The LSAT is the key law school admission requirement. This is where a little work can pay out as a huge difference in the law school admission letters that you receive. You can get into law school without completing an undergraduate degree, but I don’t know of anyone who has satisfied the requirements for admission to a decent law school without doing well on the LSAT.
I promised that this advice was going concentrate on the law school admission requirements with respect to which a little effort can radically alter the outcome of whether you are or are not admitted to any given law school. Your grades take time and a lot of sustained effort to change, but your LSAT score is something that you can change now, with a fairly short burst of effort. And your LSAT score may make the difference between admission to Harvard Law School, admission to Stanford law school, and admission to some crappy online law school that I’ve never heard of.
The three key words here are LSAT prep course. But before you say, “I don’t have $2,000.00,” you need to know that my initial advice won’t cost you anything at all (or even take much time).
The very first thing that you need to do with respect to raising your LSAT score is to call Princeton Review or Kaplan and schedule a free initial diagnostic test. This is free of charge. Let me say that again, your initial diagnostic test is free of charge.
So, you go in, and you can typically schedule this with some flexibility. You take a shortened simulated LSAT. After you drain the remainder of your brain into a small bowl, they give you a piece of paper. That piece of paper says, “Your score is X. Here are the areas that you need to work on.” The diagnostic paper that you have been given will then list the various types of questions that you took and will give you an assessment of your performance on each type of question.
The guy that has given you the test will tell you what he thinks you need to do next. If you need help across a broad range of the question types that are presented, then he will probably tell you that you need the course. That’s about $2,000. But, he may tell you that need something less than the entire course. And it may cost a lot less.
For instance, when I took my initial diagnostic test, I scored well on the reading comprehension and argument analysis sections of the test. I sucked at the games. The guy at the Princeton review came out and said, “Okay, you scored a 164. You will definitely meet the requirements for law school admission somewhere. We can raise your score by five points in a few weeks if you come in for private tutoring on the games section. You do not need to take the course, and it will only waste your time. The tutoring will cost about $600.00, rather than the $2000.00 for the course.”
So, I came in and took the private tutoring. My final score was 169. I got into a good law school and was offered a full-tuition scholarship.
The key thing is to go in and take the free diagnostic test. This costs you nothing. I recommend that you take it from Princeton review. I recommend that you take the diagnostic test without having prepared for the diagnostic test in any way, because it gives you a clean baseline.
I’ll be back with more on the LSAT tomorrow.
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