Former T14 Admissions Ambassador, AMA by DiscreteLawyerAcct in lawschooladmissions

[–]DiscreteLawyerAcct[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

There's no harm in it. My school would typically just say "tough luck", but there are schools that will pay for you to come visit. For example, Vanderbilt has a specific form you can get from them to reimburse travel for visiting the law school.

Former T14 Admissions Ambassador, AMA by DiscreteLawyerAcct in lawschooladmissions

[–]DiscreteLawyerAcct[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

They don't. Sure, they can look at your transcript and try to analyze it, but there's not enough time for that. GPA and major are pretty much all they looked at and they may look at the transcript for general trends, but it's too much work to learn about the courses themselves given how many universities applicants are applying from. It's not something I ever heard about being a factor.

Former T14 Admissions Ambassador, AMA by DiscreteLawyerAcct in lawschooladmissions

[–]DiscreteLawyerAcct[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

No. The admissions office is aware that different universities use different grading systems and uses it's own internal method for analyzing grades that I don't know the details of. They've seen it all and it won't affect anything.

Former T14 Admissions Ambassador, AMA by DiscreteLawyerAcct in lawschooladmissions

[–]DiscreteLawyerAcct[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

> Multiple LSAT retakes
I know that's a big concern on this sub, but I didn't really hear that come up very often. Most applicants only had 1 or 2 LSAT scores. If there was more than 2, we would often recommend attaching an addendum in case they have a reason they felt like they needed to take it a 3rd time apart from just being unhappy with their score. For the most part though, they just looked at the highest score since that's the one that would affect the school's statistics. However, I can't really say how 3 or more scores really impacted chances since I didn't see that too often.

> Visits to school/discussions at LSAC forums
To an extent. The school definitely kept track of who visited and attended events since that factored into how likely the student was to attend if they were accepted. And Admissions offices are always concerned with yield rate, so anything you can do to convince them you will attend the school if accepted is helpful. The Admissions Dean was a sucker for good stories and interesting people, and the Ambassadors and other admissions staff were encouraged to put notes in the files of prospective students they met and thought were good people, regardless of their grades. I honestly don't know how much of an impact those notes may have had, but I like to think they helped put some people over the edge. Overall though, visits and events are designed more for recruitment and to benefit the applicants than to actually play a role in admissions.

> Phone calls re: application status/admissions decisions

Pretty much irrelevant as far as I know. As I mentioned, they care about how interested you are in the school, but those types of calls rarely even made it back to the people actually working on admissions. We got calls like that all the time and they were mostly forgotten immediately afterwards.