January Applicants Forum

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kiklavan

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January Applicants

Post by kiklavan » Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:30 pm

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Platopus

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Platopus » Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:42 pm

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Re: January Applicants

Post by kiklavan » Tue Sep 19, 2017 1:52 pm

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Platopus

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Platopus » Tue Sep 19, 2017 8:06 pm

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Re: January Applicants

Post by WalkingContradiction » Tue Sep 19, 2017 9:12 pm

kiklavan wrote:Can anyone who applied to T14 in January let me know if they feel that it negatively impacted their cycle to apply late? Or link in their LSN so I can follow it? Thank you!

I'd also appreciate thoughts from anyone else who has info!
It resulted in me being waitlisted at a few places I probably could have gotten into outright. Eventually got off the waitlists, but that hurts for scholarships.

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kiklavan

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Re: January Applicants

Post by kiklavan » Tue Sep 19, 2017 9:38 pm

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Re: January Applicants

Post by kiklavan » Tue Sep 19, 2017 9:39 pm

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Platopus

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Platopus » Tue Sep 19, 2017 10:26 pm

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kiklavan

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Re: January Applicants

Post by kiklavan » Tue Sep 19, 2017 10:44 pm

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Re: January Applicants

Post by jel2184 » Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:13 pm

If your LSAT is great, I highly doubt you would be at a disadvantage. Im in the same boat and I will be sending my apps in mid Dec and writing "why X" essays to the ones I really want to go to. Obviously it's not ideal but I've seen on boards here that people who apply early january are still admitted.

kiklavan wrote:I'm just in an irritating situation where my ps/resume are completed, LORs submitted, and my application is virtually ready to go which is why I was really hoping to get lucky this cycle..... I really don't want to revise everything + worry about getting relevant WE. But you're right.. it wouldn't be the worst thing.

Thinking of just applying in Jan. and reapplying in the fall if things don't go well.
Platopus wrote:
kiklavan wrote:*Sigh*

I see it. Particularly with H & Chicago.
/quote]

I'm going to read a bit between the lines here and guess you're taking the December LSAT? If so, remember, you can always apply next year. Another year off won't kill you.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Jjbb938483 » Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:18 pm

Supposedly applying early doesn't give you the advantage that it used to. Law school applications are trending downward and many schools are having a harder time filling up their classes (not that there aren't plenty of people applying to T14s but that there are fewer "qualified" applicants to begin with).
The data is not going be as useful as some believe. There's a significant sampling bias involved. People that apply later may have issues that caused them to apply later (first LSAT low so had to retake or waited until after fall semester to increase GPA etc). Those problems may be contributing to the lack of acceptances.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by cavalier1138 » Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:46 pm

Jjbb938483 wrote:Supposedly applying early doesn't give you the advantage that it used to. Law school applications are trending downward and many schools are having a harder time filling up their classes (not that there aren't plenty of people applying to T14s but that there are fewer "qualified" applicants to begin with).
The data is not going be as useful as some believe. There's a significant sampling bias involved. People that apply later may have issues that caused them to apply later (first LSAT low so had to retake or waited until after fall semester to increase GPA etc). Those problems may be contributing to the lack of acceptances.
Except schools accept students on a rolling basis. So just from a numbers perspective, your reasoning is off. But even ignoring that, schools only care about your highest LSAT, and a single semester rarely bumps a GPA up that much, so it's not likely that either of those factors have much to do with the lower acceptance rate for late applicants.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by kiklavan » Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:19 pm

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Re: January Applicants

Post by kiklavan » Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:23 pm

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jel2184

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Re: January Applicants

Post by jel2184 » Thu Sep 21, 2017 11:32 am

True, they won't look at your application until you have everything in place. I guess I'd want everything else in and once my scores goes live then my application turns complete. Yes this probably may save me a day or so of sending everything to get in order but I'd rather just get it all in asap.


kiklavan wrote:Thanks for this! But why are you sending in applications first? I don't think they review your application until you submit your score!
jel2184 wrote:If your LSAT is great, I highly doubt you would be at a disadvantage. Im in the same boat and I will be sending my apps in mid Dec and writing "why X" essays to the ones I really want to go to. Obviously it's not ideal but I've seen on boards here that people who apply early january are still admitted.

kiklavan wrote:I'm just in an irritating situation where my ps/resume are completed, LORs submitted, and my application is virtually ready to go which is why I was really hoping to get lucky this cycle..... I really don't want to revise everything + worry about getting relevant WE. But you're right.. it wouldn't be the worst thing.

Thinking of just applying in Jan. and reapplying in the fall if things don't go well.
Platopus wrote:
kiklavan wrote:*Sigh*

I see it. Particularly with H & Chicago.
/quote]

I'm going to read a bit between the lines here and guess you're taking the December LSAT? If so, remember, you can always apply next year. Another year off won't kill you.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Jjbb938483 » Thu Sep 21, 2017 3:46 pm

cavalier1138 wrote:
Jjbb938483 wrote:Supposedly applying early doesn't give you the advantage that it used to. Law school applications are trending downward and many schools are having a harder time filling up their classes (not that there aren't plenty of people applying to T14s but that there are fewer "qualified" applicants to begin with).
The data is not going be as useful as some believe. There's a significant sampling bias involved. People that apply later may have issues that caused them to apply later (first LSAT low so had to retake or waited until after fall semester to increase GPA etc). Those problems may be contributing to the lack of acceptances.
Except schools accept students on a rolling basis. So just from a numbers perspective, your reasoning is off. But even ignoring that, schools only care about your highest LSAT, and a single semester rarely bumps a GPA up that much, so it's not likely that either of those factors have much to do with the lower acceptance rate for late applicants.


My point was that there's more to it than just numbers and those things aren't reflected in the data. Yes they accept on a rolling basis but if there's a decline in the number of qualified applicants that will still leave more room open later in the cycle. If accepting on a rolling basis and the sheer number of qualified applicants didn't matter than there'd be no dis/advantage either way.

Even if schools only care about your highest LSAT score many of them (especially T14s) still consider the others. I've read many times where schools say they don't average them and mostly care about your highest but still take all of them into consideration. I would assume even if you did poorly in Sept and well in Dec but your only excuse for Sept was that you were nervous/unprepared, the fact you were nervous/unprepared might weigh against you simply because being well prepared and handling your nerves is usually a good trait to have.

You've probably got me on the GPA thing since one semester wouldn't make a huge difference but there are still other problems that may not be in the data. Imagine one person with a 3.8 and 170 that applies in October versus someone with the same numbers that applies in January. Maybe the second person had to wait until January because they had trouble getting good recommenders or they procrastinated and didn't write a good personal statement. That same person may have been rejected in October as well. We don't know enough about individual applicants to know whether it was timing or something else that may be highly correlated with applying later.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Pozzo » Thu Sep 21, 2017 4:54 pm

Jjbb938483 wrote:
cavalier1138 wrote:
Jjbb938483 wrote:Supposedly applying early doesn't give you the advantage that it used to. Law school applications are trending downward and many schools are having a harder time filling up their classes (not that there aren't plenty of people applying to T14s but that there are fewer "qualified" applicants to begin with).
The data is not going be as useful as some believe. There's a significant sampling bias involved. People that apply later may have issues that caused them to apply later (first LSAT low so had to retake or waited until after fall semester to increase GPA etc). Those problems may be contributing to the lack of acceptances.
Except schools accept students on a rolling basis. So just from a numbers perspective, your reasoning is off. But even ignoring that, schools only care about your highest LSAT, and a single semester rarely bumps a GPA up that much, so it's not likely that either of those factors have much to do with the lower acceptance rate for late applicants.


My point was that there's more to it than just numbers and those things aren't reflected in the data. Yes they accept on a rolling basis but if there's a decline in the number of qualified applicants that will still leave more room open later in the cycle. If accepting on a rolling basis and the sheer number of qualified applicants didn't matter than there'd be no dis/advantage either way.

Even if schools only care about your highest LSAT score many of them (especially T14s) still consider the others. I've read many times where schools say they don't average them and mostly care about your highest but still take all of them into consideration. I would assume even if you did poorly in Sept and well in Dec but your only excuse for Sept was that you were nervous/unprepared, the fact you were nervous/unprepared might weigh against you simply because being well prepared and handling your nerves is usually a good trait to have.

You've probably got me on the GPA thing since one semester wouldn't make a huge difference but there are still other problems that may not be in the data. Imagine one person with a 3.8 and 170 that applies in October versus someone with the same numbers that applies in January. Maybe the second person had to wait until January because they had trouble getting good recommenders or they procrastinated and didn't write a good personal statement. That same person may have been rejected in October as well. We don't know enough about individual applicants to know whether it was timing or something else that may be highly correlated with applying later.
I think there's more to this than you're acknowledging. Law schools are very calculating in their admissions process to maintain medians or even make gains. They know the kind of applicants they need to admit before the cycle starts and are looking to make that class from the day applications open. The impact of the rolling admissions is that as they begin to admit people there are fewer slots left for all but the most spectacular applicants. Sure, there are lots of reasons why a January applicant could be passed over, but to suggest that most of these people would have been passed over in October is missing the one constant in all of these applicants: time. Here's a comparison from myLSN. This is an applicant pool with GPA at 3.85-4.0, and LSAT at 168-172. Strong candidates all of them. The first graph shows outcomes for those who applied between August and December, the second January or later.

Image

Image

Those are substantially different outcomes that I don't think we can attribute to procrastinating on a PS. I don't have time to link it here, but Spivey has a great podcast about timing the admissions process that articulates what we mere mortals cannot.

A couple other things: schools definitively only care about your highest LSAT. Especially (as you've written) if strong candidates are declining, why would a school not admit someone with a score that buoys their medians because the applicant took the LSAT twice? As far as applicant quality. Yes, we're down from the post-recession boom, but applicants have been flat for a few years. This year, June LSATs were up some 20%. The economy is good, people are riled up politically, there's likely to be an increase in applicants this year, including highly qualified ones. Again, Spivey has a blog post on this upcoming cycle.

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LesPaul1995

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Re: January Applicants

Post by LesPaul1995 » Thu Sep 21, 2017 7:55 pm

Pozzo wrote:
Jjbb938483 wrote:
cavalier1138 wrote:
Jjbb938483 wrote:Supposedly applying early doesn't give you the advantage that it used to. Law school applications are trending downward and many schools are having a harder time filling up their classes (not that there aren't plenty of people applying to T14s but that there are fewer "qualified" applicants to begin with).
The data is not going be as useful as some believe. There's a significant sampling bias involved. People that apply later may have issues that caused them to apply later (first LSAT low so had to retake or waited until after fall semester to increase GPA etc). Those problems may be contributing to the lack of acceptances.
Except schools accept students on a rolling basis. So just from a numbers perspective, your reasoning is off. But even ignoring that, schools only care about your highest LSAT, and a single semester rarely bumps a GPA up that much, so it's not likely that either of those factors have much to do with the lower acceptance rate for late applicants.


My point was that there's more to it than just numbers and those things aren't reflected in the data. Yes they accept on a rolling basis but if there's a decline in the number of qualified applicants that will still leave more room open later in the cycle. If accepting on a rolling basis and the sheer number of qualified applicants didn't matter than there'd be no dis/advantage either way.

Even if schools only care about your highest LSAT score many of them (especially T14s) still consider the others. I've read many times where schools say they don't average them and mostly care about your highest but still take all of them into consideration. I would assume even if you did poorly in Sept and well in Dec but your only excuse for Sept was that you were nervous/unprepared, the fact you were nervous/unprepared might weigh against you simply because being well prepared and handling your nerves is usually a good trait to have.

You've probably got me on the GPA thing since one semester wouldn't make a huge difference but there are still other problems that may not be in the data. Imagine one person with a 3.8 and 170 that applies in October versus someone with the same numbers that applies in January. Maybe the second person had to wait until January because they had trouble getting good recommenders or they procrastinated and didn't write a good personal statement. That same person may have been rejected in October as well. We don't know enough about individual applicants to know whether it was timing or something else that may be highly correlated with applying later.
I think there's more to this than you're acknowledging. Law schools are very calculating in their admissions process to maintain medians or even make gains. They know the kind of applicants they need to admit before the cycle starts and are looking to make that class from the day applications open. The impact of the rolling admissions is that as they begin to admit people there are fewer slots left for all but the most spectacular applicants. Sure, there are lots of reasons why a January applicant could be passed over, but to suggest that most of these people would have been passed over in October is missing the one constant in all of these applicants: time. Here's a comparison from myLSN. This is an applicant pool with GPA at 3.85-4.0, and LSAT at 168-172. Strong candidates all of them. The first graph shows outcomes for those who applied between August and December, the second January or later.

Image

Image

Those are substantially different outcomes that I don't think we can attribute to procrastinating on a PS. I don't have time to link it here, but Spivey has a great podcast about timing the admissions process that articulates what we mere mortals cannot.

A couple other things: schools definitively only care about your highest LSAT. Especially (as you've written) if strong candidates are declining, why would a school not admit someone with a score that buoys their medians because the applicant took the LSAT twice? As far as applicant quality. Yes, we're down from the post-recession boom, but applicants have been flat for a few years. This year, June LSATs were up some 20%. The economy is good, people are riled up politically, there's likely to be an increase in applicants this year, including highly qualified ones. Again, Spivey has a blog post on this upcoming cycle.
The differential nature of the ratios would mean something if n equaled the same, but that's not the case (let alone verifiable on my.lsn), so I don't know how you could draw any particularly meanginful conclusion from those stats. OP, more importantly than not having a significant impact in many cases for your app in Jan, the extra time will help increase your score. Unless you are getting a 180, you can absolutely increase your skills between now and then if you put in the proper work. I would encourage you to ignore the thought of deferring a year for applying In January vs September 2018, unless you have very specific goals which are largely only acquired from certain top schools.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by cavalier1138 » Thu Sep 21, 2017 7:59 pm

LesPaul1995 wrote:The differential nature of the ratios would mean something if n equaled the same, but that's not the case (let alone verifiable on my.lsn), so I don't know how you could draw any particularly meanginful conclusion from those stats. OP, more importantly than not having a significant impact in many cases for your app in Jan, the extra time will help increase your score. Unless you are getting a 180, you can absolutely increase your skills between now and then if you put in the proper work. I would encourage you to ignore the thought of deferring a year for applying In January vs September 2018, unless you have very specific goals which are largely only acquired from certain top schools.
Yes, the OP can increase their score, but late applications absolutely have a negative impact. This has been confirmed over and over again.

We don't even know what the OP's current score is (or if they have one... OP has only mentioned practice test ranges), so pointless speculation about whether an improvement would make up for the late app isn't very relevant.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by LesPaul1995 » Thu Sep 21, 2017 8:28 pm

cavalier1138 wrote:
LesPaul1995 wrote:The differential nature of the ratios would mean something if n equaled the same, but that's not the case (let alone verifiable on my.lsn), so I don't know how you could draw any particularly meanginful conclusion from those stats. OP, more importantly than not having a significant impact in many cases for your app in Jan, the extra time will help increase your score. Unless you are getting a 180, you can absolutely increase your skills between now and then if you put in the proper work. I would encourage you to ignore the thought of deferring a year for applying In January vs September 2018, unless you have very specific goals which are largely only acquired from certain top schools.
Yes, the OP can increase their score, but late applications absolutely have a negative impact. This has been confirmed over and over again.

We don't even know what the OP's current score is (or if they have one... OP has only mentioned practice test ranges), so pointless speculation about whether an improvement would make up for the late app isn't very relevant.
I didn't imply that applying later had zero negative impact, I implied that the claim is exaggerated per the unrepresentative numbers presented, especially in proportion to the potential increase one could potentially make between now and December. It is not irrelevant to consider this in talk of OP's post as it does not contain any degree of certainty in postponing or score, so the uncertain nature of the score is just as relevant as the OP's current uncertain decision of postponing is.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Jjbb938483 » Fri Sep 22, 2017 3:00 pm

LesPaul1995 wrote:
Pozzo wrote:
Jjbb938483 wrote:
cavalier1138 wrote:
Jjbb938483 wrote:Supposedly applying early doesn't give you the advantage that it used to. Law school applications are trending downward and many schools are having a harder time filling up their classes (not that there aren't plenty of people applying to T14s but that there are fewer "qualified" applicants to begin with).
The data is not going be as useful as some believe. There's a significant sampling bias involved. People that apply later may have issues that caused them to apply later (first LSAT low so had to retake or waited until after fall semester to increase GPA etc). Those problems may be contributing to the lack of acceptances.
Except schools accept students on a rolling basis. So just from a numbers perspective, your reasoning is off. But even ignoring that, schools only care about your highest LSAT, and a single semester rarely bumps a GPA up that much, so it's not likely that either of those factors have much to do with the lower acceptance rate for late applicants.


My point was that there's more to it than just numbers and those things aren't reflected in the data. Yes they accept on a rolling basis but if there's a decline in the number of qualified applicants that will still leave more room open later in the cycle. If accepting on a rolling basis and the sheer number of qualified applicants didn't matter than there'd be no dis/advantage either way.

Even if schools only care about your highest LSAT score many of them (especially T14s) still consider the others. I've read many times where schools say they don't average them and mostly care about your highest but still take all of them into consideration. I would assume even if you did poorly in Sept and well in Dec but your only excuse for Sept was that you were nervous/unprepared, the fact you were nervous/unprepared might weigh against you simply because being well prepared and handling your nerves is usually a good trait to have.

You've probably got me on the GPA thing since one semester wouldn't make a huge difference but there are still other problems that may not be in the data. Imagine one person with a 3.8 and 170 that applies in October versus someone with the same numbers that applies in January. Maybe the second person had to wait until January because they had trouble getting good recommenders or they procrastinated and didn't write a good personal statement. That same person may have been rejected in October as well. We don't know enough about individual applicants to know whether it was timing or something else that may be highly correlated with applying later.
I think there's more to this than you're acknowledging. Law schools are very calculating in their admissions process to maintain medians or even make gains. They know the kind of applicants they need to admit before the cycle starts and are looking to make that class from the day applications open. The impact of the rolling admissions is that as they begin to admit people there are fewer slots left for all but the most spectacular applicants. Sure, there are lots of reasons why a January applicant could be passed over, but to suggest that most of these people would have been passed over in October is missing the one constant in all of these applicants: time. Here's a comparison from myLSN. This is an applicant pool with GPA at 3.85-4.0, and LSAT at 168-172. Strong candidates all of them. The first graph shows outcomes for those who applied between August and December, the second January or later.


Those are substantially different outcomes that I don't think we can attribute to procrastinating on a PS. I don't have time to link it here, but Spivey has a great podcast about timing the admissions process that articulates what we mere mortals cannot.

A couple other things: schools definitively only care about your highest LSAT. Especially (as you've written) if strong candidates are declining, why would a school not admit someone with a score that buoys their medians because the applicant took the LSAT twice? As far as applicant quality. Yes, we're down from the post-recession boom, but applicants have been flat for a few years. This year, June LSATs were up some 20%. The economy is good, people are riled up politically, there's likely to be an increase in applicants this year, including highly qualified ones. Again, Spivey has a blog post on this upcoming cycle.
The differential nature of the ratios would mean something if n equaled the same, but that's not the case (let alone verifiable on my.lsn), so I don't know how you could draw any particularly meanginful conclusion from those stats. OP, more importantly than not having a significant impact in many cases for your app in Jan, the extra time will help increase your score. Unless you are getting a 180, you can absolutely increase your skills between now and then if you put in the proper work. I would encourage you to ignore the thought of deferring a year for applying In January vs September 2018, unless you have very specific goals which are largely only acquired from certain top schools.
Grouping January applicants with those applying as late as April is going to skew things too. Someone that applies on Jan 5 is going to have very different odds than a March or April applicant.

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Re: January Applicants

Post by Jjbb938483 » Fri Sep 22, 2017 3:26 pm

Pozzo wrote: This year, June LSATs were up some 20%. The economy is good, people are riled up politically, there's likely to be an increase in applicants this year, including highly qualified ones. Again, Spivey has a blog post on this upcoming cycle.
That's correct but its worth putting it into perspective. In June 2007 about 85% of LSAT takers were first timers. This year it was 75%. It's still an increase in the overall number of potential applicants but not as much as the 20% increase would suggest. It's also hard to say exactly how many of these people will end up applying or when they'll apply.

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