Law School

What an interesting year this is shaping up to be. It's only early September, and we've already received an unusual number of emails from people who have just started law school and are already looking to transfer. They're not even willing to give their schools a chance. Why is that?

I imagine that 2010 saw a large number of people saying "yes" to their law schools out of desperation, and now that they find themselves at school and are bumping into so many 3Ls who are up to their eyeballs in debt and still struggling to find jobs, they're having second thoughts.

My advice to law school applicants is not to say "yes" -- or even apply -- to a school from which you wouldn't want to graduate. Attending a school only on the assumption that you will be able to transfer to a more competitive one is too risky a strategy. You have to be a 1L superstar to launch yourself into a higher caliber of law school, and statistically, most people aren't going to find themselves at the top of their 1L class. It's not as hard to transfer to a peer school, but for many transfer applicants, that's not the goal; they're hoping to upgrade. When you accept an offer to attend a law school, you should be reasonably happy with the possibility (even probability) that you will end up having to stay.

If you find yourself in a situation where you want to transfer out, here are some tips to keep in mind as you plan your first year:

1. Grades, grades, grades. Transferring is all about your 1L performance. After your first year of law school, your undergraduate grades stop mattering, and your LSAT stops mattering. Why would that be, when those were so important for your applications the first go-round? Because admissions officers look to your LSAT and undergrad performance as proxies to try to predict how you're going to do in law school. Once they have your 1L academic record, they don't need proxies anymore; they have the real deal. So if you have your heart set on transferring, protect your 1L transcript, even if that means forgoing other things you might like to do during your first year. (That strategy will also help you when it comes time to interview for summer jobs. Sought-after legal employers are very grades-conscious, and grades are your best leverage during on-campus recruiting.)

2. Professor recommendations. In order to apply for transfer, you'll need to submit recommendations from 1L professors. That can be tricky, because 1L classes tend to be large classes involving one big final exam, so you have to be proactive. If you're the kind of person who tries to keep his head down and get through the Socratic Method with as little attention as possible, your professors aren't going to remember you very well when you ask them for recommendations. Of course, being the superstar on the final exam is the best way to get noticed, but it helps if, when reading your stellar exam, they're not thinking, "Who is this person?" Without being a pest, take advantage of office hours and opportunities for feedback after your first-semester exams. Be prepared for class so that when you get called on (or volunteer your thoughts), you'll be remembered for having contributed to the discussion and moved the analysis along in a meaningful way.

When it comes time to ask for a letter, be very sensitive to the diplomacy involved. By applying to transfer, you are in effect saying to the school (and its professors): you're not good enough for me. Nobody likes to hear that, so make sure to approach them in a way that minimizes any offense they might take. That means being able to articulate well thought out reasons for transferring. Do not approach your potential recommenders until you have something intelligent to say about why you're hoping to transfer. And if you find yourself unable to transfer out to your desired target schools, be mindful that you might face some awkwardness with professors and administrators at the school you were hoping to leave behind. Many of them will be supportive of you either way, but that's not always the case, and feathers can sometimes get ruffled.

3. The transfer essay. When you apply to transfer, you'll be expected to write an essay explaining to your target school why you are seeking to transfer. You'll need to be able to articulate your reasons for seeking to transfer, and you have to walk a careful line. It would not reflect well on you to talk negatively about the school you're trying to leave. That would be unprofessional and would also make you sound whiny. Instead, focus on the advantages of the target school. Are there better opportunities for federal clerkships? Do they have better placement in your preferred geographical job market? Do they have expertise in a particular practice area or academic subject that your current school lacks?

Practical, non-academic reasons for transferring are fine, too. You might be attending a perfectly good school for 1L but would like to move to Chicago/Boston/Miami/wherever because your spouse is doing her medical residency there. Personal reasons are perfectly valid, but make sure to supplement them with academic or professional aspects that also attract you to that particular target school.

4. Timing. Transfer application deadlines are very, very tight. Many law schools require you to have a complete 1L transcript before you can submit your applications, and many transfer applicants find themselves bumping right up against those deadlines. There are even suggestions (perhaps apocryphal) that some schools intentionally delay reporting the last set of grades in order to block students from transferring. Whether or not that's actually true (they are anecdotal stories), it is the case that some professors don't turn their grades in on a timely basis, so you might end up missing an application deadline because one of your professors couldn't get his act together. You don't have any control over the timing of your 1L grades, so be prepared for the possibility that you will make some deadlines but might have to miss others. It can't hurt to contact the target school whose deadline you're in danger of missing and finding out if they will grant you some kind of extension, but understand that they might say no. Transfers are like waitlists. When a school finds out that it has a spot to fill, it has to move quickly, and there's no upside (to the school) to wait for you if there are other perfectly good transfer applicants who can say yes right away.

Keep in mind why schools accept transfer applications in the first place: every 2L and 3L seat that goes empty represents lost revenue. It's like an unsold airplane seat. So when administrators find out how many spots have opened up (because some of their own students have transferred out, gone on leave, been accepted for a dual degree, etc.), they need to fill those slots, pronto.

5. Odds. For the same reason, the odds of transferring into a particular school are impossible to predict. Because schools themselves don't know how many slots they are going to have to fill until late in the game, and because the pool of transfer applications is relatively small, it's next to impossible to look at data for previous years and try to make any meaningful predictions. A school might find itself taking 10 transfers in one year and one the next. Or maybe last year it was able to snap up a superstar, but this year the best it can do is to take the person who got a B- on his Property final. Schools can't predict the quality of the pool or the number of spots in advance, either.

Also, because your final 1L grades come in so close to deadlines, you will very likely find yourself having to make decisions about whether and where you want to transfer, and get all your other application materials lined up, before you even know where you stand academically at the end of the year. If you end up at the top of your class, you're going to have nice options. If you're not at the top of your class, you'll have to throw some applications out and see what happens. Frustrating, but that's how it works.

Do you have transfer application stories or tips to share? Please post!

Anna, I am an Iraq veteran and I have read that military service is anywhere from "extremely valuable" to law school admissions to something akin to any other job.  What is your take?  Is there anything I should do to highlight its strengths while also countering its possibly negative connotations?

As for another, more specific question: I am struggling with whether to include my platoon's "number of enemy captured/killed" on my resume.  It's a metric we use to gauge efficacy, and it conveys the gravitas of my deployment.  However, I can also see how it would be inappropriate for a resume as well.  Help!

Thank you for all of your efforts in facilitating law school candidates' applications and enabling us all to strive for acceptance to better schools.

Well, thank YOU for your service. I have the much easier job here.

You've asked a great question. In the Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions, I advise applicants to quantify their work experience as much as possible. What's the impact you've had in your role? How can you best capture that impact in a bullet point? Your situation is a great reminder that guidelines are not gospel truths, and applicants should exercise judgment when it comes time to apply guidelines to their individual fact patterns. You are smart to wonder whether quantifying makes sense in your situation, so here's how I would think about presenting your work experience in the application process:

DO include your military experience in general. You were employed during that time, doing meaningful work, and you should get credit for that. A gap in your resume wouldn't help you.

DON'T be in any way defensive or apologetic about your military experience. Even people who are anti-war or anti-military can still be pro-soldier. To answer your question about how law schools view military service: All the admissions officers I know have great respect for it. They understand the gravity of being deployed, so your gravitas will almost certainly not be in question. Ex-military applicants are much loved by both law school (and business school) admissions officers, especially those service members who had increasing responsibility during their time serving and/or who graduated from the military academies. Ex-military students are nearly always hard-working, smart, disciplined, responsible, unflappable, and very happy to be back in school. And they bring a very interesting perspective to class discussions. Any school that would reject you because of your military experience (are they even out there?) is not one you personally would want to attend in any event. Ditto for applications to future employers. That being said...

DON'T quantify the number of enemy captured or killed. While most admissions officers will have great respect for you and the hard work you've been doing, there are many people -- even among those who are sympathetic to service members -- who don't want to be reminded that the military's job is to kill people and break things (as someone once said). Admissions officers, too, can be subject to cognitive dissonance.

DO quantify the kinds of successes or list the kinds of metrics that don't make people uncomfortable. Examples:

• Commanded 153-man rifle company in combat
• Managed $20mm budget and care and maintenance of $50mm aircraft
• Obtained Silver Star for Combat Leadership

DO include relative rankings or metrics. In your case, is there a way for you to convert the number of people killed/captured into a relative measure of platoon efficiency? Maybe, for example, your platoon was in the top 10% of your division.

This exceptions might apply in some civilian contexts as well. For example, one would say, "Led consolidation of two corporate divisions, cutting costs by X% and increasing profits by Y%" WITHOUT tacking on "...by laying off 1,500 employees."

So my big-picture advice, for both military and civilian applicants alike, is to quantify with hard numbers EXCEPT when the harsh realities of a job might make people squirm, in which case it's best to take this softer approach to quantification.

Please check in and let us know how you end up deciding to present your military experience, and keep us posted on your admissions success.

I am often asked how applicants can make themselves “look unique,” and I actually think it’s the wrong question to be asking.

To see why this is, let’s start with what the word actually means, courtesy of Random House Dictionary (here are the first three definitions):

u·nique
–adjective

1. existing as the only one or as the sole example; single; solitary in type or characteristics: a unique copy of an ancient manuscript.

2. having no like or equal; unparalleled; incomparable: Bach was unique in his handling of counterpoint.

3. limited in occurrence to a given class, situation, or area: a species unique to Australia.

Wow, that would be asking a lot. To succeed as a law school applicant, do you really have to be "unique" the way the sole copy of an ancient manuscript is unique? Or the way Bach's use of counterpoint is unique? Or the way an animal species in Australia is unique? Do you have to stand out in some way by having a job/activity/major that nobody else on the planet has?

Of course not. Even top law schools could never fill up their classes each year if those were really the standards.  (Check out how many law school students have interned on the Hill, worked as paralegals, majored in Poli Sci, competed in forensic debate, or tutored underprivileged children.) So uniqueness isn't actually the top priority for admissions officers; they’re looking for something else. And what is that? Simple: it's excellence.

More specifically, they want you to be unusually good in three areas:

1. Academics:

Can you demonstrate that you have the requisite

• intellectual horsepower
• work ethic
• critical reasoning skills and
• writing and speaking skills

to handle an unusually rigorous academic program?

2. Soft Skills/Life Skills:

If you can demonstrate that you are unusually good at the academic criteria, then (responsible) law schools will next worry about your soft skills, and in particular how you are going to fare on the job market and in the world at large. Can you demonstrate that you will be able to:

• interact with recruiters and legal employers professionally
• be proactive and focused in your job search
• get along and work well with people who are different from you
• have the grit and wherewithal and flexibility to land on your feet when the market gets tough
• be a great ambassador for the school, a role you would have for the rest of your life, and
• exercise good judgment and ethics, both in school and in the wider world?

3. Impact:

The most competitive law schools in the country will also care about your future impact. Will you be the kind of law school graduate who is likely to become a game-changer, whether in private practice, the public sector, the non-profit world, or in business? What in your background will give them the impression that you're going to have impact?

Note that none of the three metrics above assumes that you've done Activity X or Job Y. How you fill in the Xs and Ys doesn’t matter as much as being able to show that you’ve done them really, really well.

"Uniqueness" is therefore greatly misunderstood by many applicants (and misused by some law schools in the language of their applications). Applicants hear the word "unique" and think they have to be able to do something no one else can, and they sometimes despair if they haven't solved the Riemann Hypothesis on the back of a napkin or learned how to yodel Cameroonian folk music or summited Aconcagua on a pogo stick. You don’t even have to be the first in your family to go to college, or an exotic ethnic minority. All of those things are interesting -- and worth showing off if you have them -- but they are not necessary in order to be a successful law school applicant.

Whether or not you have a unique background, what makes you stand out in the application process is showing, in a very limited amount of space, that you are unusually good along the three metrics listed above. That's why law schools pay so much attention to LSAT scores, previous academic performance, experience in a professional setting, life experience, previous impact, and ethics.

Demonstrating those things is hard in and of itself, even if you don't have to be one of a kind or know how to yodel. Assuming you have achieved the underlying excellence, you then have to figure out how to feature all those various experiences and talents and ambitions in a few pieces of (virtual) paper. That's a big challenge, but nowhere near as daunting as being "the only one" or "having no equal" or even pursuing wacky activities. Wacky activities might make someone in the admissions office notice you, but they will almost never compensate for lack of excellence.

Schools want to see what you've made of the talents you were born with and the opportunities that life sent your way, or -- even better -- the opportunities you've made for yourself. Some of the most interesting applications come from people who took the lemons they were handed and made lemonade.

Bottom line: If you don't have an unusual background, no law school would expect you to go engineer an unusual background out of thin air so that you can be "unique," and they wouldn't expect you to try to present a non-unique background as unique. When applicants try to dress themselves up as something they're not, that almost always backfires. Better to present yourself at your best -- even if it's a background they see a lot -- than twist yourself into an artificial pretzel. So don't lose too much sleep about your "uniqueness." Concentrate instead on communicating your excellence.

Copying and pasting from Wikipedia in your college papers may seem totally normal to many college students, but this NYT article ("Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age") makes clear that (1) there is a casual attitude among many students about what constitutes plagiarism, and (2) copying and pasting and "borrowing" language is still considered plagiarism by any self-respecting university. From the article:

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site's frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student's copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It does appear to be a pervasive problem: a recent study found that "40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments."

Is this just another Gen Y phenomenon? The last paragraph of the article suggests there may be more at work:

And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation’s evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.

In the admissions process, I see parents crossing ethical lines with some regularity. That's not just student laziness; that's also a message from such parents that the ends justify the means, and I would think that's not the best way to help launch their kids into adulthood.

I bring this all up not to finger-wag, but to remind college students that if you get caught plagiarizing -- even if YOU don't consider it plagiarizing -- there are likely to be longer-term consequences that can affect your graduate school applications down the road. If your college, or even just an individual professor, takes any action against you for plagiarism, you will have to disclose that on your applications. Examples of such actions, whether as a result of cheating on a test, lifting language from someone else's paper, or copying and pasting from online sources without attribution, can include things like:

• Giving you a failing grade and making you redo the test/paper/exam/class
• Initiating formal proceedings within the college
• Making you appear before an academic integrity/honor code/academic honesty panel
• Recording a finding of academic dishonesty in your permanent college record

Even if nothing ever gets noted in your official college record, and even if such a notation gets expunged after a certain period of time, you would still be expected to disclose in your applications that any action was ever taken. And graduate schools take academic integrity violations seriously, so think twice before you borrow someone else's language in any of your college work or on your applications. The consequences are hardly worth it.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Why this epidemic of plagiarism? Is it really something new under the sun, or it is just the old-fashioned vice of laziness manifesting itself on a larger, technology-enabled scale? I'm especially intrigued by this argument made in the article by Sarah Wilenski, a senior at Indiana University:

“[Plagiarism] may be increasingly accepted, but there are still plenty of creative people — authors and artists and scholars — who are doing original work,” Ms. Wilensky said in an interview. “It’s kind of an insult that that ideal is gone, and now we’re left only to make collages of the work of previous generations.”

In the view of Ms. Wilensky, whose writing skills earned her the role of informal editor of other students’ papers in her freshman dorm, plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories.

The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.

“If you’re taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you’re not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won’t do so unknowingly,” she said.

At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.

Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.

Yes it is, and yes it does. Do you agree that students are plagiarizing because they are underprepared for college-level analysis and writing? Please weigh in.

Related postings from the Ivey Files archives:

• You're Not Fooling Anyone
• A Tweet Stream Is Not an Essay
• Dealing With Your Past: Disclosing Criminal Issues on Law School Applications
• 34 Duke MBA Students Punished for Cheating
• Study: MBA Students the Biggest Cheaters

Congratulations to the June LSAT test takers among our readers! How does it feel? Do you think you nailed it? Are you happy to have it behind you? Or are you feeling queasy and agonizing about whether to cancel your score and retake it in October? Or maybe you want to see how you did on this test and then decide whether to retake it? Just having the option of canceling causes applicants a lot of anguish, so I'll post some thoughts on the cancellation analysis, and also on the leave-my-score-and-retake-it analysis.

Canceling Your LSAT Score

Before you walk out of your LSAT test, and (as of this writing) for six calendar days afterward, you have the option of canceling your score. Here is the cancellation form for 2010. While that score won't be reported to law schools, admissions officers will get to see that you took the test and canceled your score. Does that look bad? It depends.

Admissions officers understand that bad days can and do happen, and they generally won't look askance at a single score cancellation. Most of them remain agnostic in that situation.

However, if you cancel it a second or a third time, at best you start looking like a flake. At worst, you look like someone who can't handle the pressure of a half-day test, and they will rightly wonder how you're going to survive law school (you won't get to cancel and retake that six-hour take-home Property Law exam), let alone the bar exam (which lasted three days each in the two states in which I took it), let alone legal practice (think law firm partners are going to give you lots of chances for do-overs? None that I know of).  So if you do need to cancel, treat the cancellation as a one-time free pass.

However, don't treat the first test as something you can waltz into on the assumption that you can always cancel and retake it. First of all, admissions officers expect you to do better each additional time you take it, because it's less scary and more familiar when you've taken the real thing before. They think that taking the test and then canceling the score gives you an advantage over someone who doesn't have the benefit of having taken the test before. You should feel well prepared walking into that test, and use the cancellation option for a worst-case scenario.

So when should you cancel your score? If you've been prepping smartly for the test, you'll have a decent sense before the test if you're scoring where you want to be, and you'll have a sense during the test, too, whether things are going as planned. If you know, as you walk out of the test, that you didn't finish a section that you normally finish, or that you bubbled in the wrong lines, or that your stomach staged a rebellion, those are good reasons to cancel. If your next test goes better, no harm done -- that's a happy scenario -- and you're better off showing admissions officers your one great score rather than taking it over and over again on a reported basis.

If, instead, you can't pinpoint anything that went wrong, but you're just feeling a bit nauseated by the anxiety of having studied so hard and so long for this test and now you've finally taken it and you have to wait for a score that determines where you go to the law school that will determine the rest of your life and OH MY GOD NOW YOU'RE FREAKING OUT... well, that's called spiraling, and that's not a good enough reason to cancel. You might have done just fine, in which case, wouldn't it be nice to put the LSAT behind you and NEVER, EVER have to take it again? And when the score comes, if you learn that you didn't do just fine, you can take it again with the benefit of of your score report and being able to analyze which kinds of questions caused you the most trouble.

You won't get to see your score before you cancel, so you'll have to make the cancellation decision with imperfect information: you'll have to assess your performance against the benchmark of your practice exams. The more realistically you've been simulating real test taking conditions during your practice tests, the better you'll be able to gauge how did on the real thing.

And finally, before you get too trigger-happy with the cancellation option, keep in mind the LSAC rule that limits you to taking the LSAT up to three times in two years (including scores you cancel). 

Receiving Your Score and Retaking the LSAT

Schools will see results from all tests -- up to 12 -- for which you registered in the previous five years, including absences and cancellations. Some law schools say that they average multiple scores, but bear in mind that the ABA requires law school to report the high score, and it's the ABA data that US News & Word Report relies on for its rankings. For that reason, schools have an incentive to focus on the high score, regardless of what they tell you publicly.

What does that mean for you? If you walk out of the test feeling strongly that you can squeeze some more points out of the LSAT, and the LSAT/GPA calculator tells you that a few more points would make a difference for the schools you're interested in, you should retake it. Treat the next test as a clean slate. Many applicants tell me that they worry how it will look if there's a really big jump, to which I reply: If there's a big jump, pop the champagne. That can only be good news.

Second, don't assume that your score will necessarily go up -- it can go down, too. Even though admissions officers have an incentive to focus on the high score, they are still subject to the laws of human psychology (and consumer psychology), and you'll look better applying with one really strong score that stands on its own in shining glory than applying with multiple attempts that show incremental improvements (admissions officer: "hmmm....I wonder which test is the outlier here: the high score or the low score?"), not to mention a score drop. Nobody walks into a second or third LSAT exam thinking "my score will drop today," but it does happen. Score drops just don't look good when -- as admissions officers know -- most people's scores go up slightly with each successive test. It's better to take the test once, when you're feeling in peak form, with the understanding that you can always take it again if you have a bad day. And if you do take it again, you should feel quite confident that your score will go up, and walk into the test knowing that you did something different this time: you studied harder/better/smarter, or that you took the test more calmly/more smartly/more strategically.

If an application asks you to explain a change (whether an increase or a decrease) in your LSAT scores, see my previous blog posting on that question here.

So, June test-takers: how do you feel? Are you inclined to cancel, or wait and see how you did? Please share!

From an Ivey Files reader:

I think your blog is incredible and I really appreciate the time and thought that you put into your law school admissions book.

I have a question/topic that I would love to see discussed on your blog. I am wondering what advice you would give to someone who was dismissed from law school after their first semester and is interested in reapplying to law school after the ABA "blackout" application period. Would you advise it? Any insight that you could provide would be most helpful!

Thank you for your time and excellent service.

Great question, and thanks for the compliments!

I thought it might be helpful for you to get the perspective of someone who has been in your situation and did in fact reapply and go back to law school. She was happy to share:

Like most things in life, success in reapplying to law school after a disqualification will depend on how honest you're willing to be with yourself and how much work you're willing to put forth, and even then it may not end up the way you imagined. Just ask Hillary Clinton.

Before you can even say that you're interested in reapplying, there has to be some serious introspection about what went wrong and why. Maybe you never really wanted to go to law school, maybe you were too immature, or maybe you just couldn't figure out how to perform on exams. Regardless, it's important to be brutally honest; it will help in your rebranding efforts.

If you're still set on being a lawyer, I'd suggest getting a job in the field in which you eventually want to practice. I took a job as a paralegal in the corporate transactional practice of a big firm. Immerse yourself in your work, find a mentor, and study the habits of successful attorneys around you. Chances are you'll realize that you didn't know what being a lawyer was really like. This work experience will be the basis of your rebranding. Be patient, though, because it took me three and a half years of working in order for me to feel comfortable going back to an admissions committee with hard evidence of why I was different and reasons why they should admit me.

It'll be important to retake and ace (as best you can) the LSAT and get glowing letters of recommendation. Remember that those two things, along with your personal statement, will be all that the admissions committee has to counter your disqualification. Your personal statement and addendum will be the place to articulate and explain your dismissal. The better you understand what went wrong, the better you'll be able to explain how you fixed it. Then couple that with a newly informed statement of your goals, based off of your work experience.

If possible, try to get face time with decision-makers at schools. If you present well, you'll be the best testament to your reinvention. Hopefully your display of an enhanced level of intellectual and professional maturity will set you apart from other candidates. Be flexible, though, and willing to jump through any hoops a school may set in front of you as conditions to admission. For example, I applied for my school's full-time program, and settled for admission to the part-time program as an unofficial kind of ‘probation'. In my case this was the perfect compromise for a risk-averse admissions committee.

Overall, be patient and realize that this process will be a marathon. Accordingly, there will be low points when you lose sight of the primary endpoint and need to recommit yourself. If you believe in yourself, and surround yourself with people who believe in you, you'll make it happen.

Good luck! Please let us know what happens.

Law professor and blogger Jeff Lipshaw reads a lot of student essays and term papers, and he has graciously written a great piece on the three biggest problems that trip students up when they're trying to get their ideas across on paper. Read his post about the "Elevator Speech" failure, the "Peeling the Artichoke" failure, and the "Presentational" failure.

More thoughts on the subject here.

TOEFL test prep guru Jon Hodge over at Strictly English sent me this question recently:

I'm writing to ask you if you can verify this claim I found on an online bulletin board:

A lot of law schools, especially the "top" ones, don't require the TOEFL even for the international students (from Europe, Asia etc.) I think they consider the LSAT score a good enough measurement for the applicant's English abilities as well. 

For instance, [Columbia Law School] says

"Q: Is the TOEFL exam required?

A: No. Applicants to the J.D. program are not required to take the TOEFL examination."

The most sure thing would probably be to contact the schools directly, if the schools you're applying to are unclear about this on their website. Each school will probably have a different policy, so it'll be hard for someone to give you a clear "yes or no" answer.

Thoughts? 

Thanks for the question, Jon. Note that top LLM programs for international students do require the TOEFL, but I assume you're asking about JD programs.

It is indeed unusual for top JD programs to require the TOEFL. For example, the JD admissions pages for Harvard, Stanford, and Northwestern mention only the LSAT in their list of required tests, so by implication they do not require any additional tests like the TOEFL.

As noted in the excerpt above from the discussion board, Columbia says expressly that it does not require the TOEFL, and that is true for NYU and Penn as well.

But there are exceptions. Chicago, for example, does require a TOEFL score from international JD applicants (scroll to the bottom of the link -- TOEFL or IELTS is required, with some exceptions).

So the norm does seem to be that no TOEFL is required for JD applications, but since there are exceptions, international applicants need to read the instructions for each school carefully. There isn't one rule that governs for all schools.

I received this great question today from an Ivey Files reader:

I know you've addressed this in your book and in the blog, but I had another question regarding the multiple lsat addendum. I took the test twice and experienced a 7 point jump the second time. I have no fancy explanation...the score increase was simply the result of altering my test preparation (I actually scaled back the amount of studying and took a slower, more methodical approach....much more effective for my brain). I am more than content to let the higher score speak for itself, as you suggest, but the language put out by some schools I'd like to apply to makes me think twice about it. For example:

Penn : "If there is a significant difference between an applicant's highest and lowest LSAT score (more than 4 or 5 points) the applicant should address this discrepancy in an addendum to his or her application.”

Michigan : "If you have a significant disparity between scores (six or more points), it would be very helpful to address any explanation for the difference in an optional essay or addendum.”

Virginia: "We encourage applicants with a significant difference in LSAT scores to include with their application any information that may be relevant to the interpretation of test results."

The language suggests they expect you to give them some explanation for two significantly different test scores. Does this mean that I should just write something short and simple that attempts to explain what I believe accounted for my score increase? If I ignore these statements and refuse to submit an explanation, will admissions be more inclined to take my average score?

You are asking all the right questions. I would argue that you don't actually know why your score jumped seven points, because if you look at your LSAT reports for the two test, you'll probably see a pretty wide score band in each for score accuracy. So yes, maybe your score jumped seven points because you studied better/harder/smarter (fill in the blank), but when you're within the margin of error (as reflected by the score bands), or even if you've moved outside the score band, you don't actually know what's behind the difference.

What's a score band? If you look at your LSAT report, LSAC tells admissions officers to view your "real" score as falling within a range of scores. Most LSAT reports that I've seen show a band that's plus or minus 3 of your scaled score, so that's a band of 7 scaled points. Pretty huge, right? Your "real" score is anywhere in that band, and even then the score band captures the "real" score only 68% of the time.*  That leaves a whopping 32% of the time when the score band -- which is already pretty big -- doesn't even include someone's "actual proficiency." (For statistics junkies out there: am I missing something? Am I being unduly harsh? Please post if you have an opinion.)

Given what LSAC itself is saying about the accuracy of its own scores and score bands, can most applicants say something meaningful or even accurate about a movement in scores? I would say no. You are not omniscient. Sometimes you have a good day, sometimes you have a bad day. Sometimes it's just the margin of error. You'll never really know. And you're not the one writing the test questions, or grading the exam, or calibrating it against other exam administrations and other test-taker pools, or determining what the statistically appropriate score band is for a given test or a given score. LSAC employs an army of statisticians for that, and the score bands are the best they can do, with an accuracy rate that leaves a lot of room for error. And somehow you're supposed to know more about your scores than they do? Go figure. But over the years, more schools have added language to that effect, asking about score differences as small as four points. So I advise the following:

If a school expressly asks or encourages you to comment on an X-point score difference, you should say something about it, even if realistically you can't be expected to justify or explain the score difference.

If they ask and you stay silent, I don't think they are necessarily going to average your scores, since they have to report the high score to the ABA, and that creates powerful incentives for the school to focus on the high score. However, staying silent after they expressly ask about it would suggest to them that you're not following instructions, and that's not a good outcome, even if the instructions themselves are silly. You should say something, anything, even if it's just: I studied differently/had a better day. In your case, tell them about your different approach to the test.

What if an applicant has to explain a decline in scores? That's a tougher situation, obviously, since most people do better with each successive test. (LSAC says: "Data show that scores for repeat test takers often rise slightly.") The things that can go wrong on a test day are wide and varied, and in a perfect universe, if you were having a bad test day, you should have canceled the score. But if you haven't canceled the score, explain what happened, and try not to give an impression that will undermine anyone's confidence in you as a future law student and lawyer. For example, it doesn't reflect well on an applicant to say that he panics in high-stakes testing situations. (How is he going to survive the much longer, more grueling bar exam? Or even law school exams? Or oral argument in front of a judge?)

I'd love for readers to post their own thoughts. Why do you think your score went up or down? How are you answering application questions about score differences?

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* Here's what LSAC says on page 24 of its Information Book for 2009-10: "Score bands for the LSAT are designed to include your actual proficiency level approximately 68 percent of the time."

Two great new postings from Steve Schwartz at LSAT Blog, one on the shift in test dates this coming season (and why that matters), and the June vs. October debate. Well worth reading.

• LSAT Test Dates in 2010 and 2011 | Change From Previous Years

• Deciding to Take June vs October LSAT | Pros and Cons