Archive : Law School

The online education movement gathered more steam this week, as Caltech, Duke, Rice, Johns Hopkins, and other global universities announced that they will join Stanford and Princeton in offering free online courses through Coursera. Upping the ante even further, Caltech and the University of Pennsylvania will invest a combined $3.7 million in the online learning provider, which only launched last year and has already partnered with 16 universities.

While these moves aren’t strictly in the graduate education space (which we mostly cover), it’s important to note how quickly schools are adopting online learning as a legitimate alternative (or, in many cases, a complement) to traditional classroom-based teaching. Between Coursera and other initiatives such as MIT’s and Harvard’s EdX joint venture, it seems that there will be no shortage of innovation in this space in the coming decade.

As different as applicants are from one another, it’s amazing how often we see them make the same mistakes over and over. We recently asked our team of admissions consultants, “What mistakes do you see applicants make most often?” and we frequently heard the same themes: not highlighting extracurricular activities in the right way, using the same applications for multiple schools, and not answering honestly when asked for a personal weakness.

Admissions officers want to get to know applicants and gain an insight into their goals, motivations, values and other personal attributes — what makes them tick and how they might fit into the program. Unfortunately, many applicants lack the self-awareness to give admissions officers what they want.

When perusing the data and seeing the average starting salaries at the top-ranked MBA programs and law schools, it’s easy to get the impression that getting into a top graduate school can turn you from an 80-pound weakling into a money-making, world-beating dynamo. But don’t be fooled. Yes, these schools can significantly improve your earnings power, but to get in you have to demonstrate that you’re already a rockstar.

“Wait a minute,” you might be saying, “If I’m already a rockstar, then why do I need the school?” That’s a good question, but in your question already lies the answer.

When it comes to getting into the world’s most competitive graduate schools, many applicants have a “I’ll worry about it later” mentality. If they’re fortunate enough to get into a school like Harvard, the thinking goes, then they’ll gladly deal with the question of how to pay for it. While this is somewhat understandable (Why worry about how you’ll pay for a yacht if you won’t ever set foot on one to begin with?), applicants owe it to themselves to consider the true cost and the true reward of the educational opportunity before them.

Many will tell you that borrowing money to pay for school is an investment and not debt, but try telling that to the loan services when they send out the monthly bill. Not only that, but the analysis is rarely about going back to school or not going, but rather about making the best possible choice. It may very well be the case that attending your dream school without the aid of scholarships or grants is the best decision, but it might also be true that a secondary opportunity starts to look a lot better when the calculator comes out.

We are excited to announce today, along with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), that Veritas Prep has awarded American Heroes Scholarships to 50 IAVA Member Veterans. These test preparation and admissions consulting scholarships will allow U.S. Military Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to pursue a wide variety of interests including business, environmental science, history, law, medicine, museum studies, nutrition, psychology and public administration.

Of the 50 scholarships awarded, 31 IAVA Member Veterans will receive a free Veritas Prep GMAT prep course, either in-person or online, and Veritas Prep’s full suite of 15 GMAT course books and extensive resources; 19 will receive six hours of graduate school admissions consulting with a Veritas Prep admissions expert related to the graduate program of their choice. In addition to the scholarships announced today, Veritas Prep is extending discounts to all qualified IAVA Member Veterans; offering 50 percent off Veritas Prep GMAT courses and 25 percent off admissions consulting services.

What do you know… Another year has already gone by. We’re so full of opinion and points of view here at Veritas Prep that we thought we should commit ourselves to another round of prognosticating about what the coming year will bring in the worlds of standardized tests and grad school admissions. It will be fun to check in at the end of the year to see how we did.

Without further ado, here are six things that we predict will happen in 2012:

Happy New Year! Hard to believe a whole year has already gone by again. At this time last year we laid out six predictions for 2011. We exhibited restraint by avoiding predictions about flying cars and holographic teachers, but we did stick out our collective neck on a few matters. Now it’s time to see how we did.

More Schools Will Adopt Video and Other Less Traditional “Essay” Questions
We were at least partly correct here. While at least one school actually backed away from utilizing video response (UCLA Anderson, we’re looking in your direction), other programs embraced Twitter and experimented with ultra-short essay responses. In other cases, schools made iPads an official part of the application review process, paving the way to allowing them to view multimedia responses in coming years. We expect this trend will only continue in the coming year.

It’s hard to believe that 2011 has already come and gone. Why do these years seem to keep going by faster and faster? As we at Veritas Prep wind down the year, we thought we’d share some of our most popular posts and most interesting topics from the past 12 months.

We hope that this blog has provided you with some useful insights as you’ve studied for the GMAT or slaved over your grad school applications. Sometimes we have a little fun, and sometimes we veer off topic to talk about what interests us, but everything written here comes from the same place: We want to help you be successful in your pursuit of grad school and in your career overall!

For the past two years Yale University has offered a three-year joint JD/MBA degree, offered between Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management. Now, after a nearly year-long review, the Yale Law School faculty has voted to make the joint degree a permanent offering. While the SOM faculty has yet to vote, it is expected that it will also vote in favor of making the program permanent.

Yale’s JD/MBA program is only six semesters long, with no summer component, making it one of the shortest such programs in the country. Students spend two academic years in the Law School and one year in the School of Management. While Yale’s accelerated JD/MBA is not the first such program in the nation — Northwestern, Duke, and Penn also offer similar programs — the fact that Yale Law School has finally embraced this model is big deal, and it could mean that more top universities will soon follow.

Veritas Prep has just released the results of its 2011 Law School Applicant Survey! Part of the work we do in monitoring admissions trends is staying current on what applicants are thinking. This survey, now in its second year, is part of that ongoing effort.

Our new white paper — titled “Inside the Minds of Law School Applicants” (PDF link) — contains some very interesting insights! Nearly 150 current and prospective law school applicants participated in this year’s survey, representing a combination of both college graduates and current undergraduates. A breakout of select findings is below:

Attention all law school applicants! Veritas Prep is conducting its second annual survey of applicants to the world’s most competitive law schools, in partnership with Law School Podcaster and the National Jurist’s PreLaw Magazine. We want to hear from YOU why you’re applying to law school, where you are in the process, and what matters most to you as an applicant.

And, best of all, by filling out either survey by August 26 you will enter for a chance to win an iPad 2! You can access the survey here. It will take you no more than two minutes to complete!

Ready for more rankings obsession? Today we dig into the latest law school rankings, which U.S. News & World Report released last week. We have a rule here at Veritas Prep headquarters to caution applicants against reading too much into rankings when making decisions on where to apply and attend, but there is no denying the fact that the material is interesting. Our society loves rankings. Put anything on a list — grad schools, rock albums, baseball players — and people will sit up and take note.

And, in research graduate schools, the rankings certainly are useful in terms of helping you get a feel for the lay of the land. Have a 170+ LSAT score and a sterling GPA? maybe you have a shot at a T14 law school after all. Having a hard time getting above 155 on the LSAT? Then maybe you need to look a little lower in the rankings. In this regard, it certainly makes sense to at least eyeball the rankings before going too far into the admissions process.

We get a lot of calls from applicants who are thinking about pursuing a JD/MBA. With potential paths into almost countless professional opportunities, such a degree seems the a can’t-miss, best-of-both-worlds prospect, right? Especially in an uncertain job market, why not invest a little extra in one’s education now and be in an even better position to succeed down the road?

We do like JD/MBA degree for a lot of reasons, and love some of the newer, more innovative joint-degree programs that some leading universities have rolled out in recent years — see our coverage of recent announcements at Columbia, Yale, and Penn — but we end up talking a majority of these JD/MBA candidates out of one degree or the other.

Why? Because these applicants rarely have thought through all of the implications of pursuing both degrees.

Getting rejected is hard stuff. What makes it even more painful is that few MBA programs (or law schools or medical schools) give rejected applicants specific feedback on why they didn’t get in. Applicants just want to know what they “did wrong” to not get in, but, even when schools do provide feedback, the applicants normally end up confused and still guessing about what to do next.

What’s the deal? Are admissions officers trying to obfuscate the process, keeping you in the dark so that you can’t “game” the system? Are they just cold hearted, not caring about you, especially once they’ve decided they don’t want you? No and no. The truth is that, when someone gets rejected, it’s often because the school just couldn’t find any great reason to admit them over thousands of other applicants.

Last week Inside Higher Ed reported that the American Bar Association is considering ending a rule that law schools require the LSAT in order to receive ABA accreditation. Right now this is just an idea being kicked around by an ABA panel charged with reviewing the associations accreditation rules, but if the panel recommends the change (which many believe it will), ABA approval may not be far behind.

Why the proposed change? Many schools claim that the LSAT requirement takes away flexibility in the admissions process, because they have no choice but to report those scores to the magazines that that publish annual rankings (ahh, the rankings again). Since each school needs to keep up with the Joneses and keep their mean LSAT scores high (lest they risk dropping in those hated rankings), they end up turning away some students they really do want.

Next week yours truly will deliver a speech at a wedding. I have known the groom for nearly two decades, and I consider him to be one of my closest friends, even though distance unfortunately keeps us apart most of the time (I live in California and he lives in Beijing). While I don’t consider myself to be an expert toastmaster, I’m not too worried, since I know that what makes for a great admissions essay or personal statement also makes for a terrific wedding speech.

Think back for a minute and consider the last few weddings you’ve been to. If you’re lucky, you only have witnessed great wedding speeches and toasts, but odds are that you’ve sat through at least one or two bombs. What accounts for the difference?

Last week news spread around the blogosphere and some major media sites that the American Bar Association (ABA) had put out an official statement urging students to carefully consider the return on investment when thinking about attending law school. Sounds like a smart, responsible thing for the ABA to do, given the number of recent JD grads still looking for work and some of the negative attention that law schools have received in recent years for not being upfront enough with prospective students about their post-graduation job prospects.

The only catch, as Above the Law pointed out last week, the ABA actually published that document back in November, 2009. Maybe it took a while for the message to sink in?

It wouldn’t be right to start off the new year without some predictions about what will happen with the GMAT and in graduate school admissions in 2011. While last year’s predictions of 3D GMAT classes and a free solar-powered Kindle for every HBS student never quite materialized (we’ve still got our fingers crossed), we’re feeling bold enough to issues some new predictions for the coming year.

Without further ado, here are six things that we expect will happen in the GMAT and admissions spaces in the year ahead:

Wow, it feels like it was barely a few months ago when we welcomed 2010. How time flies. As the year winds down, we thought we’d share some of our most popular posts and most interesting topics from the past 12 months.

We hope that this blog has provided you with some useful insights as you’ve prepared for the GMAT and/or slaved over your grad school applications. Sometimes we have a little fun, and sometimes we veer off topic to talk about what interests us, but everything written here comes from the same place: We want to help you be successful!

Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece written by an anonymous “hired gun” who writes admissions essays, term papers, and even doctoral theses for paying students, who in turn pass these off as their own. Not long after that, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a similar article that profiled a couple of similar services that write essays for business school applicants. (Veritas Prep was actually mentioned as an ethical alternative to these services in the latter article.)

Two things really bother us about the existence of these services. Is one of them the fact that they’re unethical and shady? Well, yes, we do think that, but that’s so obvious that we won’t devote any more words to it here. (If you’re the type to consider buying your essays from someone, then maybe becoming a business leader or a lawyer or a doctor isn’t the best path for you.)

Recently Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School jointly announced a new three-year JD/MBA program, joining schools such as Northwestern and Yale that have seen these accelerated programs grow in popularity over the past few years. The new program will accept its first class in the fall of 2011.

While the program’s final details are still taking shape, this is what we know so far: Columbia JD/MBA students will spend their first and third years at the law school and their second year at the business school. Students must complete each school’s core curriculum requirements, and can enroll in electives cross-listed at both schools. JD/MBA students will also be able to choose from any electives listed solely at either school. These students will be considered full-fledged members of both Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School. As such, they will have access to all of the academic, networking, and career opportunities that all students can use in both schools.

If you’re applying to graduate school this year, there’s a good chance that right now you’re surfing the Internet while procrastinating on writing your admissions essays or personal statement. The Internet is the ultimate procrastination tool, after all, but hopefully finding this article will be the best thing that could have happened to your essays.

The term “writer’s block” means different things to different people, but here we’ll use it to describe any situation where you know what’s on paper (or on your computer screen) is far from being a finished product that you’ll be happy to submit as part of your finished application. Maybe you just can’t think about what to start writing about (this is what most people think of when they hear “writer’s block”), but an even tougher case can be when you’re staring at a nearly-finished essay and you just know that it’s not working. In either case, try these three things to clear your mind and start fresh

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

While we all can get caught up in the stress of trying to get ahead at work or (if you’re reading this blog) trying to get into a top-ranked grad school, it’s healthy to stop for a few moments and realize just how good most of us have it. No matter where you are or what you’re doing right now, you probably have something in your life that makes you want to give thanks. Do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes to think about it before you enter a tryptophan-induced coma today.

We here at Veritas Prep HQ are thankful for the hundreds of amazing GMAT instructors and admissions consultants that we have all over the world. While we don’t get to see most of them very often, we know that they care about helping our GMAT students and admissions consulting clients as much as we do. We’re thankful that they’re there to get the job done, all day, every day.

Enjoy your turkey! And while you’re nibbling on leftovers, be sure to find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

Today we’re pleased to officially roll out a sweet new look to the Veritas Prep blog. For several years now we have brought you the best new and analysis in GMAT prep and grad school admissions, and now it’s all delivered in a much better looking wrapper!

Big kudos to Jeremy Dempster and the rest of the team here at Veritas Prep HQ for making our new blog a reality. Please, let us know what you think!

This morning we released the results of a comprehensive survey of law school applicants that we recently conducted. Our first annual law school applicant survey — conducted in partnership with Law School Podcaster and PreLaw Magazine — uncovered some interesting insights behind what drives today’s law school applicants.

The blogging world has been abuzz over the “Unemployed JD” scandal that broke out this week. In case you missed it, a blogger named Ethan Haines who runs a blog dedicated to crusading for better transparency on the part of law school when it comes to employment data, actually turned out to be Denver-based Zenovia Evans, an employed 28-year-old graduate of Cooley Law School in Michigan.

An application tip for the graduate school candidate.

Most of our time writing on this blog is spent diving into the nuance and nitty gritty of GMAT prep and the MBA admissions process. Every once in a while, it helps to take a step back and look at things from a very fundamental, building-block level.

Last week, Michael Kinsley, the editor-at-large for the Atlantic Wire, wrote an op-ed piece on the admissions process that highlighted some of the reasons why things have become so competitive and cutthroat over the years. The piece focused primarily on college admissions, but there are multiple mentions of graduate school and examples of HBS, so it seems fair to consider Kinsley’s words from the perspective of graduate school admissions.

Attention all business school and law school applicants! Veritas Prep is conducting its first annual survey of applicants to the world’s most competitive MBA programs and law schools. We want to hear from YOU why you’re applying to grad school, where you are in the process, and what matters most to you as an applicant.

The phrase “game plan” gets thrown around a lot in the hallowed offices of Veritas Prep. Our director of research, Scott Shrum, literally co-wrote the book on MBA admissions and named it Your MBA Game Plan. We offer a Personalized Game Plan^TM as part of every admissions consulting package. There are a lot of people in our office that love college football and study the art of game planning for blitz packages. And so on.

If you are an individual who remains connected to the news cycle (in whatever form that is now consumed), you know by now that Elena Kagan has been nominated for the open seat (formerly held by Justice Stevens) on the Supreme Court by President Obama and that her confirmation hearings before the Senate are set to begin on June 28. The process of putting a judge on the greatest bench in all the land is arduous and draining (check out Season One of The West Wing for a terrific inside look into the vetting process and tireless work required by White House senior staffers) and prone to surprises, but most believe that Kagan will ultimately be confirmed and take her place on the Court (described in terrific detail in this New York Magazine article). And as someone who has followed her career fairly closely, I believe she will make a great Supreme Court Justice and serve our country well in deciding the laws of the land.

Everyone who operates in the graduate school admissions space knows that rankings are both important and also to be taken with a grain of salt. Any summation of programs presented in list form purports to be an objective analysis, but is always filled with subjective factors, opinion, and incomplete data.

Last week, we talked about using the month of May to jump start your fall applications to MBA programs, and one of the best ways to do that is to take advantage of the opportunity to visit campuses while school is still in session. Waiting to tour a business school (or any grad school) during the summer months is almost a complete waste of time, because there are no classes in session and all you are seeing is a bunch of empty buildings.

Ready to geek out on the newest U.S. News law school rankings? Good, because we are going to break down the 2011 edition, which has been officially posted on the website and available for public consumption (and obsession). While we make it a policy here at Veritas Prep to caution applicants against reading too much into rankings when making decisions on where to apply and attend, there is no denying the fact that the material is interesting.

We make a living helping applicants get into the world’s most competitive business schools, law schools, and medical schools. So, it’s fair to say that applicants’ desire to get into the world’s top graduate schools is what puts food on our plates at night. (And those plates carry all sorts of food; the Veritas Prep team includes devout vegans, die-hard carnivores, and everyone in between.) But today we’re going to offer what may seem like a slightly contrary stance, one that some applicants need to hear this week after getting getting rejected or waitlisted by a top grad school: Your whole career and life are NOT determined by what grad school you attend!

One of the main reasons students cite for choosing a law school is the quality of the faculty, and there is perhaps no law school known more for its faculty than the University of Chicago. With the exceptions of Yale, Stanford, and Harvard (which is amassing a veritable army of academic elites), Chicago arguably stands alone as the staging ground for teaching excellence. In fact, while the school often ranks anywhere from 4th to 7th overall in rankings such as U.S. News, it is always near the top of the Faculty Rankings list generated by Brian Leiter (Chicago appears set to come in third in the upcoming 2010 version.) This, despite the fact that other top law schools have raided the U of C faculty over the past several years, enticing several elite professors to move to other programs. The exodus has included world-renowned legal scholars Richard Epstein (part-time to NYU, and then to retirement) and Cass Sunstein (to Harvard, and then to the Obama Administration), criminal law expert Tracy Meares (to Yale), beloved constitutional and legislative scholar Adrian Vermeule (Harvard), and law and econ guru Alan Sykes (Stanford).

If you have been reading our excellent GMAT Tip of the Week series (penned by Veritas Prep’s GMAT guru, lesson booklets co-author, and Director of Academic Research Brian Galvin), then you know one thing: it is “Hip Hop Month” here at Veritas Prep. The esteemed Mr. Galvin has been coming up with interesting and nostalgic ways to use rap music examples in order to better understand complex GMAT problems and solutions.

For the last year and a half, there has been a steady stream of articles, blog posts, and opinion pieces about the law school recruiting process. Some have explored new apprenticeship models employed by law firms, others have focused on what law schools are doing to protect students, still others have put a renewed focus on public interest fellowships and job opportunities. Most, however, have merely predicted more doom and gloom. It’s perfectly fine to report what is going on out there, but how many more profile articles and pithy blog posts do we need about stranded 3Ls with no prospects?

By at least one measure, Northwestern University’s School of Law is the best law school in America. But what is that measure? And what does it mean? Should would-be Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago students suddenly reverse course?

You may have already heard the “Northwestern ranked as best law school” sound bite in the last week and scratched your head. “Really?” Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the National Law Journal is a highly respected publication that put out a legitimate ranking that had Northwestern had the top of the heap. No, in the sense that this ranking measures one thing — and one thing only — and has nothing to do with academic excellence, peer reputation, class profile, or any other metric that we’re used to analyzing. And no in the sense that the one thing it does measure might be a pretty misleading statistic.