Happy first day of summer!

Happy Friday and happy first day of summer! We’ve rounded up your first batch of summer reading– full of great tips and news about law school and the legal profession:

Do You Have to Be an Annoying Suck-Up to Succeed as a Summer Associate? (The Girl’s Guide To Law School)

Take some personal advice from The Girl’s Guide To Law School for how to proceed at your associateship this summer.

Consider Law Schools With In-House Firms, Incubators (U.S. News Education)

At school-based firms, attorneys may spend between one and three years honing their skills.

The Absolute Worst States for Job Hunting Law-School Grads (The Atlantic)

New research shows which corners of the country have the biggest oversupply of young lawyers.

Law Schools: Get Back to Basics (The National Law Journal)

The National Law Journal makes the case for why students should be provided with more opportunities to engage in practical legal writing.

Law Schools Are Changing, But How and Why? (part two) (Lawyerist)

How, exactly, are law schools changing? How will they change in the next 5 years or so? Lawyerist has some interesting insight.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments or tweet @ManhattanLSAT

Could believe Lady Gaga and the LSAT have something in common?!

I recently had a conversation with a student about what he refers to as “sleeper rules” in games. Sleeper rules are the rules that don’t jive with the rest of the rules. They’re the odd man out, the lone ranger. In a Western, they’d be mavericks. On a playground, they’d be last picked. They’re Lady Gaga in the 2000s and Madonna in the ’80s. They’re the green circle next to the four blue … You get it.

We see sleeper rules all over the places in games, but a really good example is the standalone numbered-ordering rule in a relative ordering game: you are given seven rules, say, and six of them are relative (“X is before Y but after V”). The last one is not. It reads, “V can’t be third.” How many of you have gotten to a rule like this–one that you cannot easily incorporate into your diagram–and decided, I’ll just keep it in my head? Aha! Caught!

My guess is that it’s come back to bite you in the bum, as the ol’ “just keeping it in my head” is known to do in logic games.

While it may be your intuition to just keep it in your head, for most of us the best way to handle sleeper rules is actually to do the opposite. Rules that don’t conform to the expectations of the whole game should generally be treated like royalty. Give them a prominent spot on the page, circle them, underline them, shine a giant spotlight on them–that is, make them graphically obvious, and do so close to your diagram. In the example above, this might mean putting a big slash over “3” underneath the V in your diagram, or a big “V NOT THIRD!” note alongside it.

Obvious, nonconforming rules should be notated in the same way: conspicuously. This is the safest way to handle them.

June LSAT scores will come. Patience is key!

If you took the June 2013 LSAT this week, it’s now time to play the waiting game. Here are some of this week’s top articles for you to read while you pass the time.

Law Schools Shift Focus for Grads (U-T San Diego)

In the face of a grim job market, some law schools are steering students toward legal areas where careers are more promising.

Evaluate Professors to Find a Good Law School Fit (U.S. News Education)

Prospective students can get a feel for a teacher’s style by observing a class.

The Top Five Law Schools for Jobs, Cost, Clerkships, and More (Above the Law)

Here are the top five law schools based on each individual data point that composes Above the Law’s rankings formula.

The Time is Now: Start Preparing Clerkship Applications this Summer (Lawyerist)

If you just finished your 2L year, this summer is the time to start getting your clerkship applications together

LSAT Sanity: Stress Management (Part 1) (jdMission)

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments or tweet @ManhattanLSAT

Note: This is Manhattan LSAT instructor Emily Dugan‘s first post for our blog. Welcome her in the comment section!

The June LSAT is finally over.  At this point, one of two things are likely going through your head.  Either “Yes, I am done, and I can finally stop worrying,” or “Oh crap, that was so much harder than I was expecting, I think I did awful.”  Both reactions are totally normal, but one is more useful than the other.

If you fall into the first group and are just relieved it’s over, you’re doing well.  If any major errors had been made, you would have noticed at the time, so your confidence is a great sign.  Just wait for your score to come in and give yourself some much needed rest.

Most people, however, have some qualms about how well the test went.  This is a much more normal reaction.  Know that almost everyone who walks out those doors is disappointed in their performance.  The truth is that most of these fears aren’t well founded.  Unless you can point to some specific thing like you forgot to fill in one section of the test on the answer sheet or you got violently ill during the logic games, you probably did exactly as you’d been doing on your practice exams.

It’s tough to tell in the heat of the moment which questions you got right or wrong.  The LSAT is a difficult test, so it’s rare that you’ll be 100% sure that the answer you put was the right one.  Add to that the stress of test day, and people often assume that they got all those questions wrong.  You didn’t.

Read more

People are often surprised to learn certain things about the Law School Admissions Test, in particular that a substantial portion of its content appears irrelevant to “being a lawyer.” A typical LSAT “game” reads something like, “If Frank lets go of his balloon first and Anna lets go of her balloon last, how many different combinations of kids could lose balloons in between?” Imagine sudoku but with words. This, and yet law schools give applicants’ LSAT scores tremendous weight in making their admissions decisions.

But they haven’t always. The test itself is only 65 years old, and the history of the LSATprovides some insight into why, exactly, it can seem to have so little to do with the field of law.

Prior to the LSAT, there wasn’t one admissions test that all law schools used–there were a couple of well-known ones, but their use wasn’t universal. In 1945 the admissions director at Columbia Law School, unsatisfied with the tests currently available, wrote to the President of the College Entrance Examination Board that he wanted to discuss the creation of a new one. When they finally met two years later, they envisioned a test intended to correlate with first year grades “on the assumption that first-year performance is highly correlated with later success in law school and in legal practice.” The key was law school performance, not bar exam passage since, they noted at the meeting, “everybody passes [bar exams] sooner or later” (quote pulled from the same article linked to above). With this goal in mind, they invited Harvard and Yale to sign on to the plan, which they did, followed by other schools.

The LSAT was never intended to measure aptitude for the practice of law; it was designed to measure potential success as a law student based on the belief that LSAT performance would correlate with law school performance, and that law school performance would correlate with one’s professional success thereafter.

So how have all these expected correlations played out?

A 2011 report by the Law School Admissions Council (which administers the LSAT) claims that the LSAT is a better predictor of law school performance than undergraduate GPA, and that GPA and LSAT score combined is a better predictor than either one, alone, concluding that “these results, combined with similar results from previous studies, support the validity of the LSAT for use in the law school admission process.” I know: shocking that an LSAC study would affirm LSAC’s continuing usefulness. But there is also, interestingly, some evidence that preparing for the test itself alters your brain–that learning LSAT-relevant reasoning can actually make you smarter. Silvia Bunge, associate professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute says:

“A lot of people still believe that you are either smart or you are not, and sure, you can practice for a test, but you are not fundamentally changing your brain … Our research provides a more positive message. How you perform on one of these tests is not necessarily predictive of your future success, it merely reflects your prior history of cognitive engagement, and potentially how prepared you are at this time to enter a graduate program or a law school, as opposed to how prepared you could ever be.”

But the process of studying for the text had visible effects on brain connectivity:

The structural changes were revealed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans of the brains of 24 college students or recent graduates before and after 100 hours of LSAT training over a three-month period. When compared with brain scans of a matched control group of 23 young adults, the trained students developed increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain, and between frontal and parietal lobes.

If this is true, perhaps what’s ultimately so useful about the LSAT isn’t how well it’s correlated with first-year grades, or how well it predicts overall success, but how preparing for it actually makes people better at reasoning. That may make them better at the LSAT sure, but ultimately it’s because they’ve been made better thinkers, which we can infer without getting too crazy likely means better law students and lawyers. That would make the LSAT, rather than just a weeding out tool or a litmus test, a kind of phase of legal training, itself.

As for whether doing well in law school makes you a better lawyer, well, a 2010 studydoes suggest that it’s a good predictor of your career: “the consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school–as measured by law school grades–is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school ‘eliteness.’” This should dispel some worry that what school you get into matters more than how you do once you get there (a commonly held viewamong law school applicants).

So if the LSAT is a reasonably reliable predictor of law school performance, and if law school performance is a reliable predictor of career success, can we say that the LSAT can predict if you’re going to be a good lawyer? I’ll leave that one for you to reason out, for your own sake.

Here are the free LSAT events we’re holding this week. All times local unless otherwise specified.

6/9/13 – Online- Free Trial Class– 4:00PM- 7:00PM (EDT)

6/10/13 – Washington, D.C.- Free Trial Class– 6:30PM- 9:30PM

6/11/13 – New York, NY- Free Trial Class– 6:30PM- 9:30PM

6/15/13 -New York, NY- Free Proctored LSAT Practice Exam– 2:00PM- 5:00PM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page

Good luck to all taking the June 2013 LSAT this coming Monday! Relax and mentally prepare your self this weekend and when you need a break, read up on some the latest law school news:

Law Schools with the Highest Median LSAT (U.S. News Education)

Check out U.S. News’ latest list of law schools with the highest median LSAT for full-time students

About Two-Thirds of Parents Want Their Kids to Be Lawyers (Above the Law)

According to a recent survey from Lawyers.com that polled 1,001 people, 64 percent of parents still “hope their children will grow up to pursue legal careers.”

5 Things to Do the Summer Before 1L Year! (Ms. JD)

If you’re set to begin your first year of law school in the fall, you’re probably wondering the best way to pass time while waiting to start.

JD News: Which States Have Too Many Lawyers (JD Mission)

According to new research, location may be everything for recent or soon-to-be law school graduates.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments or tweet @ManhattanLSAT

Manhattan Prep is offering special full tuition scholarships for up to 4 individuals per year (1 per quarter) who will be selected as part of Manhattan Prep’s LSAT Social Venture Scholars program. This program provides the selected scholars with free admission into one of Manhattan Prep’s LSAT live online Complete Courses (an $890 value).

These competitive scholarships are offered to individuals who (1) currently work full-time in an organization that promotes positive social change, (2) plan to use their law degree to work in a public, not-for-profit, or other venture with a social-change oriented mission, and (3) demonstrate clear financial need. The Social Venture Scholars can enroll in any live online preparation course taught by one of Manhattan Prep’s expert instructors within one year of winning the scholarship.

The deadline our next application period is 6/14.

Details about the SVS program and how you can apply can be found here.

The June LSAT is just over one week away! Take a quick study break to catch up on some of this week’s top law school links:

The Mental Fortitude Necessary to Practice Law (Lawyerist)

Being a lawyer takes thick skin. That’s because your job, in serving your client, is to tune out the bluster, stay cool, and make good decisions under fire.

Should You Drop Out of Law School (The Girl’s Guide to Law School)

As the school year winds down, a whispered question is floating in on the wind: “Should I drop out of law school?”

New Lawyer Tip of the Week—How Books Can Inspire & Improve your Legal Career (Green Horn Legal)

This list of legal books can inspire you, re-energize you and deliver to you a few wise lessons that you can use to improve your career.

Law Students Should Be Able to Work For Free, Says ABA (Wall Street Journal Law Blog)

The ABA is stepping into the fray over whether law firms should have to pay law students to help out on pro bono cases.

Toobin: The Legal Job Crisis Doesn’t Exist For Harvard Law Grads (Business Insider)

Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin spoke at Harvard Law’s “Class Day” on Wednesday, telling grads not to worry about the “oversupply of lawyers” that’s been in the news.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments or tweet @ManhattanLSAT

There's no magic LSAT pill, just hard work and dedication

Here’s a beautiful fantasy: you walk into your first LSAT class, and you’re given a set of books full of LSAT secrets. Over the next six to twelve weeks, you memorize these little treasures, which are like decadent bite-size morsels, and you leave your last class knowing exactly what you need to regurgitate in order to score a 180. It was merely a matter of getting down all the tricks! You scribbled them in your notebook, took a snapshot with your brain, and that’s all there was to it.

If only.

When you take a Manhattan LSAT course, at some point your instructor will likely deliver the bad news that this fantasy is just that. There isn’t a magic pill to make you do well on this test–but there are certainly things you can do in order to perform better, and when you get to a certain level, it’s no longer about memorization.

If I memorized all the rules of good writing–be specific! have vivid characters! create conflict!–does that mean that if I just sit down and apply all of those rules, I’m going to write a great story? A story that’s in the top 1% of all stories?

No. If I actually apply everything I’ve learned, and if it’s good information, then I’ll probably write a pretty decent story–a better one than I’d written before. But in order to move from decent to outstanding, I’ve got to have something else: flexibility. I’ve got to be able to know where the rules stop and my own sense of the story’s logic takes over, because there is no perfect formula that applies to every tale ever written or to be written.

The same is true of the LSAT. If you work hard to learn rules and apply them, your score will likely go up. It may go up a lot. You may score a 165 or a 168. But people who score 175 are not just applying rules; they know how to think on their feet to interpret unfamiliar questions, and to come up with variations on the principles they understand well.

The beauty of the LSAT is that it’s a logic test, and logic can be learned. But logic is also not something you can fool your way through for four 35-minute sections. To score in the 99th percentile, you should absolutely study methods, general rules, and tips. These will get you far. But  to reach those extra few points, you are going to have to work at making yourself better at logical thinking. And there’s no shortcut for that.