Tools of the Trade

At Manhattan LSAT we are constantly swelling with pride over the achievements of our instructors. If you’ve ever spoken with us about them, you’ve probably  noticed that we fancy them quite a bit! We’re lucky to have so many incredibly intelligent, talented, and downright fascinating individuals on our team.

A recent example of our collective Manhattan LSAT-instructor-coolness takes us deep in to the world of metaphor and rhyme. John Beer, a Manhattan LSAT teacher in Chicago, has recently been given the Norma Farber First Book Award for his book, The Waste Land And Other Poems, The Norma Farber Award is given annually to one exceptional poet who has published their first book of original American poetry.  John will be traveling to New York City in April to accept the award.

I’ve been treating myself to a healthy sized sample of these poems for the last week or so and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

There is even an entire section toward the end of the book called “Sonnets to Morpheus”.  Yep, that’s a Matrix reference!

We’re so incredibly proud of John. I would encourage any of you who are interested in poetry to check out his book, available on Amazon.

Harvard’s Stephen Burt has written a review of The Waste Land And Other Poems for bostonreview.net (scroll down a little ways until you see John’s name in the subheading)

Our last self-study group continue to do logic games together, years later.

Man is a social animal. And women are too, but more polite usually. And thus it makes sense that you might be hankering for a group to study with. Let’s face it: the LSAT might not make you feel so good about yourself, especially if it’s forcing you into a dark cave of untamed intellectual training. Have no fear. We’re psyched to put you in touch with some other LSAT geeks and let you get your prep on together.

We’re starting up a group in a weekend or two. You’ll all meet in an online classroom on Sundays (or more often if you like), work on assigned problems together, and one of our teachers will come and help out the group every few sessions.

This might be the motivation you’re looking for. (Or, perhaps this is how you’ll find your soul mate. And, if you do end up hooking up with someone in a serious way, bravo – you took LSAT prep to a whole new level – and you need to invite us to the wedding if you can get over your fear of commitment.) One of the benefits of this arrangement is that you end up having to explain ideas to other students (that’s a part of our classes as well).The other is that you are more likely to do the work if there’s a group that’s going to cheer you – or give you an awkward silence when you haven’t done squat.

We’ll assign you some HW, we’ll toss your group some surprise problems to work on, and we’ll mail out stickers (no, we won’t – grow up).

If you want to join up – shoot an e-mail to studentservices(@)manhattanprep.com/lsat/ and we’ll plug you in.

It’s going to be fun – and serious. And free to anyone who owns a shred of one of our books, self-study courses, or is a course student. Buckle up.

The NFL labor dispute, summed up in one simple drawing

What do you want to do with your J.D.?  That’s the $250,000 question for most of you. After all, there has to be an end game to all of this LSAT prep madness. The truth is, a legal education can take you many places that you may have thought previously unattainable.  See exhibit A: NFL stardom.

Unbeknownst to most National Football League fans around the country today, the most important players to the future of the NFL are not named Brady or Manning, and are not getting paid tens of millions of dollars to chase a ball around. The future of the NFL actually lies in the hands of several attorneys, mediators, and decision makers who – not unlike yourselves – were recently sweating through many an LSAT workout routine.

The NFL is in the midst of the most crucial labor disputes in the history of American sports.  The NFL Players Union and the NFL owner’s are intensely negotiating how they are going to split the 9 billion dollars in revenue that the league rakes in per year. Read more

We all knew “that guy” (or girl) who couldn’t get enough of their own voice and opinion in the classroom. When the Professor asked a question, they would invariably raise their hand with a fervor and energy that can only be matched by a pack of twelve-year-old girls at a Justin Bieber concert.  They had the answer to every question, studied twice as much as you for every test, and were – at least in their own minds – destined for greater things than you.

Cee Lo Green

Well my law school hopeful friends, I have some good news and some bad news; first the bad: you will undoubtedly encounter these folks in large numbers as you journey through law school.  So prevalent are these Poindexter’s that  law school students have even come up with a term for them: gunners.

The good news?! You and your other, non over-zealous classmates have several years of jokes to make at their expense! See exhibit A: an incredibly talented group of George Washington University students have put together an excellent tribute to these classroom legends set to the tune of Cee Lo Green’s Grammy nominated mega hit “F*** You’.

Enjoy!

There's a lighthouse at the end of the tunnel.

Yes, it is time.

Look deep into your heart, young LSAT-geek, and commit!

Start by taking a diagnostic test and seeing how long the road ahead is. If you don’t know squat about the LSAT, read our intro guide, and perhaps attend a free workshop.

If you’re not some super standardized test geek, you’ll need some prep materials. At a minimum, buy some guides and some practice tests. (As you can imagine, we like ours – especially our new Logical Reasoning Guide – a.k.a. the Beast – but apparently there are some other good ones out there).

Along with this more formal LSAT prep, start improving your brain. Put aside your young adult fiction. Yes, set aside Twilight and Hunger Games (and if you haven’t read Hunger Games, you really should, but after the LSAT). Instead, pick up the Economist, Smithsonian, Foreign Affairs (not as sexy as it sounds, sorry), Scientific American, and a few other academic journals. It will fill your head with interesting facts and train you to keep focused as you work through tough texts. Here’s a bit more on good LSAT reading choices.

On your way back from the library, stop off at the gym and start doing that frequently. Study after study shows that exercise helps your brain grow new connections. Here’s a recent NY Times article about walking and your hippocampus.

Now, you’re healthy, you’re carrying some snobby reading material, it’s time for the more formal stuff. Start up a weekly schedule of studying – and I mean actually set a schedule. How many hours on which days. Start easy on the practice tests – I would recommend one every 2-3 weeks for now, increasing to 1+ per week in the last 6 weeks. Remember to study strategies, then implement them with practice sets, then integrate them into practice tests. And review those tests deeply!

But, once again, in answer to your question. Yes. Begin!

“For never was there a story of more woe, than that of Villanova and the LSAT scores they show”

Villanova Law School has recently made headlines after their dean, John Y. Gotanda, wrote a letter to students and alumni admitting that members of the school staff had knowingly passed along bogus data about the GPAs and LSAT scores of the students they admitted “for years prior to 2010”.

In the letter, Gotanda promised that the university would deal with these deceitful acts “swiftly and thoroughly”.  Apparently Gotanda went so far as to retain the legal counsel of Ropes & Gray to determine the “nature and scope” of the data fudging.

Lest we forget, the US News and World Report weighs LSAT and GPA scores quite heavily in their evaluations of the top schools in the country. Love them or hate them, these rankings are widely considered to be the authority in determining who is who among institutions of higher education.

So a law school has been inflating the GPA and LSAT statistics of their admitted classes in order to achieve a higher ranking from US News and World Report – hardly earth shattering news there! You can bet that Villanova is not the only law school out there that has “cooked the books” when it comes to the LSAT and GPA statistics of their students, and in my opinion, Gotanda deserves some credit for coming clean about these past transgressions (although this confession must have been made easier by the fact that Gotanda was not the dean of the school at the time of these forgeries).

What’s more important to glean from this article is the fact that – despite flashes of opinion that suggest otherwise – the LSAT remains as important today as it has ever been when it comes to differentiating oneself from the rest of the law school applicant pool. If a prestigious institution is willing to risk its good name through dishonest LSAT and GPA reporting, imagine how favorably they will look upon an applicant with the type of LSAT score they are pretending their students have.

Here are some interesting tidbits on this story from across the web:

//www.abajournal.com/news/article/new_villanova_law_dean/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=ABA+Journal+Daily+News&utm_content=Netvibes

//articles.philly.com/2011-02-09/business/27328846_1_director-of-data-research-rankings-law-placement

//www.collegenews.com/index.php?/article/villanova_law_law_school_rankings_11777/

It's Big, and it's Not Yellow

You’re going to love it. Take a look at how much we love it:

If you bought our last Logical Reasoning Guide after December 15, 2010, we’ll happily replace the book with a new one so that you can join in the Manhattan LSAT logical reasoning jamboree. If you bought it at a bookstore, send us the receipt, if you bought it through us, just e-mail us the shipping address to use.

Woo-hoo! We like big ducks.

MmmmMmm, bacon!

Since many of you will be taking the LSAT this coming weekend, I thought it was appropriate for me to channel my inner Jamie Oliver and make some dietary recommendations to all the February LSAT’ers (if you haven’t seen Jamie’s TED talk,  check out the first few minutes) out there. Truth is, we probably all should heed more nutritional advice from the likes of Jamie O – so why not let the LSAT be the incentive for change in your dietary habits? After all, chances are the exam has controlled every other aspect of your life for the past several months!

While I am by no means a medical expert or professional nutritionist, I do consider myself a highly skilled ‘Googler’, and I took some time to wrangle some helpful pre-exam tips from across the web to keep your mental steam throughout the entire LSAT exam:

Breakfast is essential. Nearly every expert that offered an opinion on what to eat before an exam started with the first meal of the day: breakfast. Some suggestions for a healthy pre exam breakfast are non-sugared cereal with fruit (try raisins, blueberries and/or or bananas), or if you prefer a hot breakfast, go with an egg sandwich with whole wheat bread or whole wheat English muffin. Read more

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