Career Center, Career Files, Pre-Law

Law School Application Strategies For People Re-Taking the LSAT

You took the October LSAT exam, but you are planning to take the test again in December.

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LSAT 2 RFYou took the October LSAT exam, but you are planning to take the test again in December. Should you:

(a) start applying to your safety schools now so you have some feedback from schools soon and are taking advantage of rolling admissions

(b) start writing your LSAT addendum explaining your October score now

(c) both (a) and (b)

(d) wait to apply until you have your December LSAT score

Answers (a), (b), and (c) may all tempt you – those are the answers a proactive law school applicant would pick, right? Those are the answers of people who know how the law school admission process works, right?

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Wrong. My pick is (d). Here’s why:

  1. You don’t know your LSAT score from October yet, so you don’t know where to apply.
  2. You’re registered for the December LSAT, so schools will want to hold your application anyway, meaning it won’t be deemed complete until that score is received. This means there is no rolling admission “bonus” for submitting your application now.
  3. Your safety schools now will still be your safety schools in January, but a higher LSAT score should put you in line for scholarship consideration.
  4. You can’t draft an effective LSAT addendum stating that your October score is not a good example of your abilities until you have your December score to prove that this is true.
  5. Your results will be better with a higher LSAT score than with an application sent in before Thanksgiving, so long as you apply to law school by mid-January. A law school Dean of Admissions told me recently that for the past cycle, only one third of his total applicant pool had submitted applications by December 1st. That tells you that law schools still have a lot of room for January applicants.
  6. I worry about people who work on their essays and other application materials during the same 8 weeks that they have their last good attempt at LSAT preparation for this admission cycle. Yes, get your Letters of Rec underway. Yes, start thinking about your essays and even working on them if time permits. But it’s more important for you to focus on raising your LSAT score (and, for those of you still in school, keeping your grades up, and maybe cultivating one more stellar letter of recommendation this semester) than it is for you to rush applications out the door before you take the December test.

I know, the law school representative told you (and only you, right?) to go ahead and submit your application without your LSAT score. But why? Because applications are down and they need more! The job of the person standing behind the table at the Law School Fair on campus or at an LSAC Forum is to recruit more applicants.  Law school reps will never tell you to wait to apply. The more applications they have, the lower their acceptance rate looks, which helps them in the rankings and shows how exclusive a law school they are.

Make smart decisions, not quick decisions, as you apply to law school. You will have your December score at the beginning of January. Then, evaluate your schools list and draft an LSAT addendum (incorporating both scores and actual reasons for improvement), and submit all of your applications by mid-January. You’ll be in great shape, saving money by applying only to the schools you really want to target, maybe getting additional fee waivers, and hopefully getting into more schools with bigger scholarship offers.

Ann K. Levine is a law school admission consultant and owner of LawSchoolExpert.com. She is the author of The Law School Admission Game: Play Like an Expert and The Law School Decision Game: A Playbook for Prospective Lawyers.

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