sydney3456 wrote:I have just been accepted to a great law school that I would love to attend, but unfortunately no scholarship. I have a STEM major so my grades are on the lower side, but still good considering my major. My LSAT is good, but I do believe I am capable of bumping it up. Is retaking it for scholarship purposes something that people have done successfully? If so, what does that negotiation look like? Thank you!
Hi Sydney,
Yes, it is something that has been done many times before! higher LSAT scores are the most powerful thing you can have when dealing with schools (which is ridiculous, but that's just the way it is).
I haven't written specifically about using a later LSAT for negotiation (or if I have, I can't find it right now), but this article shows how you can use a very late LSAT score to get in off the Waitlist:
https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/the-la ... june-lsat/. The principles involved aren't very different than what you are asking about.
I also talked a lot about admissions issues and scholarships, the LSAT, and negotiations in Episode 5 of our podcast:
https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/the-po ... cceptances. One of the key points in there is that to negotiate, you have to have leverage, and in the admissions game, that means admission at a comparable or slightly better school. You can also see this point being made in many of the comment replies I made on our blog in the article about
Scholarship vs. Prestige: When to Take the Money and Run (note: there are
many replies there!).
The gist is this: if you are trying to negotiate with Columbia, they will see an offer from NYU as highly relevant, same with Harvard, Stanford, etc. But they wouldn't see an offer from New York Law School (NYLS) or American or Pepperdine as something they would or should compete with. That same logic can be applied to any school based on ranking.
So, a higher LSAT is one avenue to negotiate, and better financial packages from and equally ranked or better ranked schools is the other avenue.
I hope that makes sense. Start with the podcast episode and see if that helps. Thanks!
