With last week’s heat wave finally breaking over the eastern half of the United States, law school AdComms are spending the week finally opening their windows again (and questioning why their school can charge so much in tuition and yet never seem to turn the building’s air conditioning on until July) and firmly looking ahead to next year. June LSAT scores are about to be released—the test that has the single highest percentage of first-time test takers of any administration. The August LSAT’s registration deadline is just around the corner—this usually has the second highest percentage of first-time test takers. And email inboxes are getting jammed up with invitations to law fairs and reminders from LSAC that AdComms need to submit their 2024–2025 applications soon. So while our AdComm friends are bustling to get work done, let’s take a quick look at the headlines and news from around the world of law school admissions.
LSAT Registrations
When we checked in last week on registrations for the August LSAT via the LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report, we were at 16,775 hearty souls prepping for the first non-Logic Games test. That was juuuuuuuuuuuuuust a hair higher than last year’s final total of 16,666 for the August exam. And as per usual, we’re seeing a number of folks rush to sign up just before the registration deadline on the 27th:
While jumping from 16,775 to 20,565 is pretty nice (22.5% is nothing to sneeze at), and we’re likely to see a few more folks register in these last few moments, this pales in comparison to what happened for the June LSAT:
- Two weeks before the registration deadline: 22,178 registrations
- The week of the registration deadline: 31,435 registrations
- Final numbers right after the registration deadline: 36,028 registrations
And as we can see, those 36,028 registrations in early May eventually melted down to 26,736 on test day in early June. So unless we see something absurdly abnormal in the next 48 hours, we’re probably going to see flat test-taking numbers come August 7th–10th when test takers sharpen their #2 pencils (metaphorically—of course—since you shouldn’t use a pencil on your computer screen!) and take the exam. We’ll keep an eye on this development but it's looking less like "volcanos" or "fireworks" and perhaps more like "putting a Mentos in a bottle of soda."
Building Apps
On the same note of “looking ahead to next cycle,” this is the time of year when admissions officers finalize their applications and submit them for processing to LSAC. Last year, we compared this process to building devices in Tears of the Kingdom. It was a metaphor that—no doubt! No sarcasm!—will likely stand the test of time.
But we want to return to a comment we made last year that is worthy of further reflection:
[T]he 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.
Ah, yes, the optimism of July 2023! Those were the days!
Due to the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision that they issued in late June 2023, last year saw the greatest change to higher ed applications in quite some time. It wasn’t simply a matter of schools deciding how to collect race/ethnicity information about their incoming students (per ABA and Department of Education requirements) without their traditional question. That actually became rather straightforward—LSAC provided the opportunity to ask for that information on the application, suppress it during app review (file readers would literally see “Race: Answer Suppressed”), and then update that information after a student had been admitted. The real whammy was updating Diversity Statements so they would comply with the SFFA decision. Some schools opted for simplicity. Harvard’s Statement of Perspective was a perfect example:
The Admissions Committee makes every effort to understand who you are as an individual and potential Harvard Law School student and graduate. Please share how your experiences, background, and/or interests have shaped you and will shape your engagement in the HLS community and the legal profession.
Succinct, direct, and an applicant could use this statement as the foundation for almost every school’s diversity statement. In the opinion of this humble blogger, this is simply the Cadillac of Diversity Statement Prompts.
Meanwhile, though, other schools added rather new prompts that asked the student to reflect on the school’s mission, or on how they would communicate across ideological divides. While by no means unique, Duke Law’s new and required short answer section is a good example of this approach. The creation of these new prompts was one of the main reasons that app submission on a national level was much slower than in the 2022–2023 admissions cycle. And if you don’t believe it, let’s check out how the national app pool was shaping up on October 15th (per LSAC’s Current Volume Summary report)
versus Thanksgiving on November 23rd
versus January 1
and as of the writing of this blog on June 25
The national app pool was like a semitruck that needed a little more time to rev up and hit top speed.
While we don’t expect more massive changes to applications for this coming cycle, it is very likely that the changes will be more substantive than we would usually see pre-SFFA. Quite simply, law school AdComms likely learned a great deal from their new questions and prompts this past year. They probably noticed that some questions worked and some questions probably require a bit more tweaking and/or need to be removed and never spoken of again.
So what can students do with this knowledge and with us learning from our chagrin at underplaying the possible changes to last year’s apps? It’s to hold off beginning work on school-specific pieces for a little while longer. Focus your energy in the coming weeks on the kinds of “master” documents that can be used across most of your applications. These would be documents like your personal statement, résumé, and any addenda or character and fitness explanations (if relevant!) that you need to provide. If someone was hesitant to start a diversity statement until they saw this year’s prompts, we’d understand … although we still think that Harvard’s Statement of Perspective is a good general approach that most schools will likely continue to use. But arguments about that aside, if you can take care of these master docs in the next few weeks, that will free up your bandwidth to tackle the school-specific documents and questions head-on once schools start publishing their instructions in late July/early August. Given how LSAT registrations are looking, it’s not a bad idea to be a little ahead of the curve!
7Sage Events
And if this discussion has truly spurred you to get moving, then do we have a few events for you!
Over the next week, a few of our admissions consultants will reprise our “What Does Your Score Mean?” live classes. These are geared towards students who may have just gotten back their June LSAT and are now thinking about working on their app materials. You can see a schedule here.
We’ll have our next Deans’ Roundtable on Thursday the 27th at 8 PM Eastern. The topics at hand will be transfer apps and the upcoming changes to the LSAT. Registration is required and can be done here.