Categories: Advice, Career, Hiring a Law School Admission Consultant, Law Careers, Law School Admission Trends, LSAT, Uncategorized
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Categories: Law School Admission Deadlines, LSAT, Rolling Admissions
Tags: Applying to Law School with a December LSAT score, December LSAT
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We’re two weeks away from the December LSAT. This is make it or break it time. If you aren’t hitting in the range where you need to be hitting, you might want to consider waiting and taking the February or June LSAT and applying early in the next admission cycle rather than late in this one with a score you’re unhappy with. As I write more extensively about in The Law School Admission Game, February is a less than ideal time to take the LSAT for admission the same year. Of course, applications are down overall this year so it is less lethal this year than in others, but only for those who have scores that schools will find competitive. It’s not the way to get into a reach school.
For those of you who take the December LSAT, here’s how you should plan out your time in the next 6 weeks:
In late November: make sure transcripts and letters of rec are on their way (hopefully received) by LSAC/CAS.
December 3: LSAT
December 4-25: work on and finalize your personal statement, resume, optional essays and addenda (just not an LSAT addendum because you can’t explain your LSAT history without knowing your most recent score).
Late December: once you have your score, finalize your schools list and start filling out applications. There is no rush over winter break: law schools are closed and no one is moving your file around to review it.
Early January: submit applications. Aim to be done in the first two weeks of January.
This is absolutely a strategy for success – people get into amazing law schools on this timeline, so don’t panic. This post should put you at ease about your decision to take the December LSAT if you are confident you can raise your score (or if you need a score on the board, of course). Let me know if you have any questions.
Categories: Advice, Law School Admission Deadlines, Law School Admission Trends, Low LSAT, LSAT, LSAT Prep, LSAT; Rolling Admissions
Tags: December LSAT, Low LSAT, LSAT Scores, October LSAT score
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LSAT scores came out. Let the panic begin. Right now you’re exhausted, scouring the Internet for anything, ready to grasp the smallest, least credible piece of advice that tells you that your very low LSAT score WILL get you into the school of your dreams.
What is my advice? Sleep on it. Then, when you wake up, read these posts:
Before You Re-take the LSAT
The Post-LSAT Blues (by me, but on USNews.com)
Should You Re-Take the LSAT in December? (by me)
Should You Re-Take the LSAT in December (by MSS blog)
But to answer the easy questions:
1. NO – December is NOT too late to apply for Fall 2012 admission. Why? Because you will still be able to submit apps in early January. Because you’re better off having a higher LSAT score and applying in January than applying now with a lower LSAT score. Because applications are down 10% and this can only help you.
2. NO – You can’t significantly improve your practice exam scores in 5 weeks. If you suck at standardized tests, you’re not going to be able to teach yourself the test. To get a different result, you need to take different actions.
Happy to take questions! And would love your feedback on the new book, The Law School Decision Game:A Playbook for Prospective Lawyers.
Ann
Categories: Advice, Law School Admission Deadlines, Law School Personal Statement, Law School Resume Tips, Letters of Rec, LSAT, LSAT; Rolling Admissions
20 Comments »
If you just took today’s LSAT, congratulations on being done. For the next 24 hours make no major decisions and avoid reading any forums or talking to anyone who also took today’s test. You have 6 days to decide whether to cancel your LSAT score and there are no bonus points for rushing to cancel today. Take a deep breath and relax. I always talk to a lot of people who panic on LSAT day, only to feel just fine about their performance the next day. That rarely happens in reverse. However, definitely cancel your LSAT score if any of these things happened to you.
When you wake up tomorrow, decide to be productive. Here are 3 easy things to do this week to move your application process forward:
1. Get out your resume and resolve to polish it up. See this US News post I wrote last year and listen to Chapter 6 of the audio version of The Law School Admission Game: Play Like an Expert.
2. Make sure your LORs are in process – being sent to LSAC or already there.
3. Work on your personal statement. Here are some helpful posts about law school personal statement writing and this one about concluding your personal statement.
Lastly, if you end up being disappointed by your score, is it OK to take the December LSAT and apply in early January? YES. Absolutely. It’s ok.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend and, as always, I’m happy to answer your questions.
Categories: Advice, LSAT, LSAT Prep, Uncategorized
Tags: Last minute LSAT tips, October LSAT
1 Comment »
Ten Days Until the LSAT: Everything You Need to Know
I feel like I’m giving a lot of LSAT advice right now, being asked:
- Am I ready?
- What do I do for the next 10 days?
- How do I calm down?
- Is December too late?
- Should I withdraw?
- How will I know whether to cancel my score?
I know the advice I always give in response to these questions. For example, just this week a client asked me:
“I’m still having trouble finishing on time, any tips on that? I read somewhere that on the day of the exam, the adrenaline rush takes over and people usually finish earlier than their prep tests?” I responded, “Just do the best you can on each question, knowing you might be sacrificing other questions for timing. Check through each section quickly and see which ones you think will be hardest to answer. But practice this strategy so you don’t get freaked out on test day.”
I always like to know what advice other people would give since I’m the Law School Expert, not the LSAT expert : ) So I consulted someone who I consider to be an LSAT expert, my friend Noah Teitelbaum of Manhattan LSAT. And after his great advice, below, I’ve included tips from some of my Facebook friends who responded to a call for last minute LSAT advice. Also, if you haven’t heard it before, you MUST spend 45 minutes in the next few days listening to my Blog Talk Radio show/podcast on last minute LSAT tips, featuring Noah on the panel of experts.
Without further ado, here is Noah:
It’s about 10 days until the October LSAT – 240 hours, 14,400 minutes, or 864,000 seconds – but let’s not spend our time counting! If you’re freaking out, here are some ideas to help keep you chugging along smoothly into a great LSAT score:
Now:
1. Focus on the main event. Right about now we see on our LSAT forums lots of questions about unimportant topics and students freaking out about the hardest LSAT questions in written history. Rare question and game types are rare! If you find them tough, that’s not a big deal. What is important is that you are able to get the easy and common ones correct without wasting too much time, leaving you enough time for the rare question or game. And, games are generally more consistent today than in days of yore, so don’t freak out if you think CD game or the Zephyr airlines game is hard – they were! Focus on capitalizing on your strengths, not trying to do an emergency patch-up of a minor weakness.
2. Clean up your act. Time to switch to O’Doul’s for the next 10 days, and start exercising (exercise has been linked to neural growth). And, create a schedule for yourself. Most people should be doing just 2-3 more practice LSATs in the last 10 days, though there are some strange people who do better doing an LSAT every day until test day. Think about what generally makes you stay on the top of your mental game, write out a schedule, and execute. For most people, this means a steady diet of 2 section practice sets, deep review, replay of tough questions, and a full, 5-section practice LSAT sprinkled in here or there.
3. Go mental. Before an Olympic diver takes a dive, she imagines the whole process, from start to finish. That way, the dive is simply an execution of a plan, not something that’s being invented at that moment. Same thing for you. Consider how you’ll take this test – what you’ll do when you face a tough question, what you’ll do if the proctor screws up. Practice envisioning this before each practice test. Then, do the same thing on test day morning.
On test day:
4. Keep it real. There’s something magically disastrous that happens on test day for many people. Let’s say two people are both getting 160-164 on their practice LSATs. When Mr. Proctor says begin, Mr. 164 now is possessed with the idea that he might be able to get a 180. This is a problem. The truth is that Mr. and Ms. 164 will NOT GET A 180. Ms. 164 does a better job of controlling her passions: she aims for a 164, knowing she can get about 18 questions wrong. When she comes across a ridiculously tough question, she makes an educated guess and moves on, saving time for other questions that are tough, but doable with a bit more time. Mr. 164 instead spends 2.5 minutes on the first impossible question he faces, still gets it wrong, and is now trying to catch up. In short, go in there and know how many you want to get wrong, and get them wrong.
5. Admit it, it is hard. Unless you’re scoring well-below the national median, chances are that if you think a question is hard, most everyone else in the nation does too. There are always some geeks out there who won’t, but if we stick to thinking about the mortal population, let’s keep a cool head. It’s a tough question, lots of people will get it wrong, the question is whether you’ll get it wrong and waste a lot of time on it. Notice that this is the same advice as #1?
6. Warm-up with a warm-up, not section 1. Your brain is a muscle, and it probably isn’t used to working on Saturday morning, so bring a tough game that you’ve mastered, maybe an LR question or RC passage, read it outside the LSAT center as you sip your usual morning beverage (don’t over caffeinate!) and then crumble it up as you walk in and toss it triumphantly. Better that than using the first section as your warm-up…
7. Even if you’re going to cancel, take the test like you won’t. Keep on trucking through that LSAT. It’s always good to get the practice, and perhaps that section you bombed was an experimental one. . . And what if everyone in the nation thought that the third RC passage was completely baffling – maybe your feeble performance was better than most people’s. Give yourself the time to think things through after the LSAT – you have several days to cancel.
After test day:
8. Remember your application. Ann knows a lot more about this topic, but is everything else ready to roll? Better to focus on that then hitting refresh on Gmail, waiting for your score report.
9. Geek out. We’ll review this LSAT on Wed. October 26th – so if you’d like to use the LSAT as an opportunity to learn something for the December LSAT. Join us <http://www.manhattanlsat.com/EventShow.cfm?EID=3&eventID=634> .
THANKS SO MUCH, Noah!!!! I always love to share your tips with my readers. Below is advice from some of my Facebook friends, who have been where you are and are now very LSAT-wise:
Cat Don’t drink 9 million cups of coffee – it will only wind you up. know that there will be someone doing something annoying in your test – practice so it doesn’t phase you. breathe – in about a year you likely wont remember your score anyway.
Nick A great way to train for taking a test in a slightly noisy environment (there is always SOME sort of mumbling, fidgeting, etc. going on) when you are at home is to do practice tests with talk radio quietly on in the background. You learn/get used to tuning out background sounds.
Eva I actually completely agree with the coffee comment. If you’re the type of person who gets excessively nervous, I would actually not drink coffee at all. It makes your heart rate go up and that makes you feel more nervous than you already are. Also remember that a bad LSAT score is not the end of the world – it’s just a test.
Rebecca Play upbeat music that you like to sing along with on the way to the test. If you’re singing then you aren’t obsessing about the test or winding yourself up.
Jeff 1) take two days off of studying before the test. you don’t want to burn yourself out. 2) only study for maybe 4 or 5 hours a day MAX. after that you’ll start to lose focus… which leads to you feeling like you don’t get it… which leads to a decline in attitude… which leads to a worse score. 3) the day before the test be SURE not to sleep in. you need to be sure that you’ll be able to fall asleep the night before the test (that was my mistake the first time…) 4) read the newspaper the morning before the test to a) take your mind off the test and b) get your brain into reading mode.
Eli Remember this important thing: It’s not even close to as bad as the CA bar exam. Just keep telling yourself “hey, I can do this, at least it’s not something crazy like the bar” and then when you actually get to that time, you are allowed to freak out… just a bit.
Categories: Advice, Application Timeline, Law School Admission Deadlines, LSAT, LSAT; Rolling Admissions
19 Comments »
It’s September. What on earth should you be doing? Obviously, if you aren’t taking the LSAT in the future and you are keeping a past score, now is the time to get your Letters of Rec, personal statement, resume, addenda, applications, optional essays underway. If you haven’t started, what are you waiting for?
If you are taking the October LSAT,the next four weeks are all about that – put everything else to the side except perhaps requesting transcripts and letters of rec. Also, read this post about my top 3 LSAT tips to know if you’re going to be ready to take the test and this Countdown to the October LSAT post. If you’re not happy with your LSAT practice performance, read this post about Not Hitting Your Goal LSAT score.
If you are heading to a LSAC Forum or recruiting event at a law school, here’s a post with tips about what to ask the law school representatives when you see them. The most important thing is to keep their contact info so you haven’t someone to follow up with throughout the application cycle.
If you’re considering taking the December LSAT, that’s perfectly ok. Just read this post first so you undertand admission cycle timing. Just start working on your application materials now so you can really concentrate on the LSAT for most of October and November.
I hope everyone has a great Labor Day Weekend!
Categories: LSAT, LSAT Prep
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The following is a guest post by Douglas Groene, an attorney who earned his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. He has been tutoring students preparing for the ACT, SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT for over a decade, and still takes a limited number of private students on Long Island. He is also the founder of http://www.pencilnerd.com a blog about standardized tests, featuring test prep news, commentary, tips, and product reviews.
Very early in my tutoring career, I realized the power of the score report. It’s probably the single best weapon in the big test prep companies’ arsenal. The major companies can give you instant feedback on every detail of your practice test performance. How did you do on matching games? What percent of parallel reasoning argument questions did you get right? Is your performance on assumption questions improving?
Score reports allow you to constantly improve your technique based on feedback, and to sharply focus your study time on the areas that need the most work. Because I wanted to bring this powerful tool to every student and tutor, I created the SCORE MY LSAT page.
Just enter your answers to an LSAT preptest (the real, past LSAT tests published by LSAC), and the program will instantly generate a detailed score report, similar to one you would get from BigPrep. Right now the program goes up to Preptest 38, and I will be adding the rest of the preptests in the coming weeks.
In addition to giving your raw and scaled scores and section stats, the score reports produce attractive bar graphs that depict your performance on each question type within games, arguments, and reading comprehension.
Of course, the score reports are not official and depend on my own categorization of the questions. In some cases, questions are hard to pigeonhole into a single type. For example, a question might ask “which one of the following principles lends the greatest support to the argument?” Is it a principle question or a strengthen question?
In many cases it’s a judgment call, but I tried to be as consistent as possible. I am sure there are a few errors, but luckily about 90% of LSAT questions fit unambiguously into a single category. With feedback for each question type, students can monitor their progress from test to test and allocate their study time accordingly. I hope that students (and tutors) will use the scoring program to get the most out of their LSAT preptests.
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Ann K. Levine, Esq., former director of law school admissions for two ABA approved law schools, is a law school admission consultant and owner of Law School Expert,
