Archive for September, 2011

As we close in on the October LSAT, I thought I would share our usual tips to keep you on track as game day draws near. What’s that you say – you’re not sure if you are ready, willing, or able to take the October LSAT? Before you go pushing the panic button, make sure you are making all of the proper considerations about which test administration you should take.

If you’re full steam ahead for the October exam, here is some advice for the final hours from Manhattan LSAT’s Managing Director, Noah Teitelbaum.

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. 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.

This post is provided by Manhattan LSAT, a leading LSAT-exclusive test preparation provider.

To hear more from Manhattan LSAT, you can listen to these great Law School Podcaster shows:

• The LSAT: Everything You Need to Know About the Test
• Conquering the LSAT: Tips for Tackling the Test
• Mastering LSAT Logic Games: Tips to Beat the Toughest Part of the Test
• Cancelling or Retaking the LSAT: What To Do When Test Day Doesn’t Go as Planned
• Mastering LSAT Reading Comprehension:  Strategies to Improve Your Speed & Accuracy 

Good luck on Test Day!

Just how important is a letter of recommendation (LOR) to your law school application? 

Strong letters are a must; lukewarm or negative letters can be fatal. 

But don’t just take our word for it.  Get it straight from the experts, including top deans of admissions, admissions consultants and prelaw advisors.  Here’s what they said in our podcasts — read why strong LORs can help your application and how to get them (then click on the links below and listen to the audio shows for more great application tips).

TIP 1 – Admissions committees want LORs from people who know you well, not from people with important titles.

 “The key to recommendations are not necessarily what’s in them, but that they are from people who know the candidate well, because letters from people who barely know the applicant are usually not very helpful in assessing the kind of attributes [the admissions committee is evaluating].”

˜Vanderbilt University Law School Dean of Admissions, Todd Morton in our podcast, Law School Personal Statements & Letters of Recommendation.

TIP 2 – Academic LORs are the best as they provide insight into how you will perform in the classroom.

 “I think all law schools have a 1^st choice and that would be people who have taught you at the university level, whether it’s a TA (Teaching Assistant), a GSI (Graduate Student Instructor) or a professor.  Those are the very best letters, because we are looking for a 3d party’s candid assessment of your potential to study law.  The 2d best sorts of letters will come from colleagues at work, internship supervisors or your supervisor in a job, especially if they can, in their letter, talk about any kind of legal-related, writing-related or research- related experience.”

˜UC Berkeley-Boalt Hall Dean of Admissions, Edward Tom in our podcast, Law School Personal Statements & Letters of Recommendation.

“I think the most important thing is, how are they in class and what are they going to contribute to this academic environment? So we look, for example, when I look at letters of recommendation, I often will look for two things in particular. One is how they behave in class. Are they active? Are they participatory? Do they treat others with respect when they have different opinions? And also, how do they write when recommenders write that the person is a wonderful researcher and writer? That is something that obviously counts very heavily in favor of the applicant.”

˜Jason Wu Trujillo, Senior Assistant Dean for Admissions, University of Virginia School of Law, in our podcast, Avoiding Application Pitfalls.

TIP 3 – Skip the lukewarm recommendation. It can only hurt.

Negative letters of recommendation aren’t the only letters to be aware of. “The lukewarm references can be sort of really bad in the sense that the recommender might harm the candidate with their ‘faint praise.’ So that’s always a thing to look into as well.”

˜Ann Richard, Associate Dean for Admissions and Financial Aid, George Washington University Law School,  in our podcast Mitigating Weaknesses in Your Law School Application.

Tip 4 – Establish good relationships with your professors from the onset, so that when you ask for recommendations in your senior year, they already know you.

“Certainly, as a freshman, you don’t need to walk in to your professor’s office and say, ‘I’d like a recommendation for me,’ but certainly you should be talking to your professors at that time. You should be meeting them, getting to know them – getting so that they know you in a good way, right, or that they’ll remember you in a good way. And so, once you have established these relationships with your professors, first of all, it’s going to help you get better grades, but second of all, it’s going to make requesting a letter or an evaluation a lot easier when the time comes. 

˜Rebecca Gill, prelaw Advisor at UNLV, in our podcast, Planning Your Law School Application Timeline.

Tip 5:  Ask a recommender directly if they can write a great LOR.  If possible, ask in person and at a convenient time.

“Ask them up front, say something like ‘law school is important to me, I really need an enthusiastic letter. Are you comfortable writing a really strong, detailed and enthusiastic letter for me?’ And then you need to gauge their response.”

˜Paul Bodine, author of Great Personal Statements for Law School and Perfect Phrases for Law School Acceptance, in our podcast Law School Personal Statements & Letters of Recommendation.

“On my timeline, I suggest that you talk to your professors at the very beginning of the senior year. I say either the week school starts or perhaps the week before school starts. As you know, some professors, just like students, the beginning of the semester seems rosy and there’s time and all of this stuff, and as the semester continues, duties get piled up on us and it gets more and more difficult for us to be able to turn around letters of recommendation quickly. So, it’s best to get your professors at the beginning of that semester. I also recommend against just sending an email to a professor, requesting a letter of recommendation. If you send an email, you can’t see the look on your professor’s face. And, you really want to know if you – you want to be confident that the professor you’re talking to really is going to write you a positive letter or give you a positive evaluation. So, what I recommend is that students send an email a couple of weeks before school or perhaps even at the end of the last semester of the junior year and on it say, ‘I like to meet with you early next semester about the possibility of you writing a letter for me.’ But, you certainly want to ask that question in person.

 ˜Rebecca Gill, Prelaw Advisor at UNLV, in our podcast, Planning Your Law School Application Timeline.

Tip 5 – Be organized. When asking a recommender for a letter, do it as early as possible, and provide proper materials:

“They should give the recommender a couple of months notice and they should come to the recommender with a resume, with any kind of documentation that the recommender is going to need. If it’s an online recommendation form, then the URL for that recommendation, the questions the recommender is going to be responding to, anything that can possibly help the recommender. The student presumably will have researched the school and will have some idea of why he or she is applying to the school and that should not be just the ranking. It should be something within the program and the philosophy of the school and then the student should also give the recommender a brief synopsis of both reasons to applying for that particular program and highlighting their interactions and the student’s achievements.”

˜Linda Abraham, Founder, Accepted.com, in our podcast Law School Personal Statements & Letters of Recommendation

“And then when you show up, it’s a very good to have a really quick memo to the professor, here’s what classes I had with you, here is what I did in your class, and here are the skills and characteristics that I hope you’ll be able to emphasize in your evaluation, then you’ll want to include an unofficial copy of your transcript. If you have a copy of your personal statement, which you should have a draft by this time, you’ll want to include that and if you can, it’s always a good idea to attach a copy of whatever paper you turned in for that class, especially if you can turn in the copy that your professor wrote comments on that, [that’s a] particularly good thing to do. All of these things help your professor to write really good, really targeted and personal evaluations of you.”

˜Rebecca Gill, Prelaw Advisor at UNLV, in our podcast, Planning Your Law School Application Timeline.

Tip 6- For applicants out of school for several years and who cannot obtain recommendations from faculty, you can still boost your application with solid LORs from those in a supervising capacity.

“If a person who graduated 15 to 20 years ago and still the faculty members remember him or her, that’s obviously a plus. On the other hand, after 15 to 20 years, most faculties would have forgotten many of the students. So if we don’t see letters of recommendation from the people who have been out of school for a decade or so, we’re not – it doesn’t hurt, but if we do see letters from people, that often, that’s a positive, so I think there’s a plus.But I guess what we look for are letters of recommendation from people who have been in some supervising capacity who could speak to the person’s intellectual or academic ability.  So obviously, the best ones are the college professors they have had but also their jobs in which there is a great deal of intellectual firepower that’s necessary. And if the supervisor could speak to that, that’s very helpful to us in making those decisions.”

˜Frank Motley, Assistant Dean for Admissions, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, in our podcast, Non-traditional Law School Applicants

 “For a nontraditional student, where there may be questions of what their motivation is for going to law school, there may be questions about their recent collaborative experiences and team work. There may be questions about their maturity and academic focus.These are areas where someone who writes a great letter of recommendation can really help answer those questions.”

˜Veritas Prep admissions consultant, Adam Hoff, from our podcast Non-traditional Law School Applicants.

For more information on this topic, listen to the following podcasts:

• Law School Personal Statements & Letters of Recommendation
• Planning Your Law School Application Timeline
• Avoiding Application Pitfalls
• Non-traditional Law School Applicants

Anyone who is even thinking about applying to law school will discover it’s not cheap.  And we’re not talking tuition. Application fees, LSAT fees, LSAC Credential Assembly Service (CAS) fees are a strain for most student budgets. 

The costs for applying to law school add up quickly.  First, there is the cost for each administration of the LSAT, which currently rings in at $139. 

Second, application fees for individual law schools can run anywhere from $70 to $100 and, if you apply to several schools, . . . cha-ching! 

Third, the LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service fee is $124.  This fee covers the following:

Don’t be discouraged from applying if these costs are beyond your budget; there’s a few strategies that can help reduce costs.  To start, some law schools send out fee waivers by email or snail mail to potential applicants, some have their own special applications for them (available online) and some you just need to ask and they will waive the fee.  Some law schools offer fee waivers based on financial need, and some offer fee waivers based on impressive LSAT scores.  So you should ask once you’ve received your score within a month after the June administration.  Check the website of the school you are applying to and take advantage of this if you qualify.

That’s the advice our student guest, Aminta Kilawan, a 2L at Fordham Law School gave in our recent podcast, Planning Your Law School Application Timeline: What to Do & When to Do It.  Kilawan had a couple of tips that could help you save money when applying.  “Sometimes, there are fee waivers. So, what you could do is ask your prelaw adviser who would have more information about this, whether or not the school offers fee waiver. I received a few of these based on my LSAT score. Some schools sent me fee waivers, which meant that I did not have to pay the application fee. They just wanted me to apply, and so oftentimes that’s the case. Other times, you can request that from the school if you are really in a bind and need to save money — that you can ask the school if they would be willing to waive the application fee which is not cheap. It’s $70 generally per school which adds up, ultimately. And, if you can find a way to get out of the application fee that would be helpful to buffer the cost, so it would be helpful to reach out to the school and find out if they offer fee waivers, what their requirements are. Maybe, sometimes, there are salary requirements or things like that, but oftentimes, they would be willing if you reach out them. So, a simple question can never hurt.”

The LSAC also offers fee waivers for the LSAT and for the Credential Assembly Service (CAS).  LSAC established the fee waiver program in 1968 “to assure that no person is denied access to law school because of the absolute inability to pay for the LSAT and other essential applicant services.”

An approved LSAC fee waiver is good for two years and entitles the recipient to:

So, if you are suffering from a case of “fee fatigue,” check out whether there might be a waiver available and get right on it.  It might just save you some money before you go to law school!