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Can someone explain softs? What exactly are we talking about? And what constitutes good vs bad "softs"?

anything that isn't numbers is considered a soft

a decent soft is studying at Harvard to obtain that 4.0 versus your local TTT state school (note that this isn't a sliding scale. HYPS get a very small boost but it isn't really there for a T50 grad versus that of T100 grad)
a good soft is having served in the military or having good white collar work experience
a great soft is a rhodes/marshall/famous author/look up yale resumes and insert activities here


a miniscule bad soft would be a retake of the LSAT or having more than 5 Ws on your transcript
a decent bad soft would be a DUI or other non-integreity related crime
a great bad soft would be a crime that involves being dishonest such as insider trading

Also (and I mean this in the nicest possible way), if you search the forum for "softs", limited to threat topics/titles, you will get LOTS and LOTS of discussion of softs.

Softs are anything other than LSAT/GPA/URM.

Good softs are great experience, overcoming extreme adversity, TFA, Peace Corps, founding a fairly successful business/non-profit, PhD, D1 athlete, active duty military experience

Great softs are Olympic athlete, Truman/Rhodes/Fulbright scholar, incredibly high profile position/work experience, founding very successful business/nonprofit, active duty military + Purple Heart/silver star/etc

I think Elizabeth Wurtzel got into YLS because she's a best-selling author. I think she mentions somewhere in her book "More, Now, Again," (or something that like that) that her LSAT was no where near par. So ... yea.

Keep in mind that the consensus seems to be that the kinds of softs your average applicant has are a wash. They neither help nor hurt. If your softs are things like, "I did some volunteer work as an undergrad, I studied abroad in Spain for two months, I worked a part time job delivering pizza, did an internship, and I organized my fraternity's canned food drive for the homeless" it won't really matter at all.

From what I understand as a 0L, even legitimately good softs like the ones discussed here generally won't catapult you into schools where your numbers are drastically below par. They mostly help you if you're borderline or slightly below average.