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The two factors that law
schools weigh most heavily are your undergraduate GPA and your LSAT score.
Of the two, some schools more heavily emphasize your undergraduate grades,
while others pay more attention to your LSAT score. However, success in
undergraduate school seems to translate to success in law school, because
good study habits in one naturally carry over to the other. Law schools may
also consider other factors like essays, recommendations, law-related work
experience, gender, race, and disability status. Before talking about when
and how law schools consider those other factors, though, you need to know
something about how law schools make admissions decisions.
The Rolling Admission System
Most law schools use a rolling
admissions system to fill each entering class. This means that a school
begins offering admission to applicants well before its application deadline
has passed. How is a school able to do this? Actually, figuring out who to
make offers to before a school knows how many applications it will receive
is a remarkably straightforward process. Every fall, each law school
creates its own admission index, which is a number derived from a
mathematical equation that combines the GPA, the LSAT, and a third
constant. This admission index is the "magic number" for the law school for
that year. If your index score is at or above the point where the law
school has pegged its admission index, the school offers you admission. If
your index score is below that point, some schools will put you into a
"wait-and-see" category; you may or may not get offered admission, depending
on the strength of the remaining applicant pool. Applicants whose index
scores are below a certain cutoff point find letters of rejection waiting in
the mail.
The trick for a law school, of
course, is figuring out exactly where to peg its admission index. Set the
index too high, and the law school courts disaster. The result may be too
few offers, resulting in empty seats in the class. Conversely, if the index
is set too low, the school may find itself with too many students. Law
schools would rather have too many students than too few. To make sure this
happens, a school may set its admission index a bit on the low side at the
beginning of an admission cycle. As the admission process continues, the
school will tweak its admission index up or down (most likely, up) to
fine-tune the number of students it admits. The thing to realize is that
because any given school is likely to have a lower admission index early on,
there may be some advantage to applying early. Not a big advantage, mind
you, but any legitimate advantage you can get is worth taking.
Other Factors
As you can tell from this
discussion, most admission decisions are based on GPAs, LSATs, and little
else. So when do things like recommendations, essays, gender, race, and
work experience get considered? The answer is that all law schools actively
recruit minorities and women, groups that have long been underrepresented in
the legal community. Being a member of one of these groups can only help,
not hurt, your chances for law school admission. Law schools also do their
best to offer reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
Recommendations, essays, work
experiences and the like tend to get used as "tiebreakers". For example,
the top law schools get far more applications than they have available
spots. Most of the applicants to these schools have very high GPAs and
LSATs, so the schools must rely on the tiebreakers to distinguish one
applicant from the next. Other law schools may also look to these
tiebreakers as they approach the end of an admission cycle, if they have
many more applications than openings to fill.
This does not mean that you
should ignore or downplay the significance of these other admissions
factors. If any part of your application is incomplete, a law school will
not consider your application no matter how strong your GPA or LSAT. A
sloppy application will not create the kind of impression you want,
especially if the admission decision comes down to a close call between you
and another applicant with roughly equal qualifications. It can be argued
that law schools are interested in seeing just how well you are able to
follow painstaking instructions and pay close attention to details.
In short, most law schools use
an admission index based heavily upon GPA and LSAT scores to offer
admissions in a rolling admission system. Because law schools would rather
have too many first year students than too few, the admission index may be
set lower early in an admission cycle. This means that there can be a
slight advantage in applying to law schools early. Applicants to the top law
schools have very high GPAs and LSAT scores, so other criteria must be used
to distinguish one candidate from the next. All law schools are actively
seeking to improve diversity in their ranks, so women and minorities are
encouraged to apply.
Next: Law School Admission
Requirement |
