You may not remember, but not too long ago, the egg was considered the miracle food. Then it became known as a cholesterol bomb. And now it’s gaining acceptance in our South-Beach-diet-accepting world. The same thing happens in education. Just a few days ago, the New York Time published an article about a study that concludes that testing helps us remember what we’ve read. This seems to debunk the idea that “concept-mapping” leads to long-term retention. You don’t remember concept-mapping? Apparently it’s because you used concept-mapping to learn concept-mapping. It’s basically the strategy of drawing a map of a passage, or taking lots of notes. The scientific study also debunked straight-up studying, as in reviewing multiple times. You may not have been dabbling in the dark arts of concept-mapping, but studying what about you’ve read? That’s something we all know/have done/felt we were supposed to be doing during college, and something you might be trying to do to do well on the LSAT. Hmmm.

The basic gist of the study is that they had college kids read a passage. One group simply read it. A second group reviewed the passage a few times (i.e. “studied it”). A third made a concept map while reading. And a fourth took a short test right after reading it. Then, a week later, everyone was tested on what they had read. The final group did 50% better in terms of retaining information than the studyers or the concept-mappers. This might mean that poor high school students will find that after reading a story or essay in class, instead of having a deep conversation (in which they try to impress some girl, boy or teacher), they’ll find themselves immediately taking a test.

Don’t jump to conclusions yet, all of that is predicated on the idea that the goal is long-term retention. That brings us to what this study might mean for the LSAT. Read more

Don't burn those LSAT prep books just yet

If your LSAT spidey senses  were particularly aflutter over the last 48 hours, it’s probably because a very interesting article was published by the National Law Journal Wednesday, creating a lot of buzz around the law school blog-o-sphere.

The article outlines the potential plans for the ABA to no longer require the LSAT to be taken in order to be admitted into Law School. I know, right – after all those cups of coffee, weeks without seeing family, friends, sunlight or SportsCenter!! Alas, take comfort: prospective law school students after you will be forced to suffer the same cruel and unusual punishment that is the LSAT.

This change in policy may be adopted, however it certainly does not signify the end of the dreaded exam. Read more

Diddy said it was all about the Benjamins...

It turns out that going to law school does not guarantee you’ll get rich. Are you surprised? Are you putting down your pencil and throwing out your LSAT prep book? The New York Times published an article stating what anyone who has done their research knows: people come out of law school with lots and lots of debt, and the job market is far worse than what it was during better economic times. What was most disturbing was the reminder that law schools fib on their stats about how well their grads do. It’s all about the rankings – and we repeat our “yuck!”

We have an interesting window into the legal job world because of our audition process: We generally see the resumes of some former lawyers in our inbox, but a year ago we started seeing a small surge of resumes from recent law school grads. Sometimes that’s great – they finished law school and realized law is not for them, or want to practice government law or something that allows them to teach at night. Those are the candidates we love to see, people with a passion and perhaps a bit of outside-the-box thinking. But, we also saw folks who had been banking on their summer associate job, previously the doorway to a post-grad job, leading to just a line on a resume. These were not the candidates we wanted to see.

But, at least in NYC, the legal economic tide is turning. Read more

We want YOU to wait!

It’s been days and days – where the f@#$%@#$ is your score? Yeah, the folks at LSAC gave themselves until the 10th, but the LSAC operates like many airlines, giving us unreasonably late arrival times so that they have a spotless record of ontimeliness. We want to eat! We want to eat!

While you’re waiting, sign up for our Review the Dec. 2010 LSAT workshop (Tuesday, Jan 11th, 8pm EST, be there or be square sort of thing). We haven’t seen the test yet – we’re friends with the LSAC, but we’re not that close. We’re planning on focusing on the games, probably with an eye towards how to speed up. The scuttlebutt is that there was nothing new under the sun, but people got bogged down.

So what could LSAC be doing right now? Some possibilities:

1. Researching each and every one of your lives to figure out what score you deserve. (i.e. finding out if you’ve been naughty or nice)

2. Hand erasing your stray pencil marks as a gesture of good will.

3. Editing/laughing at/doodling on your essay.

4. Calculating the relationship between the raw scores, scaled scores and percentiles.

Don’t sweat it, the scores will be here shortly – good luck!