Should I Retake The LSAT?

By offering lower prices while paying our tutors more than Kaplan and Princeton Review to put forth a high quality product, LSAT Wiz has attracted many independent young college graduates looking to improve their lives by financing their own LSAT prep and law school education. Therefore, we at LSAT Wiz have a moral obligation to utilize our expertise not only to improve their LSAT score, but help our students make positive choices that benefit them long term. It is because of this that we will outright say that except in very rare circumstances, every applicant should take the LSAT more than once.

Some large tutoring companies remain true to their mantra of being the McDonalds of LSAT tutoring, and providing LSAT prep geared to take the majority of students up a few points in a short period. This model takes people slightly below the national average, and moves them slightly above the national average securing admission into one of the nearly 200 accredited law schools in the country. This model was flawed but more effective for many applicants before the recession when simply “getting the degree” was enough.

The economic reality today is that there are roughly 45k freshly minted lawyers entering the job market each year for roughly 25k legal jobs. Nearly half of all newly minted lawyers are left in the dust, and of these “fortunate” 25k only about 12k get jobs lucrative enough to both service debt, and allow law school to be a valuable decision. At LSAT Wiz, our goal is not only to help people on the LSAT but the law school process generally in order to help them get into schools that give them an >50% chance of being one of these 12k lawyers in the coveted position of having a great legal job out of law school, or help them acquire a large merit scholarship to keep their student loan debt at a minimum.

The most straight forward path to getting into a school that places most of its graduates in six figure jobs, or acquiring enough money in merit scholarship to make attending a lower ranked school a prudent choice is a high LSAT score. This is why it is important for every applicant to achieve the highest score they are capable of. The difference between a 165 and 168 may only be three questions, but those 3 questions can be worth several hundred thousands of dollars and be the difference between a law school that gives you a 60% chance of placing in your geographic region, or a 30% chance of doing so.

The LSAT must not be perceived as merely a hurdle in becoming a lawyer, but as the greatest opportunity one has to become a successful lawyer (this is because law school exams are more competitive, subjective and largely predicated on an inherent skill set one cannot truly know they possess prior to law school). Additionally, because US News bases its ranking system only on each applicant’s highest LSAT score, the applicant who scores both a 160 and then a 170 is generally in a better position than the applicant who scores only a 169.

While we all would like to live our dreams as quickly as possible and make our parents proud, because of the financial turmoil our parents have put our economy in, our generation must be financially prudent. Just getting the degree was sufficient in 1990. However, in 2013 each student must get the best degree at the best price possible.

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