.

Hope this all helps.

FailSafe

Thanks, as a senior heading to college next year, this gave me a good idea of what to be aware of in the next set of admissions!

taxguy

Also be aware that the legal market is particularly bad. Many kids from lower tier schools are not getting jobs or not getting decent paying legal jobs. If you don't attend a top 10 school, you better do VERY well at the school that you are in. Even with a fabulous GPA,if you don't attend a top school, you will have a hard time finding employment. It certainly is doable ,but you will find it tough. Make every connections that you can while in law school. Network like crazy or you will regret it.

Also, many people think that they can transfer to a top school if they do well in law school. It is VERY hard to transfer to a much higher tier school from a lower tier school for several reasons.

First, most top schools will only take kids from lower tier schools who are in the top 1-5%. Moreover, the lower tier schools know that their top performers may want to transfer. Thus, law school grading, especially at schools in the mid to lower tiers, is abysmal. Thus, the grading is horrible and few achieve top grades. It is MUCH, MUCH harder to get top grades from a mid tier law school than that of undergrad. The only good news is that if you do well, law schools do tend to give out decent scholarships to their better performers at both mid tier and lower tier schools. This is obviously very different from undergraduate studies who won't give out large scholarships regardless of performance.

Neonzeus

TaxGuy:

Wonderful posting! S went through his apps two years ago, and discovered everything that you said was correct. S also applied to about 13 schools (2 safeties, 3 matches, 4 low-reaches and 4 reach schools). He was admitted to all of his safety and match schools. Only the safety schools offered scholarships. His low-reach schools were 50% admits and 50% waitlist. He ultimately was accepted by his waitlist low-reach schools. He was accepted by one of his reach schools, was put on a wait list and then rejected by another reach school, and was rejected by the remaining two reaches.

With the exception of being admitted by one reach school (much too expensive without a scholarship) and being waitlisted at another reach school (as far as S could tell, their waitlist was huge), his results were predictable from lawschoolnumbers. He put down a deposit at a match school. When accepted, he lost his deposit and went to a waitlist school. He did really well there. Both S and one of his friends then transferred to reach schools that had originally rejected them (no scholarships for transfer students - fortunately, S's school was actually cheaper).

S was invited to participate in some OCI interviews at School #2. It appeared to S that the firms interviewed 5+ students from each school, and that they interviewed from several schools. Negatives of transferring can be the loss of opportunities for law review at the new school, lack of transfer scholarships, the possible effect on class ranking and perhaps having to take additional required classes. Transfer applications were awkward at School #1, and S's friend actually had problems getting transcripts sent out in a timely manner. Most law school classes aren't large, and law students usually know what everyone else is doing....

S has not found that being a transfer student has affected his ability to form relationships with professors at School #2. He did find that some existing students were less friendly to transfer students. He continues to do well, but perhaps not as well as if he had stayed at School #1. He actually liked School #1 more, but School #2 is located where S would prefer to work. Aside from saving money, it's easier for S to network and job hunt. Overall though, transferring is not that common in law school for many reasons and it doesn't make sense to go to a school with the plan of transferring.

Also -- you never know who is actually going to be successful in law school. S's roommate in School #1 was from an Ivy and his numbers were a lot higher than S's, but his grades were substantially lower. Law school has a way of kicking people in the pants. Sometimes the people you don't expect to do well end up at the top of the class, and the people who are extremely confident about their abilities end up in the middle of the pack or lower. For many schools, welcome to the curve. Everyone in law school is smart and competitive, but obviously not everyone is going to be in the top 1-5%.

Dew

taxguy, thanks for the great info. But like to ask if you think LSAT is trainable. I mean ofcourse you will need some innate ability but still do you think its a bit more trainable like the SAT II's intead of like SAT I where actually there is a limit of what one can get??
SAT II's they are in my opinion are like " your score represents how much time and effort you put in" but is it like that with LSAT? Thanks for your comment.

TheRoad

How is the interview?

taxguy

Dew, the problem with the LSAT is that I think most people have an upper limit by which they won't pass. However, with that said, Yes, I think it is somewhat trainable. However, I know people who scored 15 points with training over what they did when they took a practice test, and I know people who simply went up a few points. It really does vary, I am sorry to say. My son took the LSAT three times. He took a review course and studied like mad for 6 months and didn't break 150.

Theroad asks,"how is the interview?" Honestly, there were no interviews at any of the law schools that my son applied to. Thus, I can't comment on the effect of interviews. I would bet that it doesn't matter much though.

bluedevilmike

So far as I know, only HLS uses interviews. Those interviews happen via phone and take something approximating five minutes. They serve two purposes. First, they're a marketing device for the school -- you form a connection with the admissions office, get to know the folks there, have a chance to ask questions. Second, they're a psycho screen. Even in the course of five minutes, apparently something like 10% of applicants will do something just grossly malsocial -- e.g. greet the dean of Harvard Law School with a "Wassssssssaaaap?" or something like that.

(Does Northwestern also offer interviews, maybe?)

silverturtle

Yes, Northwestern Law School recommends that its applicants have admissions interviews.

taxguy

I wanted to add one more bit of interesting information. YOur major is irrelevant. It is only the GPA and LSAT that really matters. Thus, a 3.6 in an easier major is better for admiossion than a 3.5 in a very hard major. Law schools do NOT factor in the hardness of the major or the cache of the school, as strange as that sounds.

Likewise, post college experiences such as grad school, work experience, etc. don't count much either. It's mainly about a formula that each law school uses which combines in some way the undergraduate GPA and LSAT. Each law school has a different formula that is usually kept secret. Baylor , however, has noted that they take the LSAT score and add ten times the GPA to achieve their formula. This is probably used by other schools as well.

Although I said this above in post one, it bears repeating. The LSAT is king. I know several people who graduated with a 3.9+ but a poor LSAT and didn't get admitted into any top school. I know folks with a 3.3 but stellar LSATs that got into top 15 law schools. LSAT is king.

However, don't think that because you didn't do well on the LSAT or the reverse that this will be indicative of your law school performance. There are LOTs of outlyers where kids with low LSAT do well in law schools and kids with amazing LSATs don't. Yes, there is a corelation,but I have found from the people that I know that the corelation isn't as great as you would think.

In several cases where top GPA kid were rejected because of low LSATs, they all did very well in the law school that they attended, although it was a lower tier school. The LSAt is a strange test to say the least.

frazzled1

My d's experience this year confirms taxguy's observations. Adding a few datapoints: It certainly was in my d's case. She re-took the LSAT last fall and had a major spike in her score. She credits the classroom course she took (think it was Kaplan) two nights a week. It was a miserable time for her - she has a challenging full-time job and it was hard to put the effort into getting to class each night and then doing all the self-study, too. She could see her score rising with every practice test, though. Best part of the course was the LSAT given under actual test conditions (I think at the official testing site?).

Not that I'm plugging Kaplan - she had a big problem with them when she first took the LSAT a couple of years ago. She was signed up for a classroom course, and they wouldn't give her a full refund when the course was cancelled due to poor registration. They talked her into a fancy online course which turned out to be no better than buying an LSAT practice book. Because LSATs are more important than any other factor, applicants should ask themselves what their optimal prep situation is, then obtain it. My d had faculty or dean interviews by phone for Harvard and Cornell; she was told that alum interviews for Northwestern and Vanderbilt were required. She realized that the Cornell interview was to decide whether to admit or waitlist her since the guy seemed most interested in how likely she was to attend.

Yield protection is an important factor in law school admissions, too, and for the same reason LSATs are - schools are trying to maintain or improve their spots in the rankings. Some schools want detailed "Why Our School" supplements to the application. This isn't a major consideration unless the student has the stats to be admitted, though, or so I've read.

zaprowsdower

Yield protection is not a factor. Yield isn't something US News even considers in its rankings. I suppose it has an effect on acceptance rates, but acceptance rate is only 2.5% of the overall score. Since that's considerable less weight than is given to GPA and LSAT (which are 10% and 15% of the score), schools accept just about everybody with good numbers in the hope that a few will attend.

I think this is primarily helpful in making scholarship offers. Schools may not offer money to students with good numbers who they don't believe are interested, since that money presumably can't be offered to another student until the offer is rejected.

frazzled1

Well, my bad then! Actually, from what I've read on other boards, some schools (UVA in particular) do practice yield protection. If you look at their graph on lawschoolnumbers, you'll see that many more applicants are waitlisted with numbers in excess of UVA's top 25th percentiles for LSATs and GPA than accepted. I realize these are self-reported numbers, but it's a continuing phenomenon over the past several years. The most logical explanation I've read for this is UVA's desire to maximize its yield rate. Perhaps it's more that it desires to keep its acceptance rate low and has decided to do so by waitlisting instead of accepting applicants whose numbers put them in contention at higher-ranked schools. But doesn't that seem like a subtle distinction? There are a lot of yellow triangles on those graphs.

bluedevilmike

I've seen it a little bit. But yield protection is one of the single most important considerations in undergrad and med school admissions, and it's a MUCH lesser factor in law school admissions. I applied to six law schools. The only one that rejected me was the second-least-selective. (The least selective is the only school that offers a concentration in my intended field, and I did a research project with a faculty member there in 2006.)

marny1

thanks Taxguy for the posting. Good luck to your son.

ZP- I think yield protection can come into play. Especially with kids who are waitlisted. Early in the admission cycle last year (Dec/Jan) my kid was waitlisted from UCLA. Her stats were definitely in play. The waitlist letter said something to the effect that if UCLA is truly your top choice let us know ASAP. As this letter was sent to her so early in the cycle, I'm pretty sure they would have admitted her if she sent a LOCI stating that UCLA was on top of her list. As she had already received offers from a few T-14's, UCLA was no longer a top contender. As we are from the east coast, I'm sure schools like UCLA know they may have a harder time getting NY kids to commit. So I am definitely of the belief that schools have an eye on acceptance rate and YP.