How much can I improve by January?

[stressedaboutlaw]

After 1 year+ of studying for the LSAT, I feel devastated. I just recieved my October LSAT score - 162. In January I got 162 (cancelled) -> 160 in September (cancelled) -> and now 162 again. I thought I could get at least a 165 and feel at a loss because clearly I haven't been studying right for the past year.
I am almost done with my law school applications and intend to apply in the next two weeks. Is it even worth registering for the January LSAT? I'm not sure how much I could improve by then and it would more be for the purpose of having a better score if I was waitlisted or for scholarships... Also, I'm abroad currently so can only take the January international exam.
I am SO done with this awful exam. BTW I am a split scorer - 3.92 GPA and 162 LSAT. I want to get into a T14/20.
What do I do now? Should I just give up and apply with my 162 and hope for the best? I genuinely don't know how I can improve and I just feel like I can't get this test right.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi stressed,

I sympathize with your frustration. Unfortunately, it sounds like your year of studying has not really been effective.

The first thing that I'd want to know is exactly how you've been studying. Have you been studying on your own? If so, what materials have you been using? If you took an LSAT prep course, which one, etc.?

You mentioned that you thought that you'd get at least a 165. Have you been consistently scoring in the 168+ range on recent timed LSATs? If so, then I agree that a 165 would be a reasonable expectation assuming that nothing goes wrong on test day. The general trend is for people to score a few points lower on the real LSAT, so if your practice tests were generally in the 160-165 range, then a 162 is really not surprising.

To answer your question about having enough time for January, there is certainly enough time between now and the January LSAT to improve your score (assuming that you have a decent amount of quality time that you can dedicate to studying, such as 10-20 hours a week, for example). There are many students who do all of their LSAT studying with a two month time frame. Admittedly, the higher your target score, the harder it is to achieve and the more studying/practice is needed. There are diminishing margins of returns, so it is much harder to go from a 165 to a 170 than to go from a 145 to a 150, for example.

The key thing is that you must change your strategy because clearly what you've been doing hasn't worked.

One option to consider if you haven't already done so is taking The PowerScore LSAT Course. Another option is to hire a PowerScore LSAT tutor. This second option is generally more expensive (depending on how many hours you purchase), but can often be very helpful.

As for whether you should just apply and see what happens, that's of course a personal decision. Personally, given the importance of the LSAT score in law school applications (especially for those applying to the most competitive schools), I'd want to make sure that I'd done everything that I could reasonably do to get the best score possible.

One thing that you can do is to check a few of the law school predictor websites, which will give a very rough estimate of a person's chances of getting into a particular law school based on their GPA/LSAT score. Keep in mind that this is just a rough estimate based on those two numbers and doesn't factor in other differences between candidates, so take those with a grain of salt.

You may also want to consider the worst case scenario just to be safe. If you apply to several top schools and don't get accepted into any of them, what would you do? Would you go to a lower ranked school? Would you hold off a year and reapply next year? Would you decide not to go to law school at all? Would any of these be acceptable?