[0:08] Mike Spivey: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions—law school admissions cycle data with one of the world experts, Dave Killoran. Welcome, Dave. Thanks for joining us.
Dave Killoran: Hi, Mike. It’s good to be here. Thanks so much for having me on.
Mike Spivey: And let’s just dive right in. You and I obviously have talked offline a great deal over the last 14 years about this kind of stuff, and we have about this cycle. What will happen with overall applicant numbers, do you think?
Dave Killoran: That is a good question. I don’t know if anyone really knows the answer. When we look at the numbers from last year and compare them to this year, I think there’s actually some really optimistic notes. Last year, when the cycle opened, the applicant numbers were way high. They were up about 33%, 34%. And after a few weeks, they’d come down, but they had come down so that the increase was 24%, 25%, somewhere in there. So they were way ahead of the prior cycle, which had been a pretty robust cycle as well.
This cycle started out at up around 8%, so not what we wanted to see really. More applicants just makes things tougher. And now it’s up about 10%. But you and I have talked, Mike, about this, and I think there’s a lot to be said for the fact that people are applying earlier. And part of the reason is that last year a bunch of people had results that they didn’t love, and so they pushed to this cycle, and now they’re at the very beginning.
So I’m hoping that what we’re going to see here in the coming months is, just like last year, we’ll come way down. And last year’s cycle may have started up about 33%, 34%, but by the time it was all said and done, it was under 10%. And if that type of drop-off happens here, we’ll be flat at best, and maybe even a little bit smaller, which will make things easier for the general applicants out there.
Mike Spivey: So yeah, applicant numbers is a great place to start. I don’t think people understand the definition of competition in law school admissions, or not too many people know it. So let me give the exact definition of how competitive a cycle is. It’s how many people apply relative to how many seats law schools have. You mentioned 8%. It was actually started at 12%, and we’ve drifted down. November 5th, it’s now 10%. By five days from now, it’ll be at 9%. Will it continue to drift down? I think it is. I agree with you.
As one half of the equation of competitiveness, I think you’re going to see these weird spikes every once in a while, particularly early when the data’s volatile. So it’ll jump from 9% back to 12%, and that has to just do with timing of score releases and things from the previous cycle not symmetrically matching this cycle.
But when all is said and done, two, I hope, wonderful things—if not, good things—are going to happen. The 12% that we started off with this year will be from 0% to 5%, is my guess. And I am hearing from law schools that the class size thing is real, the larger class size. Some are decreasing, of course, because they over-enroll, but some are increasing. So if you had a small increase in seats and a decrease or flat or even small increase in applicants, you’re looking at a cycle that’s no less competitive than last year. Will that happen? Neither of us know. Prediction is difficult, especially when it involves the future.
Last year, the day before today, I was on live media. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on live media, Dave, but I was being interviewed on Legal Face-Off by three lawyers. That’s like the last thing on the planet you want. Lawyers ask really tough questions. And at this stage last year, we were at 33% up, and they wanted me to predict. And I predicted we would drift down to 20% because of front-loading. I was wrong. We ended up drifting down to 8% total applicants.
So the front-loading was so intense last year, I hope I’m as wrong this year. I hope my 0% to 5% ends up being -12%. Probably not, but probably we end up at 0% to 5%, which would be good news. Anything in the negative would be great news as far as competition.
Okay. So what’s going on with high scores?
[4:27] Dave Killoran: Well, just as with applicant numbers being up, the numbers of high scores are up as well, which, again, doesn’t sound like a great thing, and I won’t try to say that it is. Maybe the silver lining here is, just as the applicant numbers aren’t up as much as they were last year, the high-scoring numbers aren’t up as much either. And if we can get applicant numbers to come down a little bit, which I think is very possible, if not likely, you’ll see the same thing with the high scores.
A good example is this: scores in the 170 to 174 range are up over 10% right now. But that’s really similar to what we see with the actual applicant numbers as well. So there are some things that we have out there that are actually tracking. Last year, when we looked at these same numbers, 170 to 174, they were up 17.4%. So it’s not as high, which mirrors what’s happening with the applicants.
The 175 to 180 range is a little worse, and I think that’s where people get really concerned, especially when they’re looking at, like, T14 schools and medians. This year, it’s up, like, 13% plus, but last year, it was up 25% plus. So again, it’s less, but we’d like to see it come down more. And certainly, you and I have talked a lot about the LSAT between the two of us and things that are going on there. And I don’t know that we’re going to see a huge drop-off this year, but I think next year is more likely, when they make some of the changes to the exam.
Mike Spivey: So LSAT inflation has been a problem. I just mentioned that when we were talking about our last question, competition, but obviously there’s market segmentation. But for the elite top schools, you do factor in the fact that there’s been LSAT inflation. Just from an admissions perspective, just so people know, what that does is it does two things. It fills up quickly by January, February, March of 2027 their need for strong LSAT scores. If LSAT in the 175 to 180 range stays at 13% and moves up to 14%, 15% increase, that’s going to benefit the elite schools.
And generally—not all, but generally—schools shore up their medians first, LSAT, then GPA, but it has this funny dual effect. So if your medians are shored up, if you’re 45 over-deposited in March or June, April, May, sort of distorting the sequential order of months, if you have a 45-person, because remember it’s median not means, person cushion of deposits at your target of 174 or 175 in extreme examples, you’re feeling great. You’re doubting, if you’re an elite school particularly, you’re going to melt that many 175-plus.
So now you’re reading applications super holistically, and you have more advantage to now admit the people who are splitters or double negatives, and we’ve seen this. This phenomenon of holistic file reading is real. So it makes things more competitive early on, and don’t apply late because I just said that. If you Google “counter-cycle law school admissions,” all you see is me having to address this. I had to come up with that word, “counter-cycle.”
[7:36] In theory, maybe applying later is real. But what you really would want to do is apply by November, December, January. And if you’re waitlisted, you can stay super optimistic because schools are probably going to be competitive early on at these top ranges; it’s going to afford them the ability to be more holistic during the waitlist period.
So if I have a 170 and I’m applying to a top six law school, and I have a strong GPA or killer softs, that’s always been a gamble. That’s always been a stretch in the 27, 28 years I’ve been doing this. But now, those softs matter more getting off the waitlist or getting a late admit than they did five years ago. I don’t even have time to bring up the diminishment of LSAT and GPA and the U.S. News rankings metrics, which are more than halved because of Z-score transformations and compression. So these numbers actually aren’t as important. They’re just more competitive. Do I think the numbers at the top will go down? I think the 170 to 174 category will go down. I think the 175 to 180 will be buttoned up next year because of the in-person, and we’ll see that category go down next year.
One thing to be aware of: I think schools are figuring out that they admitted more people in the 175 to 180 range who aren’t doing well in classes. I’ve heard that from schools, which means schools are now figuring out they admitted people that cheated on the LSAT. And cheating is going to be, hopefully, if not much harder, completely wiped out with in-person.
I mentioned the 175 to 180, and you did too. What the heck is going on with 180? Particularly given that if you score a 180, you can’t take the LSAT again. This 47% or whatever percent increase is not the Dave Killorans of the world, the Ellen Cassidys of the world just retaking 180s to prove that they can do it again and again, which I know used to be the case with some LSAT instructors. Why the heck is 180 up so high?
[9:31] Dave Killoran: One of the things that LSAC does is they release all this data on the number of scorers at each level of scoring. So 170, 171, 172, all the way up to 180 and all the way down to 120. If you’ve looked at those numbers, one of the things that jumps out is that the number of 180s, perfect LSAT scores, has jumped so far this year from 118 people to 174, which isn’t a lot, but when you look at the percentage jump, it’s over 47% more 180s, which is absolutely wild.
And I think one of your friends said that’s not organic, and it looks like, okay, is that cheating that’s actually causing that? I don’t think so entirely. I think partially. But you can’t look at these scores as if they are in isolation. You can’t just look at 180s and say that tells the whole story. You have to look at all the scores around it. And one of the things that always stands out to me is that 180 might be up 47.5%, but look at 179. If there was a trend here that said, “Oh, every score is up,” you’d expect 179 to be up as well. No, it’s down. It’s down 3%.
Then you go to 178, it’s up 19.5%, and then you go to 177, it’s down 3%. So it’s kind of like this weird up-down throughout these upper numbers, and you see that all the way through. 176 is up 22%, 175 is only up 9.6%, 174 is up 37%, but 173 is only up 3%. What’s making that happen? Is it just weirdness? People like even numbers. They want to just score evenly. They don’t like being odd. No, that’s not what’s happening.
What is happening there is really interesting. That is an effect of the scoring conversion scales that LSAC uses for some of these tests. And while they don’t release that, because they don’t release any of the content, we can figure it out by looking at this data. And what it tells me is this, is that when they give an LSAT, they’re allowing every LSAT to have a perfect score. They’re allowing people to get 180s, because it wouldn’t kind of suck if you took an LSAT, did perfectly, and you got a 179 because 180 wasn’t available.
But they’ve done this for years, and what they do is they drop out certain scores, especially in the 120s and in the 170s. And you can tell from this data that what’s happening is a number of these tests don’t allow you to get a 179. You go from 178, and the next question you get right isn’t a 179; it’s a 180. This is nothing new. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s been around for ages. But with the advent of a test that has fewer questions, there’s been more scores that have been eliminated. And what’s happened here is they’ve a lot of odd scores over time. That’s partially what’s driving that 180 up, is because you can’t get a 179, so all those people get pushed to the 180 level.
Now, when we talk about the high scores and you talk about, say, you know, does cheating cause this? And I said, “No, not entirely.” What I would say is cheating’s definitely involved in this. Also, the rise of accommodations has been growing every year for, gosh, five, six years that I’ve been looking at the data, and really even longer. And then, of course, you lost logic games, and I think that had a huge impact on this, changed the way people studied.
So you’re seeing all these different factors come together, and it’s created this balloon of really high scores at the very top. And I think next year’s change with the new LSAT, where they’re getting rid of the experimental section and putting it inside the scored sections, I think that’s just another step that’s designed to maybe re-normalize the scaling and, you know, the so-called curve, which really isn’t a curve. So lots of different factors causing it, but there are some scaling reasons that I think are playing a role there as well.
[13:23] Mike Spivey: So how do LSAT test taker numbers look for the rest of the year?
Dave Killoran: Well, this year’s almost over in terms of this cycle. The new cycle started on July 1st, and there’s only four tests for this particular year. There’s August, September, October, and November. And we’ve already had August, September, and October in the books, and each one of those was larger than last year. And that’s partially why you’re seeing a rise in the number of applicants. We’ve also got more people taking the test. Those two things go hand in hand, obviously.
So when we look at November, right now, you’d say, for sure, it is going to be larger than last November if you just did a straight comparison. There’s over 41,000 people registered for the November test, whereas last year you had 36,000 registered. But I will say this, and this happens every single time. You and I talk about it a lot, Mike. There’s always a melt-off of people taking each LSAT, so it’s not going to stay at 41,000. Every single day, you see hundreds of people drop out. By the time this is all said and done, it’s going to be about the same as last November, give or take 1,000, somewhere around there.
So that’s interesting, because the first three were larger. This one may be a little bit larger, but it could actually be smaller as well. And then you go into the January, February, April, June cycle of tests, and those are all smaller than these fall tests naturally. A lot of people try to get it done before the holidays. And so we’ll have to keep an eye on it, but if the number of test takers starts coming down, that will have a direct impact on the number of applicants as well. So I’m optimistic that that might happen, but it’s still too early to call.
[15:05] Mike Spivey: Last question. How fast or slow will this cycle be?
Dave Killoran: Yeah, in some ways, this is my favorite question because it’s something where you and I both have a strong feeling about what’s going to happen, and it’s the kind of information that actually helps people manage expectations. And right now, we’ve got the numbers up with applicants. We’ve got more high scores. If you’re a law school, your first response is, “What’s going on?” And you don’t know. You’re uncertain, and you’ve seen a lot of uncertainty in the last five or six years.
And so do you rush to make a judgment? No. That would not be smart. In fact, you hold back, and you slow down. And we’ve had some of the slowest cycles in history. I think we’d say last time might have been the slowest ever, certainly the slowest that I recall. I think this time it’s going to be even slower. And so that means that maybe if you’ve just put in applications, don’t expect an immediate response. Don’t even expect a response in a month or two, or maybe even three.
It’s going to take these schools time to sort out what they have in front of them. They’re going to be tracking these applicant numbers and LSAT scores just as closely as we all are. And if we’re having a hard time reading it precisely, you know they are as well, and so in the face of uncertainty, people hesitate, and that’s what law schools are going to do here. They’re going to slow down and take their time. This isn’t going to be a fast cycle where people get all sorts of admits early on.
Now, the one thing that would change that is if suddenly the number of applicants dropped way off and it started to go negative very quickly. Then schools would rush into the breach and say, “Oh, we’ve got to grab at what’s available on the table.” Then we’d see a turnaround. But I don’t know that it’s going to go hugely negative. Even if it came down to zero, I think they would still be pretty slow, and so my money’s on a slow cycle here. What are your thoughts on that?
[16:54] Mike Spivey: We were saying about three or four months ago on social media, on our Instagram and our TikTok accounts, that this would be the slowest cycle on record. And it was pretty easy to predict for the reasons you allude to, and also for the cheating stuff. I mentioned that more law schools are figuring out that some of their 175 to 180 test takers aren’t doing so well in class.
So I think for all the reasons you mentioned, that’s the other dimension. I think schools are going to actually go even slower because they’re going to want to interview some high scorers, read their writing, compare their writing, and make sure that these people can actually perform in the classroom. So it’s going to be slow for lots of people.
I mentioned on Reddit the other day, you had said we’re at 25% applications submitted. And, you know, by next week, we’ll be at, I don’t know, 28%, but the number of admits is going to be, like, 1% to 2%.
1% to 2% of the entire people who will be admitted have been admitted so far. Flip it. 98% of admits are still waiting to occur. I mean, you can take that as slow, bad news; it sucks waiting. Or you can take it as slow, good news. There’s still, like, so many admits that are going to go out and so many off the waitlist. Reddit and social media is going to get really frustrated, and you’re going to see optimism turn into doom.
“Every school sucks, and every human sucks, and my life sucks because it’s March and April, and I haven’t heard from a school.” So what I’m trying to do now is prepare people for that.
You mentioned three months, four months wait. There will be plenty of people, sadly, that have to wait six to eight months who then get multiple admits. No one’s putting a pin in this now, but just remember this for when it’s March and you haven’t heard back from 50% of your schools, when it’s April, May, and you haven’t heard back from 50% of your schools. Many people who applied September, October, November will be admitted March, April, May, June, July, August. That’s how slow things are.
Ending on this note: when the anxiety starts kicking in—“It’s been five months, and I haven’t heard from a school”—knowing that schools have a huge number of admits they have to make all summer 2027 long, I think is really important for people to hear, and I hope this was helpful.
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