Re: application regrets
Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 1:11 pm
For yourself and your parents, I would outline and present a detailed plan of how you will improve. I do agree you should retake but you should do so after doing some hard thinking about your weaknesses or else you risk getting the same score or worse. Understand that your parents don't want you to spin your wheels and show them that you won't with this new retake and that you will get into those better schools. Merely showing employment statistics doesn't matter if you cant show evidence that you can improve to get into those better schools. Since you only took the exam twice, taking it a couple more times won't kill you. Spivey mentioned that 5 or 6 plus takes might indicate poor judgement, but if you manage an appreciable improvement you should be fine. On top studying harder, you should study smarter. If you were studying 3 hours a day, aim to study twice that amount. Make spreadsheets to log every question you got wrong and review it often. Blind review your exams and do differwnt drills, like aiming to finish all 25 or 26 lr questions in 25 minutes to gauge confidence.
the901 wrote:Hey everyone, long time lurker, finally created an account.
I was essentially a t14 or bust person going into lsat studying and spent 7 months total doing LSAT work between taking the exam twice. My PTs had been in the high 160s to low/mid 170s but then they started to fall off and never got back up again. I applied to almost all the non t14 T30 schools and I have gone thoroughly through myLSN and such and feel confident with my applications and hope for something to start going my way. I have visited a few of the schools I applied to but I honestly did not really get a great feeling from any of them. I'm looking very close at BU/BC/Fordham(strongly disliked)/GW/ND because of their biglaw placement mainly (I have no real interest in any one particular region over another).
My major interest has always been more so towards securing a clerkship and my long term goal has always been to be a judge (I even got to intern with one during UG). Which is why when I think about achieving that goal its hard to picture it working out from any of these schools, the judge I worked with was an HYS grad, as was virtually every other judge at the courthouse except for one or two (and IIRC one was CCN).
Since none of these schools are great for clerkships am I looking at the situation of be top 5% or transfer to be able to accomplish this?
I have taken the lsat twice, the first time getting a 165 and the second time I did worse so I am not sure if retaking/reapplying really applies to me not only because I did worse/burned out but because there is a significant amount of family pressure to go straight through to law school. My UGPA is around a 3.6 but with a single semester that tanked my gpa from 3.8+ to what it is now (t20 UG). Money will fortunately not be an issue I need to address in this decision.
Thanks everyone for the input!