Admissions

Your Gap Year and the LSAT: What you need to know

This post was written by Tom Robinson [https://www.spiveyconsulting.com/about/], Spivey Consulting Group's newest [https://blog.spiveyconsulting.com/one-blog-to-rule-them-all/] Senior Consultant. Hi Everyone, I’m excited to be on the Spivey team and enjoyed working with clients in my first week with Spivey Consulting after spending my last three at Harvard Law and past seven at Harvard. It’s great to be on this side of the equation where I can assist in deciphering the application process and

How many LSAT "takes" is too many for law school?

This is a question we’ve been getting a great deal since the June LSAT and something we also bounced around the entire Spivey Consulting team in a large and lengthy group discussion. Here is how we look at it, with a brief bit of salient history. Apologies in advance for the length of this post; I’ve tried to incorporate different parts of the many inquiries we have received into this one blog. When I, and a few of my colleagues at Spivey Consulting, first started admissions in the late '90s, t

Mike Spivey's first year in admissions recruitment travel schedule

Update from the road

Some brief things I've heard from week 1 of travel that might be of interest to applicants. 1. Another WL wave is likely coming soon. That said, the general consensus is that this will be a slow summer as far as WL movement. Most schools feel "content" (precise word I keep hearing) with where they are right now. 2. The ABA ditching 503 might not be as much of a slam dunk as I (and my collegue Dave Killoran at PowerScore) have thought (see our blog on the topic [h

What lies before us...

Here is a statement that I suspect most people have not considered, or that even may seem contrary to what we are conditioned to believe: The vast majority of law school applicants don't get admitted to their dream school. It even sounds odd for me to say out loud, because I have the wonderful privilege of talking to, working with, and meeting a number of people every year who indeed get to go to their first choice. But from a 30,000 foot level, almost all applicants are below at least one med

Predicting the 2018/2019 Law School Admissions Cycle

1 — The "bump" this year looks more like an outlier than a trend, especially at the top. For starters, it has followed seven years of down cycles — so the macro trend is still down. How down? The 56,900 CAS registrations this year are almost 30,000 fewer than the high water mark in 2009-2010, and CAS was only first introduced by LSAC in 2009-2010. Additionally, when the cycle started, applications were up 17.1% and applicants were up 14.2%, and now they are down to 8.5% in applicants and 9.2%

How to Write a Letter of Continued Interest

Happy March! This time of year in law school admissions means admitted student events, the release of law school rankings, and the inevitable waitlist questions—the most common of those waitlist questions being “what should I write in my LOCI?” LOCI stands for Letter of Continuing Interest, a communication that you typically send after being waitlisted to let a school know that you are still interested. This is a necessary step in trying to get admitted off any waitlist. What is an LOCI? An LO

Law Schools Ranked by Acceptance Rate

1 Yale University (CT) — 8% 2 Stanford University (CA) — 10% 3 Harvard University (MA) — 16% 4 University of Pennsylvania — 18% 5 University of Virginia — 18% 6 Columbia University (NY) — 20% 7 University of Chicago (IL) — 21% 8 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor — 22% 9 Cornell University (NY) — 22% 10 University of California--Berkeley — 23% 11 Duke University (NC) — 23% 12 Northwestern University (Pritzker) (IL) — 24% 13 University of Southern California (Gould) — 24% 14 University of Texas--A

The Single Biggest Administrative Mistake Law Schools Are Making

Much has been said about the training of law students. Indeed, while it may seem like a recent discussion, this discussion on how best to prepare law students for their legal careers appears in the very first of law review articles. Should they be deeply immersed in theoretical underpinning of the law (a conscious decision made by the early law schools), enrolled in experiential apprenticeship type training (buzz words we often see today), or a combination of the two? If a combination, how shoul

There are no "shoulds"

By Anne Dutia, Senior Consultant at The Spivey Consulting Group When I was a prelaw advisor, and before that an admissions officer at Michigan Law School, I encountered so many students asking me what they should do to get into law school. Of course, there are certain procedures and processes applicants have to follow to be admitted to law school, but these students were looking for the right way to be a pre-law student or applicant. A lot of them were still stuck in the college application men