Law School Admissions Unplugged Podcast: Personal Statements, Application Essays, Scholarships, LSAT Prep, and More…
If I Wanted To Get Into Every T14 Law School In 2024, This is What I’d Do [FULL BLUEPRINT]
If I Wanted To Get Into Every T14 Law School In 2024, This is What I’d Do [FULL BLUEPRINT] Free Easy LSAT Cheat Sheet: https://bit.ly/easylsat Book A Call: https://form.typeform.com/to/Et1l5Dg6 LSAT Unplugged Courses: http://www.lsatunplugged.com Unlimited Application Essay Editing: https://www.lsatunplugged.com/law-school-admissions Unplugged Prep: http://www.unpluggedprep.com/ Get my book for only $4.99: https://www.lsatmasterybook.com LSAT Unplugged Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lsat-unplugged/id1450308309?mt=2 LSAT Unplugged Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lsatunplugged/ LSAT Unplugged TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lsatunplugged LSAT Coaching YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgOHAiSs08EbD-kfDFqIEoMC_hzQrH-J5 Law School Admissions Coaching YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgOHAiSs08EbsqveKs_RZEy2sqqbz3HUL Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/LSATBlog/?sub_confirmation=1 ***
The law school admission process is broken and every single aspect of admissions can be gamed, whether it's your LSAT score, your GPA, or your application essays. And this, unfortunately, puts you at a disadvantage in the process if you don't know how to play the game. Admissions is a zero-sum process because, of course, there are limited seats available at the top law schools. There is limited scholarship money available as well. And so today, I'm going to share with you what top performers are doing to get to top law schools and get full-ride scholarships in the hopes that it can help level the playing field. For those who don't know me, my name is Steve Schwartz. I've been teaching the LSAT since 2005, and I brought my LSAT score from a 152-175 on LSAT Test Day. Today, I'm going to share with you my insights from nearly 20 years of teaching the LSAT and following the law school admission process in the hopes it'll help you get a leg up in the admissions process as well. Because there are a subset of law school applicants who've found the loopholes in the system, and they are exploiting these loopholes for maximum advantage. Technically, of course, they are not breaking any rules, but by thinking like lawyers, they found ways to gain the system to get into better law schools, get more scholarship money, or both. And I'm hoping to level the playing field here because there are a lot of folks who don't realize that these tactics are even an option, but they do have a massive impact on your chances if you execute them the right way. So let's get into it. The first factor here is the LSAT. We see that LSAT score inflation is happening due to rising LSAT medians at top law schools. Now, every single T14 law school has an LSAT score median at or above 170 plus. It used to be getting a 173 LSAT score put you in the 99th percentile. Now, you've got to get a 175 LSAT score to get in the 99th percentile. And there are, of course, a couple of different reasons for the LSAT score inflation. But I suspect the biggest reason going into this cycle in fall 2024 is that LSAT has become much more liberal in granting extra time accommodations than they were in the past. For most of my career until just a few years ago, LSAT was far too strict and denied accommodations to those who should get them. Their default answer to most people was going to be no, students would then appeal the denial. And then maybe if they appealed, they'd get something, but because LSAT was so concerned about maintaining their version of what exam integrity involves that they just would not give extra time. And this time constraint, by the way, became a subject of a Malcolm Gladwell podcast episode a few years back. By the way, funny story here about LSAT not giving accommodations. One consequence of them being so strict is that LSAT got sued for refusing to grant accommodations to blind test takers who said that they were at an unfair disadvantage because they couldn't benefit from diagramming on the logic game section the way that other test takers could. LSAT had to settle the lawsuit and agree to change the test for everybody. And that's why the LSAT no longer has logic games on the test. Of course, LSAT has actually been sued several times over the years under the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that includes even getting sued by the federal government. And as a result, LSAT has now swung the pendulum too far in the other direction in my view. And they are now too liberal in granting extra time accommodations. According to a recent 85 page report from LSAT, they are now approving 98% of all requests for accommodations. Like extra time, all you need as a doctor's note used to be years back. They granted 70% of requests. It is now up to 98% meaning pretty much if you fill out the forms properly, you dot the eyes, you cross your T's, you're going to get something. And most of these accommodations are for things like ADHD or test anxiety. And so I'm going to recommend here, seek these out if you think you might qualify for them. Thing is, of course, it's not just about getting time and a half or getting double time. And for reference here, standard timing is 35 minutes per section. With time and a half, you're getting 53 minutes per section. With double time, you're getting 70 minutes per section. But it doesn't stop there. You could get triple time, meaning 105 minutes per section. Or you could even get as many as 160 minutes per section, compare that to 35 minutes per section, approximately half an hour versus more than two and a half hours. Big difference there. And the thing is, law schools will not know whether you got the extra time. And of course, I'm not going to blame anyone here for getting the doctor's note and applying for the extra time. If anything, I would blame LSAT for being so strict in the past that they got sued to the point that they had to remove logic games. And now they feel they have to grant extra time to pretty much anyone who asks. Now, exploding the loopholes in the law school admissions process is not just about the LSAT, it also relates to your GPA. And for this one, you might need a time machine, but I'm sharing it just in case anyone watching this is still an undergrad and has the potential to boost their undergraduate GPA. Because grade inflation is also out of control, GPA medians at top 14 law schools are all 3.8 or to 3.9. And so I'm going to recommend here that if you are still an undergrad, you take classes where you can get a high GPA. Don't take classes that have a brutal curve. Personally, I took Intro to Econ back in undergrad because I found it interesting. I was a policy major. Humanities was much more margin, but I figured, hey, Econ's interesting. I should give it a shot. I might learn something. And so the problem was I was competing with students who'd already taken AP Econ in high school and were retaking the class just to get the easy A and they were, of course, naturally inclined towards Econ as well. They were maybe majoring in Econ. I was just taking it as a side thing for fun. But those folks messed up the curve for me and I struggled just to get a B. I was used to humanities classes where I could just write papers and get easy A's. In fact, I once took a class in undergrad where the professor didn't even believe in grades and so he just gave everybody A's. Of course, I'm not actually sure that's the best or most valid way to evaluate students, but that doesn't change the fact that getting that A from that professor boosted my GPA. So imagine that there is an applicant who just seeks out every professor like that or only takes classes with professors who hand out A's like candies on Halloween. That applicant's going to get a higher GPA than the applicant who makes a good faith effort to challenge themselves by taking that intro Econ class without having prior background. And as a result, the latter applicant is promptly punished for stepping outside their comfort zone. The GPA system is clearly broken and no one really knows what to do about it. But as a result, if you wanted to be ruthless and law school admissions was your sole criteria in deciding what classes to take in undergrad, you would choose the ones where you could get easy A's. So we've now established here that the LSAT score metric and the GP metric are both broken and gameable. And these are the biggest factors in the law school admissions process because they are supposedly the most objective. But now you might be asking what about application essays like personal statements, optional essays, and gender, resume, letters, break, all of that, those have also become easier to game. And they've always been easy to game for those with money because those with money have been able to hire admissions consultants to help edit and revise their essays. And in some cases, ghost right their essays, ghost right letters of recommendation. But now with artificial intelligence chatbots like chat TPT, access to high quality editing is now democratized. And every applicant can use those services also. Of course, some schools explicitly do not allow those tools. But I would look up which schools do allow them, or at least don't explicitly prohibit them. And I would workshop those essays to death using multiple AI chatbots with different prompts to get different perspectives until I felt my essays were perfect. Of course, if you just say, write me an application essay, here's my resume, it's gonna feel generic, it's gonna be boring, it's not gonna stand out. So I would never use it to write an essay from scratch, but I would write my own rough draft and then ask the AI for feedback, point out criticisms, suggest improvements, and go through round after round after round of editing with the AI chatbots. And then after I was done with that process, I would print out tons of copies and show them to every human being in my network I trust for further edits, then bring it back to the chatbots and go back and forth and eventually get to the point where I was able to send in essays that would make the admissions officers cry with how beautiful they were. Of course, there are going to be some schools that don't allow AI. And so for those, I would write the essays in Google Docs so that the version history is saved. And you could prove you didn't use AI for those essays in case you were later challenged on this. Anyway, folks, that's all for now. And in the meantime, I wish you all the best and take care.