Mid-July is typically a quiet time for many admissions offices. They’ve wrapped up work for the incoming class, other than knowing that there may be a few more seats that become available because of last-minute changes of heart from a few students. But there’s nothing you can do about that until those students actually tell you that they’re not coming … so there’s no use worrying about it right now. AdComms know that they could start scheduling their recruitment travel for September through November … but the fall seems so far away when summer is right here and right now and, well, look at those flowers outside! As such, this is a fairly normal time for law school AdComms to schedule vacations, especially since taking time away during the academic year is nearly impossible. However, this year is a bit different as schools continue to figure out the fallout and next steps from the Supreme Court’s SFFA decisions. Even if they’re at a beach or a lake house, admissions officers are still being pulled into Zoom meetings with their deans and general counsels’ offices. Adding fuel to the fire have been subsequent announcements by various state attorneys general regarding what schools can or can’t do regarding admissions and financial aid for the coming year. This all happens to coincide with a task that AdComms typically do at this time of year and represents the ultimate “check the box before you go on vacation” duty—building their applications for the coming cycle. We discussed this task a bit in last week’s post but let’s take a few minutes today to dive into one of the more absolutely-mundane-yet-critically-important tasks that AdComms do every year.
Before diving in too deeply, it is worth noting how critical LSAC is to the entirety of the law school admissions process. Students planning to apply for this upcoming cycle may only be aware of LSAC vis-à-vis the LSAT. But the students who applied in this past cycle and are still reading these blog posts due to habit and/or summer doldrums (and we appreciate you being here!) can only shake their heads at the newbies’ sweet innocence. Not only does LSAC administer the LSAT, they also host the application platform utilized by law schools. As such, you’re going to fill out application forms on lsac.org; you’re going to navigate lsac.org to figure out how your recommenders can load their letters to your apps; you’re going to be the middleman between lsac.org and your school’s registrar regarding your transcripts. Get ready to have a new best friend!
When building their apps, schools can opt into LSAC’s standard templates while also still having a suite of customization opportunities. It’s a bit like one of the big hits of the summer in my household—constructing devices in Tears of the Kingdom. The equivalent of the simple “glider with fans attached” would be the basic biographical and demographic questions sections. You’ll notice little variation in those sections between schools’ applications because the standard templates provided by LSAC are practical and useful. By utilizing those templates, AdComms also don’t need to worry about creating back-end mapping from the application to LSAC’s database and Excel spreadsheets—LSAC has already taken care of this process.
But what’s the fun in a regular ol’ glider when you can—instead—attach lasers and a rocket? Those are the customized sections that will be unique for each school. An AdComm may do this because they find that the standard section offered by LSAC doesn’t collect the right information or enough information. Regarding an example of the former, LSAC was slow to provide standardized sections to capture information about the GRE. This was—in no way, of course—a suspicious and passive-aggressive omission on LSAC’s part. But it meant that the first wave of schools that allowed students to take the GRE had to build their own sections to capture this information.
Meanwhile, an example of not gathering enough information was the race/ethnicity section of the application (RIP). The racial categories offered by LSAC’s standard template mirrored those utilized by the U.S. Census Bureau and could be a bit broad. For instance, all Asian countries were grouped together while the Bureau also lumped North African/Middle Eastern into the White/Caucasian category. If a school wanted more specific information, they had to create their own section of the application.
While it sounds simple in theory to build your own sections, it can be a bit tedious in reality. LSAC’s system requires users to define the kinds of questions being asked, the kinds of answers that are allowed, whether this question is connected to another question in a different section, etc. Another kicker when making a new section is that the data collected by those questions does not automatically flow into LSAC’s database and into an Excel spreadsheet. If a user wants to do that, they have to properly map all the possible outcomes and answers into the database. As such, the bane of every AdComm’s existence is the one faculty on their admissions committee (because it’s always a professor…) who finds one minor flaw with a standard-issue LSAC section of the application and wants their own bespoke section.
This is also a collaborative process. Each school is responsible for building their own application, but LSAC is then responsible for beta testing and ensuring that the application data flow operates properly. It can take LSAC’s tech team a little bit of time to do this for each school’s application! LSAC typically recommends that schools submit their apps by early to mid-July if they want their apps to open on September 1. That’s where the timing of the Supreme Court’s decision is just a little bit of a knife twist—if they had issued that decision just a little sooner, that would have given schools and LSAC more time to adjust questions and sections for the coming year.
So, as a student, how can you use this knowledge? First, the application construction process is the reason why most schools do not drastically change their applications from one year to the next. It’s simply too laborious a process to be undertaken without good reason. Any student planning to apply in this upcoming cycle can start working on their materials based on last cycle’s app instructions. Also, the ubiquity of LSAC’s standard sections can be useful. After you fill out one application (and assuming you have your internet browser’s cookies activated…), information from the standard sections of that application should auto-load into subsequent apps that utilize the same standard sections. This will save you a little bit of time! Finally, because of how long it can take to make new questions combined with the timing of the SFFA decision, just file it away that it’s possible that schools will publish app instructions a little later this year. So in the meantime, enjoy your own summer sojourns, work on your core application documents, and be sure to check out our admissions course for examples of application documents complete with lasers and rockets attached.