My girlfriend took the LSAT maybe a month ago, and got her score back this past weekend. It wasn’t good. She scored probably about 11 points lower on the actual test than she did on her practice tests, which in LSAT terms is a pretty significant difference.* She came out of the test thinking she did ok, so right now she is upset, worried that she’s ruined her chances of going to law school, etc.
I’m trying to help her work out where to go from here. She can probably start studying again after the holidays and take it again sometime early next summer, if she still wants to give it a shot. I want to be as supportive as possible, but also want to hear real-life experiences of other folks who maybe took the LSAT more than once or just have experience with the test.
Did you take the LSAT more than once? Did you score go up appreciably the second time you took it?
Did you use a Kaplan class to help you prep, or another type of class? Do you think it helped?
Any other advice you have from your LSAT experiences would be very helful. I don’t know much about the test but I just want to help her out as much as possible.
*From a quick informal survey I heard from a few other folks who took it this year and did significantly worse on the test than what they did on their practice tests. Some folks who were taking it for the second time even did worse this time around than the first time they took it. Is that normal? Does anyone know if they are making the test harder?
IMO she would be most fortunate if she were to take this as a sign to consider a career other than law.
If she’s determined to go to law school, there’s so damn manny law schools out there trying to fill seats that she could surely find somewhere willing to cash her tuition checks so long as she filled her name in correctly on the LSAT.
And since law school has so little to do with the practice of law, it doesn’t really matter where she goes. Graduate from DeVry Institute of truck driving and law, pass the bar, and you are 100% as much of a lawyer and qualified to screw people over as someone who graduated from Harvard or Yale.
Re: the specifics of which you ask, dunno - I always did well at standardized tests. Which has absolutely zip to do with practicing law - or anything else useful, but sure comes in handy in certain circumstances.
Thanks for the feedback, Dinsdale. Are you a lawyer?
She’s not really interested in screwing people over. She’s more interested in receiving a quality education at a decent school, which requires at least a decent LSAT score. Thus the questions about the LSAT. The area of law she is interested in going into is a bit more competitive than others, and might require a cleaner resume than DeVry (but certainly not a Harvard or Yale).
If anyone has any input on their experiences with the LSAT I’d certainly appreciate it!
What kind of practice had she been doing up until this point? This might help us suggest alternatives.
My boyfriend and I both took the LSAT last summer. He was killing me on the practice tests, but when the day finally came I scored the same as my second highest practice score, while he scored lower than even his very first practice test. We can’t really explain it, especially because he felt great when he took it (which is not at all helpful to your GF).
He retook and scored more consistenly with what he had been scoring on the practices (but still not as high as his average). All in all, his score went up 5 points the second time around, which ended up making a big difference in the kinds of schools he was able to target. He looked at where he had made his mistakes and focused more on those sections than others. This is probably the best practical advice that I can give.
We just took practice tests (the real ones, not the made up ones by Kaplan), all the way through and timed every Saturday for months. Kaplan was too expensive, but I know that it works for some.
Luckily for your GF most schools are taking the highest LSAT rather than an average of scores, so a retake is not the problem that it used to be.
What kinds of career aspirations does she have (payscale, geography, practice area)? Not to put a damper on your girlfriend’s hopes, but the legal blogosphere’s latest trend has become highlighting the struggles of students attending non-top schools and their poor employment prospects. Law school is a ton of money and it is important to understand that certain employers interview at certain schools and look at people with certain GPAs.
I see you’re in Wisconsin. Is she planning on going to law school and practicing in Wisconsin? I seem to recall Wisconsin having something unusual in that graduating from law school there meant automatic admission to the bar, no bar exam required, which sounded nice to me while I was prepping for the bar exam in Illinois.
My LSAT prep consisted of getting a bunch of previously given LSAT tests, taking them under time pressure, and going over the answers I got wrong. Happily, I maxed out on the actual test day – if I had had to do another one of them, I would have ended up in the loony bin.
I only took it the one time. Sigh. Past glories. Nailed it – 99th percentile. If only the practice of law consisted of filling in those little circles.
Having taught a couple of LSAT courses, people generally make the biggest improvement in the logic games section. Your score there is largely a product of how much you’ve practiced logic games, so she should just keep practicing until she can get them all correct. You can improve the reasoning score to a lesser extent and usually the reading comp score doesn’t go anywhere no matter what you do.
If she can afford it, a class is always good. I think Princeton Review is better than Kaplan, and Testmasters is better than either. Failing that, working through one of their workbooks can be very useful. Above all, she just needs to practice, practice, practice.
I think you already figured this out, but this is really bad advice. Law school may have little to do with the practice of law, but it is a prestige-obsessed profession. The opportunities open to someone at a top school are drastically different those open to someone not at a top school. Getting a better LSAT score is worth however many hours it takes to get there.
Again, I agree. Yes, Dinsdale is a lawyer, but I get the impression that he’s more the jaded type of lawyer than the fresh-faced type of lawyer.
I’m also a lawyer, halfway between jaded and eager. I do like my job, and I like practicing law. Which leads to the next question – what does your GF want to do with a law degree? If she wants to go to a top law firm, with the prestige and the money and the lack of a personal life, then her law school matters. If, on the other hand, she wants to do pro bono work or government work, it’s less about going to a top law school and more about finding the right law school that serves as a feeder into the type of job she wants to do.
Me, I took the LSAT once and did better on it than I’d done on the practice tests. (I found the practice tests boring, and so pretty much focused on what I found interesting – the logic tests – so I think that actually helped my score.) Good luck.
Campion is right that this a critical question to be asking.
I disagree a little bit with what to do about the answer though, depending on what is meant by pro bono/government work. Some public interest jobs are much more ruthlessly competitive than big firms and hire almost exclusively from top 5 schools. Judging by the resumes of recent hires, it is easier to get a job at Wachtell (one of the top corporate law firms) than Altshuler Berzon (one of the top public interest law firms) at graduation, for example. Similarly, if by pro bono you mean ACLU, Sierra Club, NAACP, DOJ Civil Rights, CIA, etc., then where you go can be even more important than it would be if you wanted to work for a big firm. Primarily this is because these organizations don’t hire on a class system–that is, they will a few open spots when the time comes instead of hiring a big class of associates each year–so competition for each spot is always very intense.
Of course, if you mean being a public defender, or working for a lesser-known regional organization, it is much more about your connections in the region.
I’d be careful here about “quick informal surveys” and what you hear.
I wrote the LSAT once and made it into law school. My classmates were never shy about stating their results, but if their claims are anything to go by, I was the only one in my school who got less than 175. My classmates are good folks, but I’m doubtful of their claims, and I really don’t believe that each and every member of my class got over 175. Sorry if I sound skeptical, but after hearing such things, I don’t trust others’ claims so much. Hell, I made it it in. No, I’m not stating my score.
My advice would be keep working on the actual past tests (not Kaplan, for example), and trying to improve the score. Be careful that the schools to which you are applying take an actual most recent score, and not an average of past LSAT scores (though perhaps this could help too). At any rate, know how the schools deal with the LSAT, and apply accordingly. Good luck!
I realized that’s all a little dispiriting. So let me say something more hopeful. I’ve seen dozens of people raise their LSAT scores by 15-20 points. And your GF is fortunate in that only recently have schools stopped averaging all LSATs, so she really hasn’t hurt herself at all. The take-home point here is that it’s entirely possible to increase one’s score with enough work, and that work is well worth the effort.
Hey everyone – I’m the girlfriend. Thank you for your insights and your advice. To answer one the questions one of you had – I would like to be a prosecutor. Thanks again for the advice, keep it coming if you have it!
I took the LSAT two years ago. My preparation consisted entirely of these books.
I started taking practice tests about three months before the exam itself and increased the frequency of tests I took as it got closer to the real thing. I never tried any other form of prep and I doubt it would have helped. When I started the practice tests, I was scoring between 15-30 points under the score I was shooting for, but that gap eventually decreased and I hit my goal right on the nose when it came time for the actual exam.
That’s probably really unhelpful, but there you go. I do know a lot of people who have taken the test multiple times, and they’ve all done better the second time around.
I took the LSAT only once (in 2003), and scored a few points higher than I’d been doing on the practice tests. The only study material I used was one of the books of practice tests that you can get directly from LSAC.
And by the way, I just learned on Friday that I passed the TN bar exam. First try, thank god.
My understanding (or more properly the understanding of my career services office) is that criminal work is much more dependent on regional connections and clinical/work experience. Of course, the quality of your clinical experience and your opportunity to obtain it will vary drastically from school to school.
BUT, and this is a big “but,” assuming you’re not independently wealthy, the real issue for you will be paying off loans. Prosecutors don’t make a lot. All the more incentive to get the best score you can because either a) you’ll get into a school that has debt forgiveness for government work or b) you’ll get a scholarship at a school without debt forgiveness.
A few hundred dollars (and more importantly a few hundred hours (!)) invested in LSAT prep now will pay massive dividends on the other side if you can increase your score.
The question remains, does she really want to be a lawyer, and if so, why? If not, she can find something to do that isn’t as expensive or time consuming as lawschool and the bar, and as stressful and competitive as the practice of law.
In Wisconsin, if you grad with adequate grades from Wisc or Marquette - maybe another school or 2, you are automatically admitted to the state bar. Which is fine if you want to work in WI or for the fed gov’t. But most neighboring states require tests, and don’t have immediate reciprocity.
I work with a guy who totally screwed up the test and undergrad, and just went somewhere in FLA that would cash his tuition checks. He has a pile of student debt, but is on the same pay scale as me. And if you want to hang out your own shingle and chase clients, you are every bit as able to do so with a degree from Podunk U as Harvard Law.
Depends what you are calling a “bad” score. It also depends on what your goals are.
I’m a graduate of Harvard Law School. That’s lovely if I wanted to practice prestigious corporate law on Wall Street, but I don’t, so it was a waste of money. I want to work for a nonprofit. So I should have just gone to my state’s law school, and saved the cash. The importance of prestige is wildly exaggerated.
If you want to be a prosecutor, and you think you are settled in the area where you want to practice, going to a middle-of-the-pack school in your state is just fine. Prestige is not necessary to get that sort of job. Get good grades, you’ll be fine.
But it’s sort of hard to know just how serious the issue is, when you are coy about the score you actually got. I don’t know if it’s really terrible, or just not up to your usual standards. Generally, over 150 and you will find something acceptable.
Pepper Bear, there are as I recall a number of prosecutors/former prosecutors/ criminal defense attorneys/ former criminal defense attorneys on the board. Rather than relying on them happening by this thread, may I suggest you start a new thread entitled something like “I want to be a prosecutor – what should I do about law school?” I suspect you’ll get good advice there.
You’ve also gotten some good advice here, including from our jaded friend Dinsdale. Many people go into law for the wrong reasons (myself included); some of us fortuitously find our calling. Others write naively ennui-istic (should be a word if it’s not) blogs about how law is a soul-sucking venture that one might survive if one is careful. But the point is valid: if you have good reasons for going into law, stick to your guns, no matter what.
Beyond that – look at the prosecutors in the jurisdiction where you want to work. Where did they go to school? Here in LA, it tends to be Loyola, which isn’t the top school in LA, but is a good place for making the right connections to get into government work.
Good luck.
And, jackelope, congratulations. Welcome to the bar.
