Author: Lawschooli

Spivey consulting posted a possible leak of the new USNWR “Best Law Schools” rankings on twitter. As to its origins, we are working on finding out more, but it has the feel of being from the source. There’s a USNWR ranking floating around out there that includes sloppy metadata straight from the .xlsx it was taken from, along with material errors/omissions, so caveat emptor!— Derek T. Muller (@derektmuller) March 6, 2019 We want to get this out quickly, so here it is. We will update this story as more information becomes available. 1 Yale University2 Stanford University3 Harvard University4 University…

Going to law school this fall? We’ve got a list of summer reading to make sure that you’re primed and ready to go. We also suggest some pleasure reading to keep your mind agile. Remember, law school is a reading-heavy enterprise. You might not get a chance to read a novel for fun for a while, so you’d better do it now! However, this law school reading list is mostly designed to make sure you are ready to meet the challenge of law school exams, note-taking, and case briefing. Read up on what to expect in law school, and you’ll…

Conditional reasoning is a common feature of the LSAT, tested heavily in both the logic games and logical reasoning sections. While the term ‘conditional reasoning’ is a little intimidating, it’s important to realize that you already understand these logical relationships intuitively and use them in your daily speech. In this post we deal with every aspect of conditional reasoning needed for the LSAT, including the basics of if-then statements, making simple inferences, avoiding common mistakes, how to deal with conjunctions in a conditional statement, and how to spot and diagram conditional statements that are often deliberately obscure or confusing on…

We’re on a track to see an increase in LSAT takers, along with an increase in the number of people applying to law school during the 2015-2016 cycle. After years fleeing law for other professions, it appears the herd is cautiously returning to Law School Compared to the previous year, we saw an increase in the number of LSATs administered in June 2015 (up 6.6%), September 2015 (up 7.4%), and December 2015 (up 1.9%). We expect the number of February LSATs administered to be somewhere around 21,000, bringing the total number of LSATs administered in 2015-2016 to approximately 107,000, an increase…

For many of you, it’s about time to submit your law school applications soon. We thought we’d pass along some pointers for getting your applications house in perfect order.

Ranking law schools is a big deal. It’s no secret that the legal world is prestige obsessed. Everything is ranked and ranking is everything. So how about the rankers themselves? One of Manhattan LSAT Prep’s bloggers, Mary Adkins, got the idea to rank the law school rankings. It’s a good idea, but I strongly disagree with her analysis. For the most part, she just took the rankings at their word. The problem is that law school rankings can be big liars. They all have an agenda of some kind. Fortunately, some are there to help you. Get information from the…

For those finalizing their list of potential law schools, we wanted to do a “Where Should I Apply to Law School” post to help keep you on top of recent trends that might affect where you apply. Particularly, we’ll discuss how the ongoing drop in applications to law school might influence your applications strategy.

I wanted to do a quick post on LSAT logical reasoning Must Be True questions because people struggle A LOT with these problems. In fact, if there is a common issue linking most people who aren’t happy with their scores on LSAT practice tests, they don’t have a sufficient grasp of this question type.

If you’ve read my other posts, you know that law school is mostly a numbers game. At most schools, your GPA and LSAT alone predict where will predict where you do or don’t get in about 90% of the time! That’s huge. Now I said most schools. At Yale and Stanford, and to a lesser extent the other top schools, factors beyond the numbers matter a lot more. Why? Well, every school wants students with good numbers — that’s a given. However, these very top law schools get a lot more applicants with the kind of numbers they want than…

Phil Weiser, Dean of CU Boulder recently posted a short article, “Five Initiatives That Legal Education Needs” giving his thoughts on how to fix our stagnant corner of academia. Respect to Weiser, who has to live in the same hall of learning as professor Paul Campos, the most vocal anti-law school critic around. Secondly, CU Boulder has been relatively good about telling it’s incoming students what kind of job prospects they have. LawSchoolTransparency.com gave them a perfect score at least. Weiser also has some okay ideas about where law school should be headed. He says: Training law students to develop an…

First, congratulations on completing the LSAT! Even living through that test once is something to be proud of. The LSAT is always a big time ordeal! Now, about your score: everyone is going to second guess whether they did well on the LSAT in the next few weeks. That’s normal. However, if you really think you screwed up, you might be well-advised to cancel your LSAT score. You only have 6 days to cancel (we have a post on how to cancel your LSAT score here). So should you cancel or let it ride? Here’s some advice on making this…

When Kaplan isn’t busy providing second-rate LSAT prep, they do use their piles of money to put out some pretty useful surveys. A recent survey, released by Kaplan, shows that most law schools are reducing class size and that a lot “plan” to do so next year as well: “54% of law school admissions officers report cutting their entering law school classes for 2013-2014 and 25% plan to do so again next year. This marks two years in a row that law schools report cutting their entering class sizes; Kaplan’s 2012 survey showed 51% of schools cutting the size of…

Was that post title a little too bro for you? If so I’m sorry, but perhaps we can all learn a lot from the bro, who tries to stay positive in any situation. That’s how you should be going into Saturday. Do anything you need to to get your head right for test day. The one thing everyone should ALWAYS do: take a full day off from LSAT study the day before test day. Other than that, you are free to do what feels right. Here are some resources to help you out:

One of the most frequent questions we’ve gotten lately is whether the December LSAT is too late to take the LSAT if you are applying the following fall (and you want the best chance of getting admitted to a good law school and getting a good scholarship). Short answer: December is not too late. Applying to law school with a December LSAT should not significantly lower your chances for admission or scholarships.

Last week I talked about why T14s and other high-ranking, deep-pocketed schools are the best bet for your money right now. These schools can afford to lure potential students with lots of scholarship aid, so you want to get on the receiving end if you can. For contrast, this week we look at an under-performer as an example of the kind of school that you should likely stay away from right now.

Law schools are competing aggressively over the greatly reduced applicant pool that we’ve seen in recent years. Most lower ranked schools have had to compromise and reduce class size as well as let in students with weaker numbers (LSAT and GPA). While T14s have had to lower selectivity and drop class size a tiny bit, generally, they are holding the same standards. T14’s and the other big top 25 schools are winning the battle to get students in a big way. While the prestige of the institutions is certainly helping them attract the top applicants, perhaps the biggest factor is…

By the time LSAT test day arrives, you should know how to methodically approach each and every LSAT problem that is likely to arise with confidence. You should be able to diagram any conditional statement and any logic game no matter how tricky. The techniques for approaching problems should come to you automatically by test day. Once you have the techniques down, what’s stopping you from getting a 180? For most people, the answer is TIMING. Once you’ve mastered the technical aspects of answering questions correctly, improving your score becomes a matter of getting faster at answering LSAT questions and…

Lawyers (and future lawyers) love jargon. It might seem like half the of the words on the law school forums are in code, so here is a list to help you understand law school lingo. We don’t promise learning any of this will make you cooler (in fact, it may do just the opposite), however, if you want into the legal world this is the entry level terminology you have to know to understand what people are talking about. Here is a list of law school, LSAT prep, and law school admissions acronyms to help you on your way:

I’ve talked about this in a couple other posts but it’s a question that comes up frequently: if you take the LSAT in February is it too late to apply for law schools for enrollment the next fall? Well, yes and no. It used to be that most schools did not accept the February LSAT for fall admissions. However, applications and enrollment are so far down at most schools that they will in fact accept applications from Feb LSAT takers, even if their official policy is that they do not consider Feb LSAT scores. Just to avoid confusion: every school…

The US News and World Report Rankings (the USNWR rankings, for short) are far and away the most influential rankings in the law school world, heavily relied upon by students deciding where to attend law school. People working in law school admissions departments lose jobs over drops in the USNWR rankings.