<p>My S applied to lawschool with 168 LSAT and 3.83 GPA. The results from his applicatins are still coming in and we don't have the whole story yet. In a recent thread it was suggested that my S continue with this admissions cycle but plan to retake the LSAT in June. If he improved his scores to the 170's he should withdraw from whatever school he chooses and reapply and be in a better position to earn scholarships to T14 schools. The good news/bad news is he has been admitted to several schools he would like to attend and has applied to every school he is interested in going to. So my question is, does anyone have any real life experience reapplying to a school that they were either accepted to with little or no scholarship, waitlisted at or rejected from with an improved LSAT score and been successful with obtaining an improved outcome? This sounds like a good plan but actually withdrawing and starting over comes with risk so I'm wondering if anyone has had or knows of people who have been successful with this plan.</p>
<p>This is actually a repeat of a question I asked on that thread but since that question didn't draw any replies I thought I would try it one more time.</p>
<p>I understand your angst but it seems premature until your son has the retake score in hand. Anecdotal reports are unlikely to be persuasive, especially restricting the choice of schools to within the T14. You may get a better sense of the competitive nature of these scholarships by going through lawschoolnumbers.com (Disclaimer: of the five law students whom I know personally, none had taken the LSAT more than once).</p>
<p>I know nothing about law school scholarships but besides the risk of not being accepted again and without scholarship, your son is also losing $$ in opportunity costs. If he had graduated one year earlier, he could have earned more money than he is making during the gap year, salt away more $ in his 401K plan, get on with life plans etc.This may more than make up the increase of scholarship he may/may not be getting.</p>
<p>What would he be doing differently if he takes the LSAT again than he did the first time? It is not so easy to improve scores unless he had not taken a course or studied for the first one and plans to do so this time. If he feels like he really prepared when he got his 168, there is no guarantee that he will improve this time and could also get a lower score. </p>
<p>I know schools are worried about their yield when accepting students. If they accepted him this time, and he didn’t attend they might be hesitant to give him another chance, but I don’t know that, it is just something I would be worried about. What he could do, is call the admissions reps at a school he was accepted to already, and ask them their opinion. They won’t rescind his admission, so he has nothing to fear from asking. Maybe they would be able to give him merit money this year if he submits a higher score? Maybe they will tell him that they throw out all of the admissions info from one year to the next and what he does this year won’t have any effect on next years decisions. It doesn’t hurt to ask.</p>
<p>My son did study but didn’t give it the kind of dedication he needed to to get the level of score he would have wanted. Is he capable of scoring higher? I don’t know. I do know that he won’t give it the full throttle effort it would take to improve if he didn’t feel like he had a real shot of making it worthwhile, and that is the reason for the question. This came up as a possibility because others strongly suggested it. At first it seemed to me to be a no loose effort, that is minus the hours of study. Before I really sold the thought to him I wanted to get a feel for if he wouldn’t be shooting himself in the foot by withdrawing his applications. So since it seemed like a good idea on paper I thought I would see if I could find any examples of this actually working or if we should just go with as cbreeze says, the bird in the hand.</p>
<p>Neither of my kids withdrew and reapplied, but our experience has been that there is truly a “sweet spot” for merit scholarships. With a 3.7+ GPA and a 170-174 LSAT, my S saw generous offers from schools in the mid-lower T14, hoping to lure him away from the T6, we assumed. However, with an LSAT higher than that, we’ve seen a level of what we assume is yield protection for T7-10. </p>
<p>As for whether the score is likely to increase, a lot depends on his analysis of the initial LSAT. Where can he get more points - its as simple as that. My daughter increased her LSAT by 7 points on retake, but basically studied 8 hours/day for three weeks before the second exam. She took a course prior to the initial sitting, but was very tied up with work commitments prior to the first test and felt her focus was not optimal. For the second, she literally took test after test after test…and when those were done she did some more. The LG section seemed easier to improve, while the CR section took a lot more work, and she was a social science major in college at a Top 10 university. She thinks the LR is either intuitive or its not; she got it. FWIW, she started where your son did (LSAT-wise, not GPA!) and will be attending a T6 school in the fall, but no merit money! </p>
<p>The (seemingly) common wisdom on the law school boards elsewhere is that if you score north of 170 with that GPA you should see T14 acceptances with merit money. That one point does seem to make a difference. If you’d like more details, feel free to PM me.</p>