Are you taking full advantage of the LSAC?

Sure, as the creators and administrators of the LSAT they are the ones responsible for all your woes with multi-colored dinosaurs, clowns exiting cars, and Thurgood Marshall – but the LSAC is much more than an organization with a mission statement that includes irritating pre-law students the world over. The LSAC is actually here to help, and in ways you may not have realized.

Believe it or not, but the LSAC wants you to do well on the LSAT. At least that’s how I’m interpreting their providing free prep materials on their site. LSAC prep materials are a nice supplement to Blueprint methods and include an overview of each section, general suggestions for each, and sample questions with in-depth explanations. These are definitely helpful, but make sure you use them to augment your understanding and to reinforce Blueprint methods, and not as a separate approach. And don’t worry about the practice exams they provide; between your homework, lessons and practice exams, you already have access to every LSAT question released – taking an outside PE would just expose you to repeats. The LSAC also provides an LSAT test day checklist, breaking down the dos and don’ts of test day (don’t worry, we’ll keep you informed of what you need and when as the test approaches). I especially like how they had to put “nondigital” next to analog watch (I guess the youth may not recognized this anachronism from an age before iPhones), or as a student of mine used to refer to them – one of those circle time watches.

The LSAC is also about much more than just the LSAT. The LSAC provides the Credential Assembly Service (CAS), meaning, they will be the middle man for all of your law school applications. This is the second reason why applying to law school is better than medical school (here’s reason 1) – you only need to send your application materials to the LSAC once, and they will compile and distribute them to whichever schools you apply to (while your pre-med friend needs to manage separate applications with different requirements for each school). I should note that Canadian schools don’t accept the CAS, for which I have one response: Eh?

You should come to think of the LSAC as your best friend in the law school application process. They provide a law school application checklist and even have tools to help you evaluate law schools (because it’s not all about that one number in that one ranking). And, perhaps most welcome, the LSAC can help provide monetary aid (as one of the first things you’ll notice about law schools is how damn expensive they are). The LSAC will help you apply for law school financial aid and will even let you apply to waive LSAC fees for the LSAT and CAS. And “because of the rigorous financial standards applied in the LSAC fee waiver process, some law schools waive their application fees to those who receive it” – icing on the cake.