Admissions

24 Oct 2018

Spooky Halloween Blog: Real Stories of Things That Creep Out Admissions Offices

For Halloween this year, we'd like to share some peculiar stories from some of the Spivey consultants' days as admissions officers at top schools such as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Penn, Michigan, Duke, and many more. If you want to avoid spooking the person making a decision on your file (and making a lasting bad impression), avoid these creepy tactics! Nikki Laubenstein, former Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management at Syracuse University College of Law, had a coworker who was once

Read full post
21 Oct 2018

Sample Law School Application Video

For some of these you only have 1 or two minutes. There is no need to talk about resume items, this is your chance to be yourself. There's only one you applying to law school!

Read full post
28 Sep 2018

Law School Forum Dos and Don'ts

DO: * Wear appropriate clothing. You certainly don’t have to wear a suit but don’t show up in your pajamas or club wear either. Business casual is the best option. * Speak and act in an adult, professional manner. * Use the opportunity to ask specific questions that can’t be answered by brochures or websites. Some examples:  What factors can improve an applicant’s admissions chances beyond numbers? What percentage of your students secure [employment/clerkships/public interest

Read full post
26 Sep 2018

It's early. You're early. This whole damn place is early.*

For most of you applying to law school, this time of year is a busy one. It's also when nerves start feeling frayed. Someone online was admitted to UVA. Then another to Duke. It seems like all others have left the gate and you're still stuck on rethinking almost every single word of your personal statement. Whether you're already sending in applications, waiting for your LSAT score, or in the midst of full-time test prep, one thing is certain: you have a lot of waiting ahead of you. In the past

Read full post
29 Aug 2018

What you can learn from Emory Law School's C&F instructions

A big hat tip to Emory Law School for the epically clear C&F instructions. They give reasons behind why they are asking, samples, and explicit instructions on what to do if someone told them not to disclose. Couldn’t have said this better — thanks Emory, and I hope this helps everyone demystify some of the ambiguity around C&F issues. Please do note that C&F instructions is one of the areas where school instructions vary the most, read each carefully. GUIDANCE ON BAR CHARACTER AND FITNESS REQUI

Read full post
09 Aug 2018

Class of 2021 Entry Statistics and Changes

As law schools start to round out their final classes to begin this fall, we wanted to keep track of incoming classes’ GPA/LSAT stats and look at how they changed from last year. In past years, law school discussion forums have crowdsourced this data, but since we haven’t seen a similar effort take place yet this year, we put together a spreadsheet that can be added to and kept up-to-date, we hope, from members of numerous different online law admissions discussion communities. We’re posting it

Read full post
26 Jul 2018

The top 10 most overly, wrongly, and (at times) annoyingly used words in law school applications

With more than 100 years of law school admissions experience between us, we have read over a hundred thousand law school essays and applications. That is an incredibly rewarding experience, but there can be times when you start to see the same words used, or used out of context, again and again. The following list of words includes some of the most overused and/or at times aggravating usage of words we see in applications. Keep in mind that not all of these words annoy every admissions officer —

Read full post
13 Jul 2018

GRE vs. LSAT: Answers from the Deans

The introduction of the GRE to the law school admissions process has created a great deal of questions, confusion, and theories about how it’s being used. Almost everyday we get these questions, and as with the free-for-all of advice on the internet, the reality of how it impacts the admissions process can be confounding. Because of this confusion and lack of reliable advice, we wanted to help you sort out how to think about the GRE — so we took some of the most commonly asked questions to our f

Read full post
11 Jul 2018

Top 50 Law School Application Opening Dates for the 2018-2019 Cycle

*Please note, schools can change these dates, and it is possible that when we called to ask them that they gave us the dates applications become available to fill out on the LSAC website rather than when applications are accepted (although we were very careful to clearly articulate what we were asking about) — but this should be highly accurate to the extent we can control it. Also please note that several schools told us that they had not yet decided on an exact date that they will be acceptin

Read full post
28 Jun 2018

How many law schools should you apply to?

First published October 2017; updated October 2018 With LSAT scores having recently come out, your school list may grow – for those who did better than anticipated, you may consider schools that are now a possibility; for those who didn’t get quite where you had set a goal, well, perhaps you will add a couple other safeties in your group. Either way, your list could get longer, prompting the question, how many law schools should you apply to? I’ll confess that my own strategy when applying to

Read full post