3.89/172, good softs- pondering a retake? Forum

[SemperLegal]

In fact, I've heard a number of older lawyers say that their biggest pet peeve with our generation of lawyers is that we have a hostile, disrespectful, "win at all costs" mentality. Too much TV perhaps? I dunno. But your conception of what goes on in trials is laughably naive. Being competitive is one thing, but being a douche-truck (as you are) will almost certainly get you fired. Trial lawyers generally respect their opposition, and if they don't, then they at least act like it.

Yeah I hear this complaint often as well, and it is not unusual for judges to sanction attorneys who act out of line like that in court, or who are deliberately deceptive or refuse to work civilly with others on discovery timelines, making people available for depos etc. Acting like the biggest asshole in the room will definitely not help you when it comes time to ask your opposition for a favor either. And if you ever plan on doing anything more like becoming a judge, judiciary panels/commissions have been known to call people's opposing counsels to ask how someone has behaved in order to vet for judgeships.

I have paralegaled a bit, and the successful attorneys are all very polite and professional. By successful I mean ones who are partners or sole practioners with huge client books. Heres why: The legal field is 100% insular. You are going to get 90% of your referrals from fellow attorneys who either conflict out of a matter or have a side issue with a client (e.g. they may represent the business and need you to rep the principal that is owed deferred compensation or they may do bankruptcy and they need you to deal with an underlying intentional tort they don't feel comfortable doing), you are going to argue before fellow attorneys (or former attorneys depending on how the bar/bench partition is setup in your state), you are going to have to request trials and deadlines be adjourned due to scheduling conflicts from fellow attorneys, you are going to have to borrow brief language and templates from fellow attorneys, you are going to have to request fellow attorneys to appear for you in a minor hearing in one court so you can argue in a more important case across the state, and most important you are going to have to work nearly everyday with fellow attorneys.

Being a dick, a shark, or whatever you call it is bad for you professionally, bad for the client, bad for the judicial system, and ultimately bad for your health and sanity. Aggressive is fine, being an ass never is.

Trust me, I am no pushover but rather ultra-uncompetitive, insensitive, and results-oriented, but being unprofessional is not commendable nor benefical, but rather stinks of insecurity.

Sorry for the rant, just moved from dealing with the Bankruptcy Bar, an extremely collegiate bunch, to the criminal side the house in a town where everyone is more concerned with being the next AG/POTUS then seeing that justice is done.

[ahduth]

is there any sort of conventional cut off to retaking? would you guys tell the OP to retake if he had gotten a 173,4,5? I am in a simular situation and am leaning towards not retaking ( but am not entirely sure yet). My logic is that if I was on an adcom, I might look at someone retaking a 170+ and wonder why they didn't use the time for something more productive/meaningful then taking another LSAT. Am I way off on this?

If you are below LSAT median at your target school(s), you might want to consider a retake.

Yeah, I think that point between 2, 3, 4 and 5 makes a big difference. They really don't care if you're doing anything meaningful. They want your LSAT score. It depends on the school - for Harvard, OP (and maybe you) should consider retaking. Potentially for Columbia too. Watching returns come in this year, it seemed obvious to me there were distinct 172/173, 173/174, 174/175 fault lines for those two schools in particular. I only think I got into Columbia due to weird softs.

[jbptls]

have you decided what you are going to do?

[chasgoose]

FWIW I also went to Yale, and from what I have seen from my experience and those of friends applying to law school, you are pretty much guaranteed to sweep CCN (almost no one from Yale goes to Chicago and Columbia/NYU take almost half of the Yale applicants that apply) and would probably get into at least one of HYS with your numbers (particularly with Yale, see if professors you have worked with have connections to the YLS, that can often give you a boost there). As those have said earlier, retaking would only be worth it if you know that you could crack the 175+ barrier. I don't think a 173/174 is really going to make HYS any more likely to take you or significantly affect your chances at getting big money from CCN. Also talk to UCS, they can probably give you a more clear picture (although they are kind of reticent on giving you anything resembling a solid answer either way) of whether or not retaking will really be worth it for you. I would probably say unless 172 was an unexpectedly low score for you based on practice tests and stuff, I probably wouldn't retake. The risk of you getting a lower score outweighs any benefits anything but a 3-4+ point increase would get you.

[WhatSarahSaid]

I retook a 173 and got a 174.

It's pretty tough to say what you should do, but I will say that you absolutely can't retake unless you are absolutely certain that you should do better (based on PT results and how test day went). I knew I could do better, and I knew I'd be dissatisfied if I didn't try, so I did. I really, really doubt a one-point swing made any kind of difference on my cycle (for all I know, it was even negative), but that's how it went.

PM me if you'd like any advice.

[mst]

FWIW I also went to Yale, and from what I have seen from my experience and those of friends applying to law school, you are pretty much guaranteed to sweep CCN (almost no one from Yale goes to Chicago and Columbia/NYU take almost half of the Yale applicants that apply) and would probably get into at least one of HYS with your numbers (particularly with Yale, see if professors you have worked with have connections to the YLS, that can often give you a boost there). As those have said earlier, retaking would only be worth it if you know that you could crack the 175+ barrier. I don't think a 173/174 is really going to make HYS any more likely to take you or significantly affect your chances at getting big money from CCN. Also talk to UCS, they can probably give you a more clear picture (although they are kind of reticent on giving you anything resembling a solid answer either way) of whether or not retaking will really be worth it for you. I would probably say unless 172 was an unexpectedly low score for you based on practice tests and stuff, I probably wouldn't retake. The risk of you getting a lower score outweighs any benefits anything but a 3-4+ point increase would get you.

This is about right. In at CCN with cash. In at other t10's with even more cash. Maybe YS, each dependent on dif. soft factors. And in my very limited experience with t10 undergrad folks with your numbers during this cycle, decent shot at H. If I was in your shoes my decision to retake would depend on the factors of the LSAT that held me back (ie. was it an insanely hard x session that you've never dealt with or were you just scattering the board with -2s in each section?). If you were truly in the 176-180 range on the RECENT practice tests and you have the time to kill this semester to run through tests until June you could for sure lock in a spot at Harvard with a 174. Also, it depends on what Harvard means to you I suppose. CCN with cash is not a bad fallback if you decide not to retake and you ding at HYS. But Harvard does present some real advantages to CCN in several areas, regardless of what we'd like to think (prestige, clerkship, corp.). So there's that. Good luck choosing.

To gator1 if you haven't been banned and aren't a flame, please for the love of god don't be from uf. You're embarrassing other grads.

[yale2011]

.

[lalalalala]

thanks so much to everyone for all the advice! this has been really helpful, and people have raised a lot of the issues that i've been worrying about. i'm leaning towards a retake right now - a better chance at scholarships from CCN and other t10 schools seems especially worth it to me (law school loans are scary). the risk of doing worse is always there, but if i didn't feel good coming out of a retake then i would probably just cancel. 172 was at the lower end of my PT's, and I did have a minor freak-out during the real thing when I realized that i had misread one of the logic games, ran out of time and had to guess on the last 4 questions of the section. that hurt. i think i might regret not trying again in large part because i was so frustrated with the first time.

i do have another question i wanted to throw out there, related to retaking- i would do some heavy preparation for the retake, because doing worse would obviously be awful, but i took pretty much all of the 20-25 most recent tests in preparing the first time around, and am worried about a lack of new/recent/real material to prep with now. anyone been through this or have any suggestions? slightly off-topic, i know, but y'all are so knowledgable

[jackjackson]

in my opinion: redoing/ reusing prep tests is as valuable (if not more so) as doing them the first time

[chasgoose]

thanks so much to everyone for all the advice! this has been really helpful, and people have raised a lot of the issues that i've been worrying about. i'm leaning towards a retake right now - a better chance at scholarships from CCN and other t10 schools seems especially worth it to me (law school loans are scary). the risk of doing worse is always there, but if i didn't feel good coming out of a retake then i would probably just cancel. 172 was at the lower end of my PT's, and I did have a minor freak-out during the real thing when I realized that i had misread one of the logic games, ran out of time and had to guess on the last 4 questions of the section. that hurt. i think i might regret not trying again in large part because i was so frustrated with the first time.

i do have another question i wanted to throw out there, related to retaking- i would do some heavy preparation for the retake, because doing worse would obviously be awful, but i took pretty much all of the 20-25 most recent tests in preparing the first time around, and am worried about a lack of new/recent/real material to prep with now. anyone been through this or have any suggestions? slightly off-topic, i know, but y'all are so knowledgable

Sounds like I would definitely retake. If you break 175 you almost definitely will crack HYS and will be in serious contention for big money from CCN. If all you cared about was making sure you got into CCN w/o money plus 1 of HYS I would probably say that you wouldn't need to retake, but since 172 was on the lower end and you had the logic games issue, I would retake.

As far as taking the old tests again, I don't think it matters as you probably won't remember the questions that much. I would probably get new test booklets that you hadn't written all over. It might seem stupid and wasteful, but $8 per test for a few tests will probably be worth it in the long run.

[TheTopBloke]

If you're that insecure you should find work at the nearest strip bar.

[ExpectLess]

I was in your exact situation. PTing in the upper 170s, but ended up with a lower score the first time around. Retook it and ended up getting a score in the upper 170s. Best decision I've made. A 172/cancel looks virtually the same as a 172, and if you are PTing in the upper 170s you should be able to tell if you didn't break your old score. So there's extremely little risk, and if you do hit the upper 170s, that's worth tens of thousands at CCN, makes H a much safer bet, and likely gives you better chances at SY.

As for strategy, I ended up retaking some of the tests I had first taken, and I found I didn't remember much of them. I essentially took them in the same order I did the first time around, although I only re-did about five of them. They may not be completely representative, but that doesn't mean they won't be helpful. If you notice that you're recognizing a bunch of questions, maybe you should find an alternate method, but it worked out for me.

Re-read the LG/LR bibles.

[mst]

Also, depending on what course you used (if you used one), the most-recent tests included might not include the MOST recent. Kaplan for example is missing 5-10. So there's at least a few new ones maybe... Aside from that I'd be careful. Old test logic games are very different than some of the new ones. So I'd be careful about getting too comfortable. Just my two cents.

[z3201]

haha "elistist piece of trash"? seriously, what are you getting so worked up about? i'm just trying to figure out if a retake is worth it. half the people on this thread say yes and the other half no, so it's clearly not a straightforward situation. if this thread is offensive to you...no one is forcing you to read it. i am sincerely trying to figure out the best thing to do, and everyone's advice has been really helpful. i'm certainly not a "damsel in distress" - just trying to get others' opinions on what to do.

I have similar numbers. I think the only place that a re-take would help is Harvard. YS is a crap-shoot as it is, and it sounds like you have decent enough softs to have a good shot. If you check out H on LSN you'll see that they take some 172s but you have to have a 3.9X. Still a good shot at H though with your undergrad. A re-take isn't as risky as these people are making it out to be especially if you were PTing so high. Basically if you raise it two points, you're a guarantee at H and no one can predict YS anyways.

Sorry I'm kind of late replying to this (I just came across this thread now) but LSN isn't entirely representative, which is something I only realized this year when I was applying. I go to an Ivy, and I was surprised to see the prestige bump that people get from here. Last year I knew someone with a 3.84/172 who got into Harvard out of UG, and this year I know someone with a 3.8x/170 who got into Stanford out of UG. There was also someone who had a 3.98/172 who got into Harvard and Yale, the only two schools she applied to. Those people aren't on LSN and would be strong outliers if they were, but I think people like that are more common than one might expect, especially coming from a top 10 college.

That said, I would advise you to retake, if for no other reason than to know how well you could've done without the frustrations of the first test. Based on the the people I've seen, though, I don't think you actually need to.