Ann K. Levine, aka The Law School Expert, has just released her newest book, The Law School Decision Game: A Playbook for Prospective Lawyers.  I’ve had the opportunity to give it a once over, and I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone who is thinking about law school, about to start law school, is currently in law school, or has recently graduated from (you guessed it) law school. In short, this is a fantastic read – well worth the $16 price tag!
Chock full of advice to help the aspiring attorney through the difficult maze of career decisions in front of them, this title is a straight-talk, easy-to-read guide that would make a welcome addition to any aspiring lawyers library. Aptly described in the title as “A playbook for perspective lawyers”, Ann draws upon years of experience working with prospective law students to identify and address the most transient questions that prospective law students have.

The Law School Decision Game is not about gaining admission to the JD program of your dreams. Instead, Ann provides expert perspective on the increasingly relevant decisions that need to be made before one even begins down the path to law school, such as:

• Is law school a wise decision?
• Considerations one should make in deciding what type of law to study/practice
• How much money do lawyers make?
• The business of law
• How to pick a law school

And much more.

Ann Levine has penned an incredibly helpful resource for any individual grappling with the decision as to whether or not law school (and thus a career in law) is in their future. “The Law School Decision Game” is a welcome injection of fresh, well informed perspective to the law school conversation.

Ann’s book is available on Amazon.com or her own website, LawSchoolExpert.com.

It's over!! It's all over!!

As we lay the October 2011 LSAT to rest, it is important that we remember the legacy it will leave behind. We mustn’t forget the blood, sweat, and tears that went into preparing for this exam. Hopefully, you’re coming off of Saturday’s exam feeling content with your performance. If that’s how it went for you – congratulations! I hope you celebrated properly, and cannot wait to hear about your results.

As for the rest of you, who didn’t quite skip out of the exam center whistling “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah“, all is not lost! If you’re certain things did not go well for you on Saturday, you ought a cancel your score (if you haven’t done so already, today is the last day!). And luckily, December is not too late – you can still get in to law school in the Fall 2012 using your scores from the December 2011 LSAT!

What’s important is for you to recognize what’sholding you back from achieving your LSAT goals, and then to do something about it. Here are three common reasons why you might not be seeing the results you wanted:

1)  You underestimated the beast that is the LSAT.  You knew the LSAT was hard, but you had no idea just how much time and energy was necessary to adequately prepare for the exam. –We see this often—students who expect that a few hours of homework and studying each week will be sufficient for maximizing their potential on this test. Unfortunately, for most people it takes much more than that. Set your sites on the December exam with your expectations adjusted.

2) I just can’t seem to get over the hump on the ___________ section.  This is natural. Often students who have been studying for a while start to have a few sections of the exam really “click” for them, while one or two sections remain  problem areas. You should embrace this opportunity to hone in on your weak areas and really address what’s holding you back (note: if you’re struggling with Logic Games, consider trying our Logic Games Intensive Course).

3) You prepped hard, but not smart. At Manhattan LSAT, we’re big proponents of self-study. Maybe you’ve been studying on your own, but have never really had a structured approach. This is one of the major advantages of our Self Study program: it gives you structure.  It tells you what to focus on, when to focus on it, and how to channel your efforts on a particular question type or exam section. If you’ve chosen to do it yourself, be sure to add some sort of structure.  Our Self Study program comes with a syllabus and course recordings, ensuring that you have a very structured plan of attack.

For those of you who are going to continue the LSAT battle from now until the December exam, perhaps we can help.  We’re offering a free, live online review of the October exam and have an lsat class beginning October 17^th that will prepare you for the December test.

Things to Stay Clear of on Test Day

As we close in on the October LSAT, I thought I would share our usual tips to keep you on track as game day draws near. What’s that you say – you’re not sure if you are ready, willing, or able to take the October LSAT?  Before you go pushing the panic button, make sure you are making all of the proper considerations about which test administration you should take.

If you’re full steam ahead for the October exam, here is some advice for the final hours that our Managing Director, Noah Teitelbaum, wrote for our good friend Ann Levine on LawSchoolExpert.com’s blog:

1. Focus on the main event. Right about now we see on our LSAT forums  lots of questions about unimportant topics and students freaking out about the hardest LSAT questions in written history. Rare question and game types are rare! If you find them tough, that’s not a big deal. What is important is that you are able to get the easy and common ones correct without wasting too much time, leaving you enough time for the rare question or game. And, games are generally more consistent today than in days of yore, so don’t freak out if you think CD game or the Zephyr airlines game is hard – they were! Focus on capitalizing on your strengths, not trying to do an emergency patch-up of a minor weakness. Read more

The inner workings of the new Manhattan LSAT Tracker

Cue trumpets…drum roll…da,dah! Ladies and Gentleman, esteemed members of the international community, we are pleased to announce that we’ve just finished updating our LSAT Tracker. LSAT pandemonium in the streets; children shouting for joy; dogs and cats finally getting along. Woo-hoo! Wait, what’s that? You don’t know what the LSAT Tracker is? It’s our fancy spreadsheet you should use to analyze your LSAT results. After you take a practice test, slide in your answers, hit a button or two and voila, you’ll find out what’s what with your strengths and weaknesses. As one person told me, “the Tracker tells me in detail how I suck!” (I assure you she improved). One great thing about using the Tracker is that it doesn’t reveal the correct answer if you get something wrong. That way you can go back and look at the question again without knowing what answer you should have chosen – that’s a lot more useful than simply going back and saying “oh, yeah, it is (D)!”

What’s new about this new Tracker? For one it includes a lot more tests. This Tracker covers PrepTests 46-72 (including the June 2007 LSAT, which you can find on our LSAT proctor page). It also has more detailed analysis of each section. As we all know, more graphs = more fun.

When you click on the input tab you’ll notice that the exams are not in chronological order – they’re in the order we assign them in our class. But, it’s fine to use it in any order you like. Also, we threw PT51 & 52 in their own section. Those two LSATs are stupid and deserve to be isolated to protect the other LSATs from them. Or, we use those two LSATs in our class a lot, so our students can’t really use them as authentic practice LSATs since we’ve taught the heck out of a lot of those questions (we’re sorry PT51 & 52, it’s nothing personal, we had to do it to some LSATs).

So jump in: the new tracker is located in your free Student Center – register now! Just note one thing: we’re releasing this in beta version. We want to hear from you how to make it better. So, please, please post your feedback on the LSAT Tracker forum thread. We will listen – even if it’s about how it sucks, in detail.

With less than a month to go before the October LSAT, I have noticed an increase in the number of students who call and ask for advice on which LSAT administration they should be setting their sights on. Many of these students are concerned about their readiness for the upcoming October exam, and are fearful about what postponing until the December exam will do to their admission prospects (timeline wise) for the Fall of 2012.

Legend has it LSAC decided on its four implementation months by tossing a marble on a rotating Mayan calendar

While there is something to be said for taking the June or October LSAT and applying earlier in the rolling admissions cycle that law schools use, I want to be very clear about my advice on this: it is far more important to maximize your potential on the LSAT than it is to apply early!

Ann Levine, President of LawSchoolExpert.com and author of The Law School Admission Game: Play Like An Expert has reiterated this point time and time again on her blog.

I can certainly understand the tendency of a prospective law school student to want to get the LSAT over and done with – and their applications in as early as possible – however rushing to take the test before you are truly prepared is an error in judgement that will ultimately hurt your application, since the LSAT is factored so heavily in to your admission decision.  If you have been preparing for the October LSAT and are not yet where you think you can be score wise, then you should embrace (not fear!) the prospect of postponing your exam until December.  Remember, LSAC has relaxed its policy on postponing registration for the exam, making it more convenient for students to choose a course of action that will benefit them the most in the bigger picture.

When it comes to the February LSAT, it is a different story entirely.  Taking the February LSAT will not allow you to apply for law school admittance for the Fall of that same year.  While there is nothing wrong with taking the February LSAT if you’re ahead of the game (scores are good for five years), all February LSAT takers should be aware that the February test is not released, meaning you will never have the opportunity to review which questions you got right or wrong, which can be a real bummer when you’ve put so much in to preparing for the exam.

If you’re one of the many students who has been preparing for the October LSAT but are not quite feeling like you are where you can be score wise, you should strongly consider setting your sights on the December exam.  We still have a few online courses (and courses in select cities) yet to kick off that have schedules catering to December LSAT takers.

Is the LSAT driving you mad? It has been known to have that effect on people. However, before you seek some form of professional help, check out our FREE public LSAT Class led by Brian Birdwell: Zen and the Art of LSAT.

Brian Birdwell, one of our 99th percentile rock star instructors, is worth the price of admission (okay, so it’s free, but seriously check him out!). He is the LSAT equivalent of the Dos Equis Guy. How many people do you know who have rode on a scooter for 70 miles in the pouring rain in Malaysia, sandwiched between a Thai kickboxing champion and an English hip-hop artist, or sold a million dollars worth of watermelon in 6 weeks? He just may be the most interesting man in LSAT prep.

As if hanging with Brian weren’t enough, what you’ll get out of his class is worth clearing your schedule for. Here’s how it works: you sign up and submit questions that you would like to see Brian cover during the session.  Brian will sort through the submitted questions and teach as many as time will allow.

Bring your friends, bring your neighbors, even bring your shrink if you want; Brian Birdwell is dishing out LSAT peace of mind for the rock bottom price of $0.00.

Decisions, decisions!

A member of the Manhattan LSAT Forum community – who, like a good lawyer-to-be, is keeping himself anonymous – sent me an interesting article in the NY Times magazine that has some interesting implications for LSAT study. Take a look at the article and what he had to say about it – I think this is spot on:

The article is about “decision fatigue”: how merely making a large number of decisions (whether deciding LSAT questions or deciding your breakfast cereal) leads you to a point where you are more liable to make bad decisions or take shortcuts to avoid having to invest yourself in more decisions.  There were  a few things I think are relevant to LSAT study:

#1. This could underlie the fatigue students often feel towards the end of an individual test (it’s not just having to read a lot or analyze a lot of logic—it’s literally the act of making so many decisions) Read more

Perhaps the word “studyhall” brings up bad memories of detention for you – I will do my HW, I will do my HW, I will do my HW.

But cast aside your chalkdust torture nightmares, these Review Sessions are a different breed. All of our Fall LSAT classes (the ones aiming for the December LSAT) will now include 12 live online Review Sessions. Each session will be 2 hours of LSAT goodies  – one of our teachers will lead the class through an extra set of questions on topics taught in a recent class. As usual, we’ll expect you to work hard, ask questions, answer them, debate, laugh, cry, etc. It’s an extra touch, a bit more practice, another taste of that great meal we call LSAT prep.

Some of our students will no doubt be too busy to attend – there’s a lot of HW to do already, and life is life, but we’re excited to get to teach a bit more. If you’re looking for a fall LSAT class – now with 66 hours of instructional time in all – check out our upcoming schedule and jump in. We promise we won’t make you clean the erasers.

Back To School

It’s mid August and for many of you that means only one thing: another summer break is in the books and its time to move out of mom and dad’s house once more (can I get a hallelujah?!) and head back to school.  But before you set off to platform 9 and 3/4, we wanted to leave you with some words of wisdom.

Mary Adkins is one of our superstar LSAT instructors here in New York City, and she also happens to be a graduate of Yale Law School.  In the ‘back to school spirit’, we asked Mary if she could reflect on the top five things she learned during undergrad that had the biggest impact on her life in Law School. Hopefully it’s not too late for you to take some of her advice (and if you’re intrigued by Mary’s insights and are looking for a New York course, consider signing up for her course).  So without further ado…

5 Things I Learned as an Undergrad that Helped me in Law School:

1. No one else knows what’s going on either.  Remember when you were a freshman in college and your mom gave you a giant, sloppy kiss on the cheek before reminding you to separate the whites from the colors? You were embarrassed until you realized that everyone else (a) also had dorky parents, and (b) couldn’t do laundry either. When I got to law schoolI was positive that I was the only one there who was utterly confused. What’s a holding? What’s dicta? “Oh no,” I thought, “I’m actually an idiot. How have I managed to fool everyone all this time?” However, once I learned that everyone else felt equally lost, it was liberating. It was also a great way to launch friendships—over shared panic and distaste for the law. I mean, over beers. Read more

Slightly More Complicated Than Minesweeper

Comedian Daniel Tosh has a bit in his stand up act poking fun at people who claim they are ‘bad test takers’. He quips:

“Don’t you love it when people in school are like ‘I’m a bad test taker’ — you mean you’re stupid!  Oh you struggle with that part where we find out what you know?  I know, I can totally relate, see, because I’m a brilliant painter minus my god awful brush strokes.”

While it is incredibly tempting to pick apart the flawed logic used by Mr. Tosh in this analogy, I am simply going to disagree with his overall statement; being a poor test taker does not mean you are stupid, nor are standardized tests an exhaustive or conclusive measure of one’s intellect.

There are many among us who are quite sharp yet don’t excel in the realm of standardized test taking. There’s a TON of pressure, and questions are often phrased in a misleading or confusing way.  In the case of the LSAT, the exam writers are constantly setting answer traps to trick you. With all of these obstacles present in most standardized test formats, it is no wonder that many folks simply do not perform well on these exams.

Luckily for you, we at Manhattan Prep have your back.  On September 15th we are debuting our first ever “Reaching Your Standardized Testing Potential” workshop in New York City.  The session will be run by Jen Dziura, owner of two perfect scores on the GRE.  Jen will discuss the various habits and practice routines that can help improve your performance on test day, as well as hack away at some of the intimidating myths surrounding such high stakes exams.

The best part?  It’s totally free to register. Join us and begin learning how you can maximize your standardized testing potential.