Wikipedia is More Accurate Than Ever

I'm sure everyone here remembers my foray into the world of Wikipedia editing, but for those who might be new, here's a refresher: I found out-of-date information on the Wikipedia page for the LSAT, and corrected the page. You can read the whole crazy story here, if interested.

The sparknotes version is that the page hadn't been updated to reflect the fact that the LSAT would now be offered six times a year, rather than four, the previous standard. Today, I went back to check and see if my edits were still standing, and lo and behold, they were.

Although the page's intro already mentioned that more tests would be added in the 2018-2019 test cycle, I think it's important for common resources to be as detailed as they can be. I'm hopeful that the service I provided has helped more accurate information be disseminated. 

Another Factor to Keep in Mind When Choosing a School

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the six factors to keep in mind when choosing a school. After doing more research, I'd like to add a seventh: Class size.

This can be applied two ways; both the size of the average class within the school and the amount of people per year can make a huge difference in your experience. There are pros and cons to each side, so you have to pick which aspects will work the best for you.

If you do better in small discussion groups where you have a lot of one-on-one time with the professor and other students, you're going to want to look at schools that tend to have very small classes. However, if you do well in lecture-style courses and know that you learn better when you are exposed to a diverse array of perspectives, larger class sizes might be what you're looking for, particularly if you check your school's diversity reports and see a highly-varied representation.

The number of people in your year at school can also seriously impact your experience. Schools with larger student bodies tend to have larger facilities, and offer a larger array of classes (this isn't always a given, but it's a good indicator). But larger doesn't always mean better, and if you're hoping to network while you're in school, it can be harder to make a splash in a bigger pool.

There's no single, correct answer for what everyone should pick. I know that I do well in individualized settings and want to have variety in my course options, so I tend to look at schools that have large student bodies and small class sizes. However, anyone considering law school should take a moment to reflect on their experience in undergrad or in other post-grad settings, and remember in which situations they've done the best.

The LSAT/GPA Paradigm

Whenever you apply for an academic program, you have to take into consideration whether or not you are qualified for it. I don't mean the out-and-out "bare minimum, graduated from a four-year university" qualifications, I mean whether or not the facts on you provide a strong enough basis for that program to accept you.

For us lawyer-hopefuls, those facts pretty much come down to our LSAT scores and our GPAs. It only takes a Google search to find the statistics on a school's admitted applicants, but sometimes it can be hard to properly understand how that criteria is applied. Does a 25th percentile GPA mean that you only have a chance of admission if your LSAT score is in the 75th percentile? Or is there still hope?

I found a program that tracks applicants' LSAT scores and GPAs together, and catalogues whether or not they were admitted. See an example below:

I picked Georgetown after reading that it is one of the most applied-to schools in America, so I figured that it would be the most relevant. You can check out the stats on your dream school here. 

It's good to know about where other applicants were in terms of both their scores, not just one or the other, so that we can be realistic about our prospects. For Georgetown, at least, a 25th percentile LSAT score (161) doesn't do you much good if you've also got a 25th percentile GPA (3.52).

Even though some of the data you may find could be disheartening, it's better to know than to blow the $50 on an application fee for a school where you don't have a chance. Then again, maybe you do. After all, there's almost always that one, hopeful little green dot in the lower or left-hand reaches of the screen. Maybe you could be that dot.

LSAT Prep Videos

I know I talk a lot about LSAT prep, and have done my best to give a rundown of what it's all about, but it occurs to me that I should probably let you guys see what the official LSAC (Law School Admissions Council) website says on the topic.

They've released a series of videos on the topics, you can find a link to the page with all of them here.

I do my best to give anyone reading this blog the best advice that I can, from an applicant's perspective, because I think it's valuable to hear about the process from someone going through it; there are things which occur to me that you might not pick up from asking someone who's been practicing law for decades and doesn't remember the minutia of the process.

That being said, it's important to turn to the experts for their advice as well. And the LSAC really is the best source for advice on the LSAT.

Finding an LSAT Prep Course

Finding an LSAT prep course can be a bit confusing; it seems like Kaplan is everywhere and there aren't always other readily available options. I don't have any hard or fast rules for figuring out which course you should take, since that's a very individualized process, but I recently found a good way to learn about your options: The LSAT Center site.

As far as I can tell, LSAT Center isn't LSAC-certified, but if you put in your state or your zip-code, it lists out all of the major, reputable LSAT prep courses available near you, including tutoring centers and online options, which can come in handy considering how much sponsored ad-space the major companies buy on Google. Sometimes it seems like the whole first page of search results has been bought by advertisers.

Whichever course you choose has to depend on the amount of time you can devote to the process, how much work you need based on your practice tests, and what you know about your own style of learning. I'm taking an in-person course because I have time for bi-weekly classes that are a bit of a drive from my house, I want to get my score up at least five points from where my average is currently, and I don't do well in one-on-one environments long-term.

Any number of factors could go into why you choose the course that you do. But whatever those factors are, it's nice to see your options laid out so you can make an informed decision, which is what the LSAT Center does.

Letters of Recommendation: The Basics

A HUGE part of your law school application comes down to your references. Your GPA and LSAT score only tells schools so much; admission committees want to know how you do in an actual class environment. Even if you're the smartest person in your undergrad class, if your references write in saying that you were always a jackass difficult student who had trouble with focusing and distracting others, that doesn't look good.

For better or for worse, you can't go back and change your last four years of behavior. Luckily, the way you ask for a recommendation can really help you (Or hurt you if you do it improperly).

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you're asking this person for a favor. So be polite. I'm not saying that you have to be overly formal, particularly if you already have a good working relationship with the recommender. There's no need to send an engraved letter along the lines of:

Dear Sir/Madame,

I would cordially request that you submit a letter of recommendation on my behalf to the following institutions, to facilitate my application and assist me in attaining admittance to a higher level of graduate education.

But on the other hand, you can't be too casual either. No professor wants to open their inbox to see:

What up teach? I need a letter of reccommendation for my law school app thats due at midnight tonight can you help me out? Id have asked yesterday but it was two-for-one tequila shots down at the Blue Pickle so I sorta forgot. Anyways   Im gonna need an extension on my final essay too. Your the best! K thx byee!!

I'm here to help you strike a balance. For starters, the professor you pick matters a lot here. They should be someone you've known for a while and have a decent relationship with. I know that sounds like a no-brainer, but there are some people out there who ask professors from their massive lecture courses, where the professor barely could pick them out of a crowd. Even if you got an A in that class, there aren't going to be many personal details a professor like that can write about in their letter. You should at least ask someone whose office hours you've been to.

Once you know who you're asking, it's a good idea to figure out when you should ask, and the answer is always as early as possible. If you expect your recommender to sit down and write out a thoughtful, complimentary letter, you need to give them enough time to do it. I'd say that you should ask at least a month before you want to start sending out your applications.

If you wait until the last minute, your professor is well within their rights to say no, that they don't have enough time. Even if you come across someone who is benevolent enough to agree, do you really want a letter that they wrote with one eye on the clock, trying to just throw something together so you'd at least have something to mail in?

After you've asked, and the professor has (hopefully) agreed, here's a tried-and-true trick that's worked for me over the years: Ask the recommender if you can sit down with them and talk about your application. You want to tailor each piece of your application, and this gives you the opportunity to do that.

It's not exactly a bad thing if a recommender focuses mostly on your strong writing skills in their letter, but if you were hoping that they could talk about how you improve as the semester progresses, and that you're a dedicated and hard worker, it's not the best possible outcome. Talking to the recommender gives you the opportunity to explain what you're hoping the admissions committee learns about you from this letter.

Talking to your recommender also means that you can help them write about why you're specifically interested in a particular program as well. If you're only applying to schools with great clinical programs, your recommender can add a tidbit about that, which can make you stand out from a pile of standard 'He/She was a delight to have in class'. 

All these little things add up, and an admissions committee can definitely tell the difference between a boilerplate, basic, "I send this out for every student that asks" letter, and a carefully crafted letter about you specifically.

Once you've gotten your letter sent in, there is one more, very important task that you have to do: WRITE A THANK YOU NOTE! Yes, it's big and red because it's just that important.

I'm not just telling you to write a thank you note because to not do so will lead to the death of polite society (Even though it will), I'm also telling you to do it because it's the best way to prevent yourself from accidentally burning a bridge. A professor might not automatically hate you if you don't write a thank you note after they write you a recommendation, but they will remember you much more fondly if you do. And they put the effort in to write you a letter. You owe it to them to at least let them know how your applications turned out.

Three basic rules: Be polite, give plenty of notice, and write a thank you note. It's not a perfect recipe to success; you still need to find professors who thought highly of you in the first place. However, it's a very good place to start.

6 Factors to Keep in Mind When Choosing Schools

When applying to law schools, it's important to figure out what's important to you. Yes, it's easy to just take a look at where you fall on their LSAT/GPA spectrum to figure out where you might get in, but picking the school that you want to attend, and that you think would be a good fit for you, should require a little more research. Here is a list of things that I look at in a school before I decide whether or not I want to apply, and why:

1. Bar Pass Rate: A no-brainer. I want to know how likely it is that I'll pass the Bar the first time; it's the whole point of law school.
2. Ranking: This matters because the name on your diploma carries weight, and a higher-ranked school is likely to have more clout when you're applying for jobs.
3. Clinical Programs: I know that I want to get as much hands-on experience as I can, as soon as I can, and law clinics are the best way to do that.
4. Tuition and Types of Financial Aid Programs: We all know that law school will be an expensive endeavor. Even with the six-figure salaries we all hope to get right out of law school, crushing debt isn't a good look on anyone, so it's good to figure out how much you'd be paying.
5. Location: Just by nature, a school in an urban area is going to have many more external opportunities than a rural one.
6. Reach, Match, or Safety: I don't look at this solely as a factor to decide on one school, but I like to know where I stand with each school I apply to, so I can ensure I'm applying to a variety of all three.

This is a non-exhaustive list, but I absolutely encourage everyone to at least look at these factors when you're picking the schools that you want to apply to, or figure out what's important to you and keep that in mind.

Picking which schools to apply to is overwhelming. Having a few clearly defined criteria that you're looking for can really simplify the process, rather than just applying to every place that might take you, and trying to figure it out from there.