Though most schools weight the numbers a little more; your LSAT score and GPA have a big impact, law school essays are definitely taken into account. Moreover, your law school essay will make or break your application if you’re a borderline applicant, and it can even make up for a weak showing in the numbers department.
If you’re applying to law school, your law school essay, along with your LSAT score and your undergraduate GPA, is going to be the most important factor in both what schools will accept you and how much scholarship money they’re going to offer you.
Even if you’re a huge long shot for a particular school the admissions staff will read at least the first paragraph of your law school essay, just to see what you have to offer. On the flipside, if you’re a strong applicant to a particular school a bad law school essay can knock you out of the running if you’re too flippant or stuck-up.
Are you toying with the idea of attending law school? Are you just beginning your undergraduate program but acknowledge already that that is what you’re going to do? Then you’ll need to know what to do to brace yourself for law school. Is there a way to prepare for what may be the most arduous schooling you’ve ever been through to acquire your law degree? How can you ready yourself, is there a list of things that you’ll need to know.
There are a lot of different matters that will go through your brain when you decide to go to a school of law. You have your goals and your ambitions, but how do you ensure they come true? You plan. You gear up and you acknowledge where each step is going to take you on the way. You begin with your undergrad degree. You ensure that you’re taking all the courses that you require in order to apply to law school later on. You do your best in every class and begin ascertaining what you’ll need to analyse to take the LSAT.
A dear friend of mine decided to go to law school at fifty years of age. This is something that she had always wanted to do but did not have the time or finances for until she was fifty. The first year of school she worked full time as a social worker in the same agency with me along with taking three classes. I could not believe that she was able to complete the tasks that she needed to do for our high stress jobs in addition to studying and reading for her classes. She did say that the one thing she was not prepared for was the law school essay. She has always had an easy time taking test, but the law school essay is a completely new concept for her.
Two of the first classes she was taking had only one grade for the class and that was the score that you received on the written exam at the end of the semester. The reason they have some up with the law school essay is to have the students practice placing what they are learning into their own words. The thought is that writing the essays will help the student when they need to write briefs for court hearings. It also helps them learn to defend their stance on a certain point of law. For the timed tests the student is allowed to bring a lap top computer to the class; however it does need to be thoroughly examined to insure that the person is not cheating. I was surprised when my friend told me that the majority of the students hand write their law school essay rather than use a computer. She does this the majority of the time because her husband uses the lap top computer for work and so he does not want to risk losing information when the school checks the computer prior to the tests.
