[0:08] Mike Spivey: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. Today, we’re fully in the admissions category. Reddit crushed a trivia question we asked, so we said, “Bring on the AMA questions, and we’ll return the favor.” I think Anna Hicks-Jaco, our firm’s president, and I got to every single one of the AMA questions, and they were great questions. I think we’re going to do it again, and I think we’re going to do it either on Instagram or TikTok or both. So feel free to follow us @SpiveyConsulting on those two platforms. But without further delay, this is us answering the Reddit AMA. Hey, Anna.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Hey, Mike.
Mike Spivey: So Reddit, congrats. I asked a question, “Why would you generally rather start with your safeties?” And Reddit nailed it. There wasn’t, like, a single bad answer in that thread. So, as a “Congrats, you all did so well,” we did an AMA, and I think you and I are reading the AMA questions and answering as many as we can, right?
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Let’s do it. And good job to Reddit.
Mike Spivey: The first question comes from SecretLSA. They were in a field with 90% turnover, and I like the way they summed it up for us at the bottom. So basically, they took a job with a high turnover rate out of college. It wasn’t the right fit. Are they doomed? How would they explain the gap because of the turnover, because they were let go?
I think you’re going to help me here, but the one thing I would say is, many law school admissions officers have JDs, and a decent amount started off in big law firms. I can think of some deans of admission off the top of my head that all started off in big law. Well, that’s the law firm model. It’s called the “up and out.” It’s the Cravath model. The pyramid starts off big, and then 90% don’t make it all the way up the pyramid.
I would just say at the very beginning, you’re going to get a lot of understanding people if you explain somewhere that you were in a field with a high turnover rate, whether the turnover was self-selection on your end or selection by the employer, which again is called out and up. Another huge example is the military. You know, most people turn out four years or less. So I think law school admissions officers are going to be pretty understanding, but I also know that people often need to explain gaps on their resumes. So I’ll let you take over there.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, so I think to some degree, my thoughts on this depend on the timeframe for that turnover, which, I don’t know what specific types of jobs this person is looking at, but talking about jobs that you go in and you expect that a good number of these people are not going to stay in this job long term, so those people who are not staying in the job, are they leaving the role after a year? Are they leaving the role after a few months? I would say that those are two very different propositions.
I think that if you get a job after graduation, and then you leave that job within a very short span of time—I don’t know, Mike, maybe six months or fewer, maybe even less than a year, I don’t know—I think it presents a question mark. By no means is it going to preclude you from getting into law school or anything remotely close to that, but I think it’s a question mark. It’s, “Okay, what happened in this job that you left after three months or four months?” versus I think if you are in a job for about a year, and it’s in general high-turnover, and then you maybe go into something else, or you have a slight resume gap, I think that that is less of a question mark that needs to be explained. Although, as Mike alluded to, you can certainly write an addendum and talk about how this is just a field with high turnover in general, and depending on the situation, depending on the context, that might make sense.
[3:32] But in terms of, in general, speaking about resume gaps—first, I will say that this is something that we, to some degree, we just recently discussed in our podcast with Dean Natalie Blazer, UVA’s Dean for Admissions and Chief Admissions Officer. So if you’re interested in her answer to this question, go check that out. It was just published this fall, so I do recommend that one for her answer. But I can basically summarize what she said, which I think is pretty in line with how most folks in admissions would think about it, which is—it is not abnormal, especially in 2026, to have some form of resume gap, whether that is directly after graduation, whether that is after leaving one of these high-turnover roles, or something of that nature. It’s really not uncommon, because employment is difficult to get right now, especially for new college grads, and admissions officers do understand that. So the question is then, what do you do with that time? How are you responding to that reality? Because different people respond to that in different ways.
The particular person who asked this question, SecretLSA, brought up, what about starting some other project part-time or volunteer work, that kind of thing? I think that that is exactly the sort of direction that you might want to be thinking about if you are in this position where it looks like, “Okay, I think that this lack of employment is going to be going on for longer than, you know, a month. This is going to be a gap in my resume.” It is a positive thing to have something there.
So if you can go out and volunteer part-time, if you can go and get a part-time job, if you can go and work somewhere where maybe it’s not necessarily you utilizing your degree to the fullest, maybe it’s not you going out and working in exactly the field that you want to work in, but it is still better to have a job than to have no job. And that’s the case if you are working at a bakery. That’s the case if you are working as a server. Those types of roles absolutely give valuable experience for someone who is going to be in a client-facing sort of role, for example. So finding something to do with your time is hugely, hugely valuable.
For volunteering especially, you know, if you can do something that is related in some way to what you’re interested in doing after law school or something that is in the legal realm in general, just showing that you’re getting some exposure to what lawyers do on a day-to-day basis and working in that area, that can be really helpful.
So I think, overall, find something to do during that time. Find some way to show that you were trying to use your time to its fullest. Obviously, the job search is hard, and it’s grueling, and you probably are not going to have time to be volunteering 40 hours a week and then also doing this whole job search. That’s okay, but find something for there.
And then the only other thing that I will flag is that sometimes I will get questions about resume gaps where there’s some sort of personal element for why you are not working. So, for example, you are caretaking for a family member who is sick or elderly or whatever it might be. That is not considered a resume gap in the same way, and that is something that you would want to explain in an addendum. Admissions officers are human beings. Most of us have encountered some sort of situation like that, whether it’s directly or indirectly through family members, loved ones, people that we know. So if that is the situation, you don’t have to think about it in the same way, and certainly I would explain that in your application.
[6:43] Mike Spivey: You did address the big thing, “Am I doomed?” And the answer is no. There was a secondary thing, and we don’t have this person’s resume. I would love to, because then I could literally say, “Yes, write an addendum,” or, “No, do not.” But I like this other question that they said, which is, “More generally, do adcoms care about turnover rates, or is the logic more that you should have been successful in the role and stuck with it no matter what?” I’ll end on this note to help them specifically.
What you don’t want to introduce into an application is an excuse. What you do want to introduce is context. So if this role has a, like they said, has a 90% turnover rate and you turned over in the first year, I think that context matters. And without having their resume, I personally lean towards, yeah, a two-sentence addendum to all law schools, “Just FYI, I generally commit, and my other jobs in high school were all three years, but with this particular job, the turnover rate in the industry was 90%, and I just wanted to share,” something like that. They’re not going to hold that context against you if that’s reality. They only hold it against you if it’s an excuse. So we’re good.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Moving on!
Mike Spivey: Aggravating_Host_558. I kind of like this one because I’m going to tell a story about myself on it that you told me initially.
They have a 2.5 GPA from 11 years ago. In the time since, they have a 3.8 in their paralegal certificate program. LSAT PTs are in the high 160s. So they’re permutating—a word you and I made up. They don’t know their LSAT score yet, so it’s kind of hard for you and I to help them on the LSAT score. Just like the first person, I like how they end it: “Realistically, how much of an anchor is my terrible GPA, and how high of an LSAT do you think I need to feel safe applying this cycle?” There’s a lot of variance. We don’t know an LSAT score yet.
So just for Aggravating_Host, you’re not aggravating, because so many people ask this question, can you give me a feel—so what I would say is, you know, the question I think is apropos of not having an LSAT score yet. We know your GPA, we know that you have really good paralegal experience, and there’s a way you want to differentiate yourself with that. It’s not just that you have the paralegal experience, you want to express yourself. But I think this person is onto what I would generally say, which is, you should feel relatively safe if you apply to a broad range of schools within that context you gave us—if, and I need to double-click on “if,” because you still don’t have an LSAT score yet.
If your LSAT is above the 75th—and you and I can talk later in this podcast about LSAT inflation—and you apply to a broad range of schools, where by definition we know you’re going to be a splitter because of the 2.54, if schools need that LSAT and you apply to a number of schools, I think you should feel relatively safe. The problem is we don’t have cycle data yet. It’s a really tough question to answer without cycle data.
[9:28] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah. I think that that’s really the key is that applying very broadly. This goes for anyone with a very low GPA. This goes for anybody with really significant C&F issues, for example. The thing is that, if you have an LSAT score that’s above the 75th percentile, you have this great long-term work experience, you probably are going to find some schools—overwhelmingly likely, if you build a good, strong school list and you apply broadly—you are going to find some bites, you are going to find some admits in there. But you don’t know which schools they’re going to be, because it just depends on all of these various factors. And in general, it’s very difficult to predict admissions generally, but especially for folks who have something like a very low GPA, something like that 2.5 GPA. So applying broadly is really, really important to make sure that when the music stops, you do have a chair.
And then the other thing that Mike was mentioning, we don’t have data for this cycle yet. So if their 75th percentile LSAT was 166 in fall 2025, that’s even less helpful data. If it was a 166 in fall 2026, that’s slightly more helpful data. But again, we don’t know what’s going to happen this cycle. So you should be assuming that that is going to be even higher in terms of their targets for this cycle. Will they actually achieve an LSAT increase this cycle? No way to know, certainly. We were just talking to Dean Natalie Blazer, and she was saying, “I don’t know.” She doesn’t know what they’re going to do with their LSAT median this cycle. But it’s safest to assume it is going to be higher and build that broad school list based on that assumption, they’re targeting higher this cycle.
[10:59] Mike Spivey: I’m going to guess by the time we publish this podcast, we’ll finally have cycle data. Just so everyone knows, because this is inevitable what’s going to happen. Things will be inflated early and then slide down. So the cycle data may be scary early on, but right now, we have no idea what it is, so everything is a guess. Even as recent as this day, someone put up last cycle data. LSAC words it pretty inarticulately. They say “as of this date”—they’re talking about last cycle. I check at 4:00 AM every morning. We will put the new cycle data up once it’s up, and we’ll comment on it, and that’s going to be helpful for making early determinations about where the cycle’s going.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah. Anybody can look up that data. If you look it up and see that the number of applicants is in the range of 70,000, that means they’re talking about last cycle, because 70,000 people have not applied to law school this cycle as of October whatever.
Mike Spivey: So I like this one from Gray_Fox. I apologize we didn’t have time to get to it when we podcasted it with Dean Blazer. “How do admissions committees determine that a FGLI/broken home/severe adversity student made the most of the opportunities that they had? I’ve always wanted to better understand how committees make these decisions, because year over year, we see most schools are at 10% to 20% first-gen, which is interesting because as an applicant you don’t know how many people applying are first-gen, so that might be a misleading data point.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, and I think they acknowledge that. Some can be explained by self-selection bias, significantly lower quantitative qualifications. There are these other factors. But in terms of how admissions officers and how admissions committees are looking at first-generation, low-income students relative to these other applicants who, as this user says, grew up with far better circumstances and likely have objectively better accomplishments in a vacuum, how does that comparison look?
Mike Spivey: I’m curious your take, Anna.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, I mean, everything in admissions is within context, or whatever context you offer for admissions for them to understand. So that’s the first thing to note is that the only context they’re going to have about your life is context that you give them. So it’s one thing to check off a box that says “first-generation,” it’s one thing to check off a box that says “low-income,” and it’s another to actually explain what that means and what that meant within your life. Because there is a broad spectrum of people who identify as first-generation college students and had just drastically different circumstances growing up, drastically different emphasis on education coming from their families. All sorts of different things can be really, really different within that very broad bucket.
So to the extent that your circumstances have impacted your path to applying to law school today, you should be talking about that specifically, and that’s something that is great for one of those experience/perspective/background, the whole genre of application essays that have replaced “diversity statements.” That’s the first thing I will say, is that you have to give them that context. You can’t just assume that they are going to understand based on you identifying as first-generation.
And within that context, law schools do want more first-generation students. The first thing a lot of these admissions officers are looking at is, is this applicant—no matter who they are, doesn’t matter their background—is this applicant someone who we think can be academically successful within our law school? And that’s something that has to be evaluated, because it’s not about how much you have overcome and how far you have come, the accomplishments that you have accumulated and under what circumstances. It’s just about, “Okay, do we think this person is going to be able to come into law school and do well?” Because no law school wants to admit a student who is then going to come in and really struggle and then maybe have to drop out or, you know, be on academic probation or things like that. That’s not what an admissions office wants.
[14:42] So if you can clear that hurdle of, okay, your LSAT score, your academic performance, your objective factors point toward, you are someone who can be successful at that law school, that’s when we really get into this holistic evaluation of everything that goes into your application, including all of those life circumstances. And I think that admissions officers do have the context of seeing years and years of first-generation students come in, folks who might not necessarily have, oh, that, like, really prestigious internship that somebody else might have had. But you can tell from their essays, from everything that they’ve had to overcome, “This person is a hard worker, this person is smart, this person is going to fight for their goals and for what they want to do,” and then seeing those students come in and fight and be excellent students and work really hard and do incredible things. That context is very much taken into account in that holistic review sense—which, Mike used to not even like to use the word holistic. Now I think we use it a fair bit. But you have to first clear that bar of academic success.
Mike Spivey: “Holistic” was just so often overused because U.S. News had so much weight behind LSAT and GPA that every law school would just say, “We read holistically,” but everything started at GPA and LSAT as that filter. None of those metrics aren’t as important, believe it or not, even though there’s GPA inflation and LSAT inflation. In some sense, there’s more than in any other time in my 28-year career.
To your point, once you meet the standard of “Can this person succeed at our school,” there’s an ability of schools to read every line in the application holistically that I wasn’t afforded when I was an admissions officer, and maybe you weren’t even when you were an admissions officer, admissions dean several years ago. Do you agree with that?
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Definitely. I think that we have heard from a ton of people in admissions that they are able to look more holistically at applicants within the current world of admissions.
Mike Spivey: So piggybacking off of that, the way I would answer this person’s question is, after Anna’s answer, and after showing in your application that you could do well in school—I have admitted a lot of people, and I’ve now seen a lot of people admitted, even when I was averse to throw out the word holistic left and right like a lot of people did, I’ve admitted a lot of people who have extraordinary resilience because of the severe adversity, and I keep clicking on those two words in this. Because of the severe adversity they have overcome in their lives, they prove to me they have a lot of resilience.
So let me just be candid, and this is one thing I like about our podcast, is I can say things I probably couldn’t say maybe when I was in admissions. Often, early cycle, the numbers are going to matter the most. Another reason I was always afraid to throw out “holistic” in admissions. Early cycle, if you’re below both medians, you’re probably not going to hear back from the school. But late cycle, I think almost every dean of admission and admissions officer would agree with me, they’re holding on to a certain number of people who they want to admit once they have their numbers figured out in their heads. And to me, that was so often the person that had overcome a life of severe adversity, even if they were below both medians. I held on and I held on, and when I knew I could admit them, late cycle, they got their admit, even if they were below both medians.
[17:54] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, I think that’s very relevant for the part of this person’s question where they were talking about potentially being in this situation where you have significantly lower quantitative qualifications than some of these other applicants. That’s a really good point. Even if you are receiving many more waitlists than you were hoping for, do not take that as a “no.” Do not take that as a “no.” If you’re below the numbers and a school waitlists you, that’s a good outcome, because that means they still want to consider you even though you are below both of those medians. And they can foresee a situation where they would be able to admit you and they’d be really excited to admit you.
Mike Spivey: I’m going to give a double negative. Schools don’t deny you for a reason. Right? So they waitlist you for a reason. There’s something in there they’re interested in. It could be a 180 but you have a C&F, so they’re pausing, but it could be the opposite. Could be that you overcame a huge amount of things in your life and they really want to keep an eye on you. And I just have so many memories of that personally. I don’t want to give them because some of the stories are actually kind of deep, but the memories are flooding into my head of people who I held onto who I was able to admit.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah. The last thing I’ll say is just that, resilience, Mike, you used that specific word, and I think that that is a really good word to use here, because that is hugely important in law school. Law school is hard. If someone is coming to the law school application process having faced zero challenges—which I don’t think anybody’s coming to the process having faced zero challenges—but if someone is coming to the process without having overcome significant challenges, law school is going to be a challenge. Law school is going to have hard moments. So you have already demonstrated that you are able to overcome really challenging things, and that’s huge.
Mike Spivey: Yeah. You’re also probably going to be able to relate later in life to your clients who, in the criminal justice system, are facing the biggest struggle of resilience in their lives, or in the transactional world are dealing with things that they’ve never dealt with before. So your calmness in this storm is really helpful for you as a lawyer. So for anyone out there listening to this podcast, the things you’ve overcome now are going to help you not just in law school, but all the way down the road. I could go off, as you know, resilience and mental health are really important, not just to me, but I think to every applicant in the process, but we can move on.
[19:59] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Sure. Apock asks, “Everyone has an opinion about the KJD tax. Is it real, or do schools accept KJDs at approximately the rate that the KJDs make up of the applicant pool?” And then they give an example. “Is it just proportional fewer KJDs are applying, or are KJDs”—and by that we mean people who went straight from kindergarten to law school without breaks in school, that is someone who is applying from their senior year in college—is there actually this “tax”? Is there this disadvantage?
Mike Spivey: Have we data-mined this with our own internal data?
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yes. I don’t have the exact numbers, but our data certainly bears out this tax, as do our conversations with folks who are in admissions. It is very much on current admissions officers’ and current admissions deans’ minds, the difficulties that folks without full-time work experience face in law school and in the job search.
Mike Spivey: Yeah, and what I would say is, it’s not like applying to business school where it’s almost the sine qua non, you have to have work experience. But because of two reasons—we’ve been flooded the last three years with more applications; if there were a dearth of applications, schools couldn’t be as choosy about this stuff, so reason number one. And reason number two, which is tied with one, it’s no less important, what U.S. News did three years ago is they changed their equation of the rankings. 58% of the rankings are outcome. 58% are bar passage and employment, outcomes-based. And so they really added a lot of weight to that.
So what’s a great way to prove that you’re employable? Well, you’ve been employable in the past. What I don’t want to say, because I think sometimes I hear people go too far. Obviously, if you really want to apply KJD, go for it. There’s so many reasons why you would need to, including the time value of money, but you’re probably getting some bump in how you interview and how you’re read if you do have work experience.
So what I would say is, yeah, there is a KJD tax. I don’t think it’s as remarkable as sometimes doomsday posts make it out to be. There are many, many students in many, many law schools who went straight KJD, but I think there is a little bit of a tax now.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah. I would go further than to say a little bit, even. I think it’s pretty significant, frankly. But by no means is that applicable equally to all KJDs. That means very different things for different people. Some folks are coming to the admissions process having virtually no work experience whatsoever, whether full-time, part-time, whatever. Other people have been working two part-time jobs throughout college and have internships every summer and have a ton of experience, and a lot of exposure to the legal field, and a lot of these skills that can be signaled by full-time employment.
There are KJDs in every top law school. Every law school you can find has them. So by no means is it insurmountable, but if you were talking about, in a vacuum, will I do better applying if I have full-time work experience? Almost certainly.
This is one thing, and several of the things that we’ve been talking about have been admissions trends that have changed over time. And I’m curious, Mike, things change significantly in law school admissions, and I imagine it might be wildly different than it was for you when you started out in admissions 27 years ago. But I’m curious, what is your current biggest frustration with admissions?
Mike Spivey: I’ll do the biggest challenge that also annoys me and then the biggest annoyance about admissions currently. And you’re right, 28 years ago, it was mostly the slowness of it, because everything was in file drawers. We had rooms and rooms, and you had to go pull out a file, call the person’s number, and I’m doing, like, a rotary phone. I wasn’t quite that old. But I mean, things have changed so dramatically. So in this current moment, with GPA inflation and with LSAT inflation, they’re real, and they’re challenging.
Now, I’m going to contradict myself in a second and say the doomsdaying also is an annoyance, particularly from people selling products. But I think the biggest challenge is, it is a hard landscape with not just more people applying. You can’t control that. Obviously you can’t control LSAT inflation, but it’s real. You can just look at the bell curve. It hardly looks to me like a bell curve anymore, so thick at the high end. And GPA inflation, and this is what I’m getting at, and this comes from you, but I thought of it the other day when someone asked me about how hard is it to get into a T14 with a 2.9 or a 3.0 GPA, and I think a question coming up hits on that.
[24:14] As you know, I have a 4.3 law school GPA from a top 14 law school, and I guarantee you I couldn’t get admitted right now because of LSAT and GPA inflation. I don’t have an LSAT score, but even if I got a 180, with LSAT and GPA inflation. I have proven with one class that I—a 3L class, no 0L, 1L, 2L experience; I guess you could argue I had a ton of 0L experience—never had taken a law school class. I proved to that school that I could get an A+ in the class; now they wouldn’t, I don’t think they would admit me in the law school admissions process. That’s how difficult it is. So it’s a frustration to me that people with lower GPAs from years ago now also have to fight the LSAT inflation problem too. It’s a real challenge.
I think as far as the annoyance, every day, Anna, as you know I get up really early, I get up around 3:00, 3:30 AM. And part of my day is, when no one else is around me making noise, is scanning the internet particularly law school admissions and law school employment and law school administration threads and media interviews. And there’s so much bad advice. I’m going to put this into two categories. There’s bad advice from people that go away quickly. Do you remember years ago someone on Facebook claimed to be a former dean of admissions, and they weren’t?
Anna Hicks-Jaco: I think I know exactly who you’re talking about, yeah. With the video?
Mike Spivey: The video, and they said that your personal statement was 95%—like, “Don’t worry about your LSAT and GPA, hire me for $1,000 an hour, and I’ll make your personal statement an A+.” But they went away.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve seen that person since.
Mike Spivey: You know, we were asked to call them out and we did. We knew that they were lying. Technically they were breaking laws.
So those people go away, but there’s a lot of people that post every day or post often, a week. I heard this on a podcast the other day at one of my 3:00 AM “all right, let me find out what people are saying in the market.” Two people were podcasting, and they said, you know, you don’t want to be unique in admissions. You want to be like every other person. That’s the exact opposite. Admissions is about differentiating from the 10,000 apps or the 6,000 apps the person has just read all year long. That’s horrible advice.
So I think the biggest frustration is because of how diffuse social media has allowed us to be, people can claim a lot of things. I mean, I’m just reading this book, Sapiens, you know, how humans evolved. The smartest species shouldn’t necessarily be alive today. 80,000 years ago, I couldn’t outwit a baboon in an argument. In the Serengeti, the baboon was going to win no matter how compelling my argument was. But because humans can be so convincing with language now, and people can say things with so much confidence and repeat it day after day, there’s a ton of advice. The reason why it annoys me, and then I’ll get to number two, is because it’s hurting applicants. They don’t know what’s right from wrong, and often it’s making them apply to law school the wrong way.
And then the second thing that piggybacks off of this is, I mentioned earlier in the podcast, yeah, there is GPA inflation and grade inflation, but you see people just using that to sell their products by saying day after day, “Oh my God, look at this new median. It’s so inflated.”
Anna Hicks-Jaco: The sky is falling.
Mike Spivey: The sky is falling, and they’re using “the sky is falling” to get people to follow them and listen to their bad advice. I think you and I both flagged someone saying, “Oh my God, look at UVA’s median. Their new medians just dropped. Look how horrible they are.” Well, their medians were the exact same as the year before. You don’t have to post every day about the sky’s falling.
I think I would sum up all of this in, give yourself the opportunity to take breaks from this all. You don’t have to listen to the doomsday people every day, and you don’t have to get so overly into the process that you’re following 12 different people on Instagram or 18 when you have 2 or 3 or 4 schools that you trust.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah. I think that being aware of the current competitiveness of law school admissions is important to the extent that you are broadening your school list, to the extent that you’re making sure that you are applying to a good, healthy range of schools where you’re going to get some admits. And beyond that, I think that freaking out about how difficult things are and how high medians are is only going to harm you. The more cool, calm, and collected that you can stay in this process, generally, the better.
Mike Spivey: My annoyance is not applicants freaking out. That happens every year, and it’s quite understandable. I just think I would personally tune out the “experts” who are freaking out on a daily basis.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, that’s fair.
Mike Spivey: That was a good question. I liked you throwing in an organic one. Back to the Reddit ones.
[28:33] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Okay. Next Reddit question from Altruistic_Block_742. “If you are somewhat significantly below 25th percentile for a school’s GPA median, but 5+ years strong work experience, how important is it to be above the 75th percentile for the LSAT, especially if you’re already above the LSAT median?” So I would say to some extent, we have answered part of this question with our first question about the 2.5 GPA. But I do think that this has an interesting specificity in it of talking about, is it important specifically to be above the 75th if you’re above the median?
Mike Spivey: I think people online often think that law schools are sitting around trying to figure out from day one what their 25ths and 75ths are going to be, and they’re not.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: They are doing that with medians.
Mike Spivey: They are doing it with medians. But my point is, if you’re above a median, I’m not overly worried about you having to be above 75th. And I think in their candid moments, almost every admissions officer would probably say that. Maybe later at the margins it’s helpful to have a 180 and be differentiated, but early on, they’re focusing on medians. They’re not focusing on 25ths and 75ths. 25ths a little more because you don’t want to get below bar passage, but not the 75ths.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, I think that a 75th can tell you some information as far as the sorts of applicants who a law school is bringing in, but I would not be thinking of a law school as targeting a specific 75th, so you want to be above that 75th. It’s more just an indicator of how they are looking at applications. And so, you know, if you can be above that 75th percentile for the LSAT, that means you are likely going to be very strong compared to the overall LSAT that they’re looking for. But it is by no means the same as or looked at in the same way as a median. The real important thing is the median. Keeping in mind the caveat always of, just because their listed on their website LSAT median is a certain number, that by no means means that that is what they are targeting as their median for this cycle.
Mike Spivey: Yeah. And do you want to explain what target medians are real quick?
[30:31] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Oh, sure. So as Mike was just saying, law schools are not sitting around before they open their applications thinking, “What do we want our 75th to be?” But they do target medians. So that is typically a discussion that is coming from, at the leadership level, at the dean level, and it’s a conversation that is had in terms of the overall strategic direction of the school and what they want the admissions office to be doing. That target median that they set at the beginning of the cycle might change depending on how applications are actually coming in, but in general, you can assume that a law school typically, at least at the beginning of the cycle, is going to be targeting going up in their LSAT median. In general, it’s safest to assume that.
A law school might have a 165, for example, LSAT median this fall. I would assume that they are probably targeting a 166 for next fall. And if the data starts coming in and they have a lot of high LSAT scores, they might start targeting a 167. If the data starts coming in and they don’t have a lot of high LSAT scores, they might say, “Okay, let’s pull back. Let’s try to keep our 165. That’s the strategy that we are going to be using.” And that strategy really does inform how they are treating different numbers in terms of just that quantitative side of things.
If they choose to change that target LSAT median from the 166 to 165, suddenly your 165 looks very, very different in their application pool and in how they are looking at their applicants.
Mike Spivey: I can’t stress this enough. This is the most important part of this podcast conversation, much more than me venting about annoyances, although I appreciate the opportunity to do so.
When you are looking at our median tracker, you’re looking back in time. In my entire career, I’ve yet to meet a dean tell the admissions office, “Do worse.” It’s yet to happen. Now, you bring up a really good point that I also want to stress, Anna, which is why we keep talking about “we don’t have any cycle data yet.” If the cycle data—and this could be the case, because it’s blown up for three years—if the cycle data comes out and it’s low early on, applicants are down, the LSAT is more organic, believe it or not, “dear listener,” piggybacking off Dean Z and me two weeks ago, a school can actually target going down one LSAT.
They’re probably not going to target going down GPA, because GPA inflation is kind of here to stay. They literally, in a down cycle, could target going down one LSAT and keeping GPA if they think other schools are going to go down two. Or they could target going up one or even up two LSAT points. If things blow up, they might take plus one, as you mentioned, Anna, and take it to plus two or plus three. But all of these are in the pantheon of possibilities. So that’s why, every time I’m online posting, everyone’s using the word “medians.” Well, if you’re using medians, and you’re looking at medians, you’re looking back in time. So that’s why I’m pretty adamant about always saying “target medians.”
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, there was a period of time for several years where admissions was pretty stable. In general, there were fairly similar numbers of applicants, in general. The LSAT bell curve stayed fairly similar. This was for just a few years, really. And in that world of admissions, I think it was fairly easy to say, “Let’s look at last year’s median. Let’s make our plans based on those medians.” And that’s just not the world that we live in now.
You can look at our median tracker. How many schools have gone up one point? How many schools have gone up two points? We’ve seen a number of schools go up three points, as you were saying, Mike. Things are changing. And will that continue forevermore? No. Will it continue next year? Maybe.
Mike Spivey: Yeah. To be determined. This is probably the most volatile time in admissions, as far as schools moving up and down and rankings, which are silly. Schools moving up and down and plus three LSAT. You and I were joking about flying everyone out to Napa again because schools are coming in with 175 LSATs. You’re seeing 4.0 median GPAs. It’s a volatile time. It’s the most volatile time I’ve ever seen. More volatile than the Great Recession—well, in admissions.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is not quite that volatile in terms of employment, thank goodness.
Mike Spivey: Okay, so we’re down to—how would you say this person’s username, Anna?
Anna Hicks-Jaco: I’m between Drucifer, rhymes with Lucifer, and Dr. Ucifer, which I suppose also rhymes with Lucifer.
Mike Spivey: I just read it as Lucifer. It’s too similar. It’s a very friendly, happy question, but I see the name, and I read it with sinister intent. There is no sinister intent. We’re going to call him Dr. Yucifer.
[34:32] Anna Hicks-Jaco: I like it. So “Dr. Ucifer” 271 asks, they are a soon-to-be applicant going to law school for a career change. They say that they had an underwhelming undergraduate GPA 15 years ago, a 3.2, and a significantly better GPA for their master’s, which they completed 5 years later. So they had a 3.8 for their master’s. They’re also currently completing a graduate certificate program with a high GPA, another 3.8. “I consistently read,” they say, “on law school admissions subreddits that admissions committees don’t care one lick about graduate GPAs because only undergraduate GPAs contribute to their rankings metrics. How much truth is there to this? Does graduate GPA carry any real weight in admissions considerations, or am I stuck with my undergraduate GPA being a permanent albatross around my neck?”
Mike Spivey: I’m almost Dr. Ucifer, because my undergrad GPA was around there. It wasn’t great. My business school GPA was the highest in the business school, so it was about a 4.0. And it wouldn’t have helped me in the law school admissions process. I mean, maybe if I was able to eloquently say, I graduated number one in my business school—which might not even be true, I might’ve been two or three. If I was able to eloquently put that in there, that might help. But the GPA itself, and here’s the reason why, and I think it’s important to know. I mentioned earlier about you want to differentiate. You do want to be as unique, and everyone is unique. Almost all graduate school GPAs are super high. Now, that’s not, believe it or not, it’s not the case for law school, because so many law schools are graded on a curve. But if you have a law school GPA, unless you’re an extreme outlier—like one person in almost 30 years I’ve seen—you want to go back and get a JD from a second law school, they’re looking at graduate school GPAs that are all 3.8, 3.9, or 4.0, so there’s no differentiation. So saying, “Hey, I’ve matured intellectually. I’ve matured academically. Look at my 3.9 in this graduate degree program.” Correct me if I’m wrong, Anna, your typical ad com, they’re not going to hold that against you, but they’re just going to move right past that, and it’s not going to sink in as a positive or a negative data point.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, I think in general it’s likely to be relatively neutral, or, if you have a 4.0, which I will say, I totally agree, a 3.8 is a great GPA, that’s a high GPA. But we also have to recall, in the context of law school admissions, there are a lot of law schools where a 3.8 is below their 25th percentile, even. But that’s talking about undergraduate GPA, which is the only one relevant for rankings and the only one relevant for their metrics. So on that level, as Dr. Ucifer mentioned, the undergraduate GPA is the only one that matters. In terms of this “soft factors” of looking beyond just the hard numbers, I think you’re probably right, Mike. For most situations, it’s going to be a neutral or, you know, okay, this is a positive sign, but it’s probably not really making any notable substantive impact, because so many of these other GPAs are really, really high.
But the one thing I will caveat there, Mike, is that that is coming from the perspective of someone who worked with relatively competitive law schools. I think there’s this whole spectrum of different law schools, and I think that it’s probably much less consistent really high master’s GPAs at some schools that in general have lower undergraduate GPA medians. So I think it probably has more potential to make a positive difference the less competitive the law school is in general.
[37:51] Mike Spivey: You bring up a good point. When I was at Vanderbilt making admissions decisions, I was at a school where a lot of people who wanted to target Vanderbilt had 3.9 master’s degree program GPAs. And what you’re saying is when you were at Syracuse, it wasn’t all 3—all I saw was 3.9s, so there was no differentiation.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: There was certainly much more differentiation in our pool at Syracuse, for sure. So is that 3.8 in your master’s differentiating in that circumstance? Yes, it’s more differentiating. I would say it almost never was a situation where a high master’s GPA made me feel, “Okay, now I’m really confident,” in lieu of having a really high LSAT or other factors that really build up, “Okay, this person’s going to be a successful student,” that data point alone was not typically going to be, like, the difference maker in terms of, “Oh, I’m sure this person is going to be academically successful in law school.” Because as you were talking about, Mike, it’s different, other graduate programs from law school. Law school is typically more challenging.
Mike Spivey: Yeah. Great question. Good username. We’re down to the last one. I read this person as Monkey, but it is “Movkey.”
Anna Hicks-Jaco: MovkeyB? MovkeyB.
Mike Spivey: A 1L—that’s always interesting to me when law students are on the admissions board—at a school with a new president and a new dean, asking a great question. Believe it or not—I think you know this, Anna—when schools first started allowing the GRE, they used to come to us to explain to them how it factored into rankings. Did you know that?
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, I was around for some of that.
Mike Spivey: Okay. Well, yeah, I know you were around, but sometimes I’m doing my own stuff and you’re doing your own stuff.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: I edited some of those reports.
Mike Spivey: Okay. Right. This is how far the GRE has come, I think. We used to have to explain this as a firm to law schools, and now that it’s equalized, I don’t even know the answer to this anymore. The way I would have answered Movkey four years ago, three years ago is, well, it’s going to be a lot slower for you. Is that still the case if you have a GRE versus an LSAT?
[39:38] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Okay, so the full question is, “I’ve always been curious about the reality behind how law schools treat the GRE versus the LSAT and how students should evaluate GRE scores when deciding if they should or shouldn’t take the LSAT, cancel reportable LSAT scores, et cetera, assuming they already have a GRE in hand.” So as Mike alluded to, this is something that has been changing over time. For a long time—well, long time relatively—if an applicant had both a GRE score and an LSAT score on file, the law school could not choose. The applicant could not choose. It was imposed upon them that the LSAT score was what they had to report. The LSAT score was the thing that was going to go into their medians. That was decided. That has changed now. So law schools can choose to report only the GRE if your GRE is stronger, which, if your GRE is stronger percentile-wise than the LSAT or relative to their medians, they’re going to opt to report your GRE. They can make that choice. So in that regard, a GRE is much more helpful, even if you have a reportable LSAT score, than it was a few years ago. You know, several years ago, if someone had both, we would just say, “You pretty much should just act as if you are applying with the LSAT score,” because functionally that’s how it was. So on one side of things, that’s better for you if you have a higher GRE score than your LSAT score, or if you’re trying to think about “Should I risk taking the LSAT even though I have this high GRE?”
On the other side of things, you have to keep in mind that the LSAT has been the standard for admissions for a very, very, very long time. The GRE is much newer, it’s much smaller numbers within the law school applicant pool. And so, to the degree that law school admissions officers are seeing an LSAT score reported, even if they don’t necessarily have to report that LSAT score in their eventual medians, they are going to see any reportable LSAT scores. So if it’s from within the last five years, it’s going to be something that they are going to know as they go through your application, and they can’t just, you know, get rid of that information. So it is going to have some sort of effect, even if just psychological. They are going to start seeing you within that spectrum of their whole applicant pool and the other LSAT scores that they’re seeing. That’s not an effect you can negate entirely just by how things are being reported. But at the same time, that GRE can be much more important even if you do already have an LSAT score.
So if you’re deciding whether you should or shouldn’t take the LSAT, I would say it’s less risky now to go ahead and take the LSAT and see how it goes. I would still only do that once you are fully prepared, once you have consistent practice tests that are higher in percentile than your GRE score. If you were practice testing lower, then I wouldn’t do it. But if you feel really good about your ability to get a higher LSAT score and to position yourself in even sort of a similar percentile, I think the LSAT can be easier to predict, a faster process. As you were talking about, Mike, the GREs, it can be a slower process. I think it’s less risky to just go ahead and take it. But be aware that regardless of the scores, law schools are going to see them, and that is going to have some impact on their evaluation of your application. But it can be now more of a soft factor than a hard factor if your GRE is stronger and that’s the one that they’re going to report.
Mike Spivey: Right. Still a little bit slower though, right?
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Yeah, I think in general, slower. If you’re someone where a law school is taking enough GRE applicants that they are reporting their GRE medians, and if you are above all three of those, verbal, quantitative, and writing, if you’re above all of those medians, if a law school has, like, target medians for their GRE, there are, as we’ve been talking about, way fewer applicants applying with the GRE. So if you’re above those, and also you have a high GPA, and you have a great application in general or at least an application that has no red flags, no issues, you might get a pretty quick response, certainly. But in general, I think it’s safest to assume that the process will move a little bit more slowly for you.
Mike Spivey: Right. But not to talk anyone out of taking the GRE if that’s their sweet spot and the LSAT is not.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: No, no, not at all. I think it’s better to apply with a high GRE now than it has been in the past. And if you can score really highly on the GRE and maybe not quite so highly on the LSAT, by all means, that very well could be the best choice for you. Just do all your research, make sure that all the schools that you’re interested in take the GRE, etc. etc.
[43:44] Mike Spivey: One of the things that’s trended in the right direction, years ago—again, years ago relatively speaking—my understanding from people in the ABA Council of Higher Education, LSAC fought really hard to keep the GRE out of the process. Now the GRE is not only in the process, but more and more schools treat it, as far as a determinant for law school admission, very similar to the LSAT. Anything that gives them choice, doesn’t impose bias against them, I think is good for applicants.
Let’s end on this note, I do owe you a question. Name one thing trending in the positive direction in law school admissions or law school, Anna.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Man, well, the easy one, as we’re talking about the GRE, is JD-Next. More and more schools are taking JD-Next. They are actually admitting students under JD-Next, because I think there was a period, and for some schools they’re still in this period, where they are technically accepting JD-Next as an alternative to the LSAT or to the GRE but are very, very, very cautious about admitting anyone, and very well might not admit any JD-Next-only applicants in a given year.
But I think law schools are starting to see some of these students come in and be able to evaluate their performance as they come in, and the more JD-Next folks who do come in and do well in law school, the more comfortable they’re going to feel in the future. We’ve done past episodes about JD-Next. I’m not going to get really into that right now. We’ll link a past episode about it so that you can learn about it if you are interested. But I think that’s definitely a positive. I think, as you said, the more choice, the better, and JD-Next also, at least as of the most recent data that I have seen, really minimizes the biases that are present in the LSAT and the GRE and most standardized tests. So I think that’s awesome.
[45:19] Mike Spivey: We’re going to end it on positives. Applications are being read more holistically, for multiple reasons. There’s more options for applicants to take things like JD-Next and the GRE. So there’s a little bit more ability to exercise free will in the admissions process versus mandated structure that we saw five years ago. We can end on that note, if you agree.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: I like it. I agree. Well, thank you, Mike, for your time. Thank you to our listeners, as always, and we hope to see you next time.
Mike Spivey: Feel free to follow us and hit the like button if you enjoyed this. Thanks, all.
Anna Hicks-Jaco: Bye!
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