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

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!

Congratulations to all the December LSAT test-takers. Hopefully last weekend was a dream come true. Now begins the frightful wait for LSAT scores – here’s a list of previous LSAT release dates, so you know when to start wondering.

Until then, finish up your applications, make sure all your letters of recommendation are in, and get ready to hit submit when your score comes in.

Our fingers are crossed for you!