How do people write out explanations for questions and do you use this method for RC, LR and LG?

Hey everyone, so this is my second time applying to law school. I've been looking up whatever or not I have to change my application from last year to reapply. I don't have much to update besides a summer job that I had. I've seen an article that said they can't be exactly the same, and I've seen some that said it's not necessary to change anything. I think I might change my PS slightly and update my resume. Is it necessary that I do anything else?

Hey all,

I have a question regarding references on which I'd be interested to hear some thoughts. I'm a Canadian applicant, and I've already submitted my applications for Ontario law schools, which allow three referees. However, I am just finishing up applications for UBC, UVic, and Dalhousie. UVic does not accept LORs (which, in my opinion, lowers their program on my list...but, anyway). UBC and Dalhousie, on the other hand, ask for only 2 letters. Thus, I'm in a position where I have to decide which two referees to ask to submit letters to these schools. Here are a few relevant specs for each referee.

Referee #1: An Associate Professor in psychology who I completed roughly 8 courses with over the duration of my program. I haven't seen the letter he wrote, but I often received back positive comments on my performance and a few times he asked if he could provide my papers as a model for future students in particular courses that he taught. However, I never worked as a TA or research assistant for this individual.

Referee #2: Instructor in sociology. Due to a health condition, he is not able to fulfill the requirements to be a full professor at this time, keeping him at the rank of instructor. However, he does have his doctorate from a prestigious American university. I worked as a TA for him for 4 years, returning each year at his own request. I also worked as a research assistant for him during a summer. I expect the letter would be quite good.

Referee#3: The Vice-President Academic of the university where I graduated. Unfortunately, I never completed any courses with him. Our relationship revolves around his supervising an academic writing fellowship that I was offered, and am now completing, at the the university. His comments to me have been favorable, and he described his letter as "glowing." However, I know that the amount of personal experience with me that he has to drawn on is more limited than the other two. At the same time, his title is impressive.

In many respects, the question this comes down to is...Do admissions committees tend to regard more highly the title/position of the referee or the amount of experience shared with the applicant? Thoughts?

Do's and Don'ts please????

Hey everyone, happy thanksgiving! Last year one of my LSAT scores came out about a week before the predicated date. Does anyone think that may happen for the November exam. I want to have all my apps ready by the time the scores come out. Thanks

Hey all. I just finished the core curriculum and have jumped back into timed PT's. The analytics on this site are great and I have identified one major LR weakness and two minor ones. I plan on setting aside at least one day in the near future to make my first attack.

How often do you, fellow 7Sagers, break from PT's post-core curriculum to fine tune your understanding of your weaknesses in the core curriculum? After every three tests or after every five? What is your drilling strategy after that? 20 3 of 5 difficulties, followed by 20 4 of 5's, followed by 20 5 of 5's of that type, for example?

#Help The LR section has really left me baffled. My average score per LR section was -2 while I was PTing through PT50s and PT60s. But in the series of 70s, it has drastically dropped to -5. I do notice some differences when I do more recent PTs but I can't figure out what. I've approximately a month and a half. How do you guys think I can get back on track?

Any advice or tips would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Hello. I'm a spoken word poet and I was thinking of submitting a poem as my Statement of Purpose. I've converted my SoP into a spoken word piece and I've even formatted it so it fits in two pages, the word count being around 650. Does it sound like a good idea to send it in or am I taking too much of a risk?

So, I was doing Game 4 of PT 61 in which

Q.19 asks J's position cannot be which one of these?

Answer choices:

A.2

B.3

C.5

Q.20 asks If J is in 3, which of these could be true?

Using Q.20 can we safely assume that J can in fact fit in 3 and then use that to eliminate answer choice B?

is "except" also "negate sufficient," just like "unless"?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I've been working on this post for a while and it's finally ready: six of the best essays we've ever worked on. All of the writers took different approaches to telling their stories, and all of them got into T14 schools. Note that we've published two of them before. Four are brand new.

If you're looking for inspiration as you write your own law school personal statement, take a look!

https://7sage.com/blog/law-school-ps-examples

Is there still office hours tonight?

Let's assume total COA will be the same (edit: negligibly different). I know the numbers from LST, but I was hoping I could gain some more anecdotal input or data from other resources.

My goal is big law, particularly NYC, but I'm also extremely open to working in LA or SF. I basically want to practice in any major city, except for those in Texas.

I think I will be fine on either campus, so which school would better help me reach my goal?

Id appreciate any input :)

Hi all,

I've been out of college for a few years now, so I asked my manager to write me a letter of recommendation and she readily agreed. She would like to see some examples of good letters of recommendation, since she's never written one for law school apps. Anyone have any helpful links and/or words of wisdom? I've found plenty of examples for letters from professors, but not a lot of robust guidance for employers.

Thanks!

I'd appreciate another set of eyes to cut mine down. Let me know if you're interested!

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EDIT: And... we're back! 14 minutes downtime on the discussions. Thanks for your patience while we did that!

With a week left in my subscription, I wanted to say thank you to this awesome and supportive community, as well as a huge thank you to JY for creating and continually innovating this 7Sage program.

I know my stats aren't amazing, but after 2 years studying on and off for this exam and working full-time, I was able to go from a 139 diagnostic,144, 147, 152 and hopefully 154+ (Nov) on the real LSAT's, so I'll take that dub.

7Sage definitely has my recommendation, and the people on here are amazing. For what it's worth, i'll finish this post by saying what i'd change if I can do it all over again.

Dedicate studying for this exam full-time for 5 months

Burnout is real, but I also felt great momentum was the biggest factor in my score increasing. I have been studying inconsistently, but the time I took a 4 month hiatus from Jan through April then began to study for the Sept 18 LSAT has so far been my highest score. Point is 2 years studying for this exam was too damn long.

Sit for the September LSAT

That was my highest score, and as a teacher who gets the summer off, I thought getting those two months completely off was a huge difference and its also pretty early in the cycle. I would think this is also the case for students. Sure, things start ramping up in August and September, but its not so bad, right? (syllabus stuff? lol)

NOT BECOME SO FREAKIN OBSESSED, WORRY ABOUT STUDYING ONLY!

The current market for attorneys, medians, obsessing about stats, on and on. Sure,its reality and it is important. I'm not denying that. But it won't matter until you get the sore you want, and you have to bump all that noise until you're done busting your ass for this test.

I wish all the best for everyone on here. Your hard work will pay off. Happy Thanksgiving!

Cheers,

Carlos

LSAC notified me that one of my recommenders has submitted his LOR few days ago. Should I write that professor a thank you note right now or wait until I know the admission results? I kinda want to thank him now but don’t want to seem too kiss-assy either .. any advice?

So with the LSAT going digital soon, we are entering into a whole new era in a major way. Though I am personally glad to have done my LSAT on paper, this change is long overdue and will ultimately be beneficial for everyone. Inevitably though, it will impact the way we study, and as an LSAT tutor, this is something I've been thinking a lot about. Here's a few things I've come up with, and I'm really interested to know what everyone else thinks!

Opportunities:

Extra time: You won't actually have time added on to your section, but just as good. Added all up, bubbling takes about two minutes for most of us. Not having to bubble, we can bank those couple of minutes to put towards an extra question or two. Major win. Also, no anxiety over bubbling errors! (Also, no actual bubbling errors!)

PT Reports: So this one will take some time and programming, but it's the thing I'm most excited about. Taking your PT's on a screen offers an enormous return in data. I'm imaging a PTing program which accounts not just for your answer choices but for your time management. This will paint a much better picture of your test than just right/wrong answers. If you spend four minutes on a question, it doesn't matter if you get it right or wrong: It's an error. Computer PTing can generate reports with this kind of consideration, and once it's available it's going to be an enormously powerful tool for empirical analysis.

Instant Scoring: No more agonizing wait for scores. Future LSAT testers will correctly look at this as inhumane. The concept of "grey day" will melt into obscurity, an odd terminology no one will understand the meaning of when pulling up old threads. Also, you'll know right away if you need to get back to studying for a retake.

No more "Test Dates": I think this won't be happening until later, but eventually the LSAT will be administered more like the GRE where you just sign up to test pretty much whenever you want. This will make discussions of "aim for your score not your test date" somewhat different, though people will still set personal deadlines that won't be realistic for target scores. Hopefully the added flexibility will be beneficial for this. Also, I think certain test day anxieties will be alleviated. "Test Day" just won't be quite as big an event.

Gamification Potential: This will take some development, but I can't help but think a digital LSAT will be highly gamifiable. I'm imaging PT/drilling software with different options for developing specific skills. Working on time management? Maybe there's a feature for that where the screen changes from white to green to yellow to red as you spend more and more time on a question. Working on more effective POE strategies? Maybe a PT plug-in can show your odds improving from 20% to 25% to 33% to 50% as you eliminate AC's; then as a part of the report we can track your outcomes over time just for 50/50 situations. I could sit here and come up with these all day, but y'all get the idea and Alan would probably prefer I stop!

Speaking of gamification, how about Sage PTs via Twitch?: This could be a cool feature. Watch a Sage take the latest PT live! This could be really cool if anyone has the courage to do it!

Obstacles:

Instant Scoring: This one is maybe a double edged sword. While the instant score return will save a lot of agonizing, it will also rush the decision to cancel or not. This will make for a higher pressure decision without the benefit of reflection and advising.

Transitioning: This will be a short lived con for those of us that came up on paper, but we'll have to reimagine certain procedural things about how we take the test, and this will take time and energy that we'd prefer to invest elsewhere.

New testing issues: Software crashes, screen malfunctions: Hopefully tech issues won't affect many of us, but certain problems feel inevitable, and I'm not sure what kind of solutions are going to be available.

No paper: Okay, this one is a bit observational, but I think it's important. I like being able to feel the test and to mark it and interact with it directly. I think you get scratch paper which is good, but there's something about working via screen that feels detached to me, and I know this will be a factor for many others as well.

No pencils: Again, not all that insightful, but a sad passing for many old school testers. While the pencil isn't really that important, I had enormous fun trying out tons of pencils to find the perfect one (Staedtler Noricas, obviously). The pencil thread will sink into oblivion and only maybe resurface with a chuckle as a relic of the past when things were quaint and simple.

Well, these are a few of the things I've been thinking about. What do you guys think? What have I missed? Overall, I think the opportunities far outweigh the obstacles.

Hey guys, so I have a dumb question. I just started my CAS stuff on LSAC.org. But where do I write and submit my PS, resume, etc?

Do they have to be individually submitted to individual schools, or through CAS?

Were you disappointed when you saw your score? Do students tend to over-predict or under-predict there scores walking out of the test?

To be fair most people on this forum who have written multiple times probably did so because they did poorly the first time so we might have a bit of a confirmation bias here. But is there any consensus that students generally overestimate / underestimate there score on average?

I have a sentence in my diversity statement that reads "The X that I faced gave me thicker skin and a resilience to bend to others’ expectations and adversity." A few people read my DS and didn't notice it. I didn't even notice it until I had already sent it out to a bunch of schools this week and the last. I meant to say that I gained a resilience to bendING not to bend, which means the complete opposite of what I intended. The way it's phrased now sounds like I DO bend to other peoples' expectations.

Please help! What should I do? Is it understandable enough to leave it as is or should I email or call the schools and ask to send in an amended draft?

Hi all-

I'm in the middle of full-proofing, and sometimes I come across a game that's categorized as "MISC" and they always give me a really hard time. How have you all approached these type of games? Do they get easier as I finish full-proofing? (I'm only on section 5 of 35)

Thanks.

There has been some discussion lately about the difficulty of PT 83,84 and 85. I want address an aspect of these discussions I have yet to see fully articulated as of late. I am by no means the first person to come to this conclusion, but I hope you find my take both helpful and reassuring. This process is what has worked and continues to work for me personally, I mean this advice as respectfully as I can.

Several people have written about the difficulty/subtly of these newer exams. Yet, almost by definition, the exams should not truly be that different from the previous exam which shouldn’t be that different from the previous exam before that and so on, because if they were markedly different, the LSAT would no longer be standardized in a way that any meaningful data could be gleaned from someone taking the exam. The exams would become “non-standardized” at that point. Imagine the shock for instance, if you sat down for an LSAT PT marked “PT 95” after all the hours of drilling valid argument types and the common flaws only to find the entire exam was a manual on how to disassemble and troubleshoot the transmission of a 2006 Honda Civic. Then the entire process of taking this standardized exam would be defeated.

Obviously, no one is claiming that the exams are now that different from previous exams, but nonetheless: this raises a question, if the newer exams are different, what are the primary differences? The answer to this question is usually something like: the reasoning patterns on LR are more subtle or “the answer choices are wrong because of the inclusion of a single word,” or “the flaws aren’t really as cookie-cutter as they were on older exams.” Obviously, there are more tangible differences between the PTs in the 80s and the PTS in the 40s: the inclusion of rule substitution questions on LG and the comparative passages on RC for instance, but these differences are by no means “new.” In fact, some of them have been around nearly a decade.

So, the general consensus seems to be that the newest exams are more “subtle” than exams 10-15 years ago. Which brings me to my central point, I am in no way claiming that the exams have remained completely unchanged, but I do claim that the changes have been subtle enough that if we have been doing pretests in order, we shouldn’t have noticed a big change from PT to PT and we should have in our approach inbuilt fixes to whatever has arisen.

So what should we do to minimize the struggle the newer material poses? After you’ve gotten through the CC and you are comfortable with the material: do the pretests with thorough blind review in order. Either from PT 37-present day with thorough review of each PT, or if you are like me and you need a few more PTs to drill from to get comfortable with the material then from 49-present day with thorough review. This helps us get a great foundation, hone our test day skills (pacing etc) and also mitigate any newer elements of subtly or surprise that might come our way.

So, ideally, the process would go something like this:

-You leave the CC having what you believe is a decent understanding of the material

-First PT 37: score 151

-Revisit the CC while thoroughly doing BR, because you thought you knew how to do necessary assumption questions but on the PT you missed 3.

-You watch the videos, you interact with the community, you walk away from that exam knowing how to explain every question, maybe not as fully as you one day will be able to, but nonetheless, you can explain it in a way where your strategies are being used.

-You take PT 38 rinse and repeat, maybe get in on a study group to answer questions and ask questions. You do this through all the PTs. This takes time, but can lend itself to the student getting used to the subtle difference between exams.

What I argue emerges here is a process in which by the time we go through the 60s, past the 70s and into the 80s in order, the “subtly” of the newer exams should be something we are acclimated to. If we have done this process correctly.

In summation, I have met a ton of elite high scorers in my journey. From them telling me their stories I have come to view the process these used in two rough categories: those that got a super high score by doing a process similar to this, if not more in-depth and those who come into the LSAT with amazing LSAT skills already in place who could start with PT 70 and do this process, but greatly abridged (either due to some combination of previous training in logic or other skills.) Basically, every high scorer I have met has done some iteration of this process, the only question is how much did they do.

On test day there are going to be people who get elite scores, how do they do it if the exams have this new subtly to them? They simply have become acclimated to the features of the exam that might be new or slightly different and assimilated this newer subtly into their already built approach of general skills honed through taking PTs and thorough BR. A wise person once told me that we have enough PTs available to us that the LSAT has in a very real way already “showed us their hand.” So the process can be done: go out there and do every post CC PT if you have to in order with super thorough review building skills you can carry forward to the next PT, you’ve got this.

TL;DR: if the newer tests have a unique subtly to them, we can mitigate this difficulty by doing pretests in order. That way we build our core skills along the way and also try to become acclimated to the subtly the newer material poses.

David