With Thanksgiving on the horizon, law school admissions officers are trying to accomplish just one thing over the next week—reading enough applications ahead of time so that they can eat their turkey without a side helping of personal statements (especially since gravy and laptops tend to not mix well). Meanwhile, everyone knows a potential torrent of applications will come after the holiday given the imminent arrival of November LSAT scores. So with that harried spirit of the season in mind, let’s take a quick lap around the world of law school admissions.
LSAT Numbers
Given the above note regarding the arrival of November LSAT scores on November 27, let’s take a brief break from talking about those numbers to talk about the January LSAT instead. Per LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report, registrations for that test are increasing, but not drastically:
While acknowledging the usual caveats:
- The registration deadline for the January LSAT is two weeks away (on December 3), and
- The biggest surge of registrations always happens right after the latest LSAT scores are released and folks turn their eyes ahead to the next test.
It’s beginning to look like the January 2025 LSAT may be the first test since August 2023 that didn’t see an increase in registrations from the previous year. We’re making this assumption based on where registration numbers are today and how much they tend to surge in the days before a registration deadline, but also—importantly—how many folks tend to cancel their registration in the weeks leading up to the LSAT.
What would a decline in registrations mean for 2024–2025 applicants? Not a great deal, unfortunately. If you take a look at last year’s January LSAT, you’ll note that the percentage of “first-time test takers” was just 36.4%—the lowest of any administration. This means that the January LSAT is really the Hail Mary play of the law school admissions world. Sometimes it works
And other times … not so much
The greater factors affecting the 2024–2025 applicant pool (and strategy) are developing over in another LSAC report….
National Application Totals
The Current Volume Summaries report!
The totals are holding rather steady from last week when applicants were up 24.5% and applications up 37.9%. We’re expecting the next possible wave of action to happen after the November LSAT scores drop on the 27th—conveniently timed with the beginning of the holiday weekend. If we don’t see a big surge in apps in the December 4th edition of this blog, then we can expect the larger applicant pool to slowly lose steam and fall back closer to last year’s totals (a year that started slow but caught up once applicants adjusted to all the new application prompts that schools introduced to their apps after the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision).
But while speculating about what the applicant pool will do is all fun and games, we want to point these trends out only if it may eventually inform what you—our reader!—may want to do strategically regarding your application cycle. For example, we can look at:
- The amount of people who took the November LSAT, and
- The timing of the LSAT score release with a major holiday,
and feel comfortable advising, “If you can, try to submit your apps before the hurricane makes landfall!”
We’d like to offer another strategic suggestion based on an additional data point that we’re seeing from the same report. Per LSAC, this increase in applications is not evenly distributed across all score ranges:
It’s mostly skewed in the 165+ range. So what does this mean for you—our reader!—and your possible strategy? We would offer that it may be prudent to add another target school (or two) or safety school (or two) to your list. AdComms are currently being inundated with applications from folks whose LSATs are at/above the medians for 25% of all law schools. If admissions officers don’t increase their class sizes, that means that there are more students with at least one metric that helps the admissions office that are competing for the same number of seats in the class. By broadening out your app list, you limit your possible liability of being completely shut out in this year’s admissions process.
And for those of you who just read that and thought, “That makes a lot of sense … but where else should I apply?” we’ll shamelessly plug our podcast episode from back in September that went over this very topic!
Decision Trends
And on the note of file reading, we’re also seeing more schools issuing admissions decisions per lawschooldata’s “Recent Decisions” page. While returns are still a smidge early, as we can see on Cornell’s admit chart
some schools are starting to give us enough information to see some trends emerging.
For instance, let’s take a look at Washington University’s admit chart:
We can see a clear indication of Wash U’s target medians—a high-3.9 GPA and a 174 LSAT (which would be an increase over this past year’s median LSAT). We haven’t seen anyone yet admitted who didn’t hit at least one of those two target numbers.
Meanwhile, the University of Georgia is taking a slightly different approach with whom it has admitted thus far:
While Wash U is admitting a number of “GPA splitters” (students with high GPAs and low LSATs), Georgia has yet to admit any lawschooldata users with a low LSAT. Thus far, everyone has had at least a 169 LSAT or higher. Given that a 169 was UGA Law’s median last year, they seem to be targeting that number again this year.
And if we check out UVA Law, we see a school that’s pursuing a little more of a balanced strategy:
There’s a right angle, but it’s not quite as distinct as what we saw with Wash U—it’s difficult to tell if it starts at a 174 or 173 LSAT (with a 173 being last year’s median). We can see the development of a GPA target line around last year’s median of 3.96, but there are a few hardy souls who have been admitted with lower LSATs and “low” GPAs (in a normal world, a 3.88 would not be a “low” GPA, but that’s how law school medians have been trending over the past few years).
While it’s still early in the admissions cycle, tracking this information can be a useful way to determine if you need to adjust your targets at all. In the case of Wash U, it seems like they’ve adjusted their LSAT target (at least for now!) up to a 174. So if you were planning to apply there with a 173 (“Hey, I’m at their median!”), it may be prudent to consider adding another school to your roster to cover the same markets that Wash U represents in your application list.
7Sage Events
We’re continuing our series of weekly live classes on different components of the application process. We turn to Character and Fitness questions/statements. After taking a break for Thanksgiving, we’ll then be back the week of December 2nd to do another two rounds of “What Does My Score Mean” classes and a session on “Why School X” statements. Registration is free but required. You can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.
Our next episode of the admissions podcast will drop on Monday and discusses one of the great mysteries of the law school admissions process—what happens to your application between the time you click “Submit” and the time your status checker says, “Decision Made”? Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!