Beware of Scammerships (Ep. 491)
Thinking LSAT
Nathan Fox and Ben Olson
4.8 • 868 Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2025
⏱️ 109 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Always read the fine print on your scholarship offers. This week, Nathan and Ben examine a low-ranked law school that reduces roughly two-thirds of its conditional scholarships every year. The guys also discuss the competitiveness of this year’s application cycle. They dismiss the idea that the LSAT is harder than it used to be. And they weigh the importance of law school rankings in deciding which school to attend.
0:35 - A Competitive Cycle - Nathan and Ben check the numbers for this highly competitive application cycle. They speculate about what might be causing the upward trend in applicants and LSAT scores.
19:05 - Is the LSAT Getting Harder? - After every LSAT, some test-takers complain that their official LSAT was more difficult than their practice tests. They’re imagining it. The LSAT is as difficult as it’s ever been: not very.
24:28 - Ask of the Week - The guys highlight Elizabeth’s insightful Ask Button explanation about unrepresentative samples.
42:38 - Law School Rankings - How much should you care about law school rankings? It depends. Ben and Nathan urge listener Kenley to factor the cost of attendance into their decision.
51:20 - What’s the Deal with…? - Nathan and Ben look into California Western School of Law, a low-ranked school that doles out dubious scholarships or, as the guys call them, “scammerships.”
1:42:59 - Word of the Week - Students dread the panopticon of remote LSAT proctoring.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the 2023 to 24 academic year, |
| 0:03.5 | 191 applicants came into the school with a conditional scholarship, |
| 0:10.3 | or with a scholarship, |
| 0:11.6 | and 130 of those were reduced or eliminated. |
| 0:15.7 | Holy shit. |
| 0:28.2 | Hello and welcome to episode 491 of the Thinking Elseap podcast. |
| 0:31.2 | I'm Ben Olson and with me is looking at Fox. |
| 0:35.7 | We're the co-founders of Elsaid Demon.com and the ElsaDemon Daily podcast. |
| 0:38.2 | Let's jump in, Nate. |
| 0:41.7 | We have a lot of data to go through. |
| 0:42.4 | Yeah. |
| 0:45.8 | So basically real busy cycle, right? |
| 0:47.4 | I think that's the headline here. |
| 0:57.9 | We have data from law school admission council telling us that applicants this cycle are up 23% year over year. |
| 1:05.4 | Applications are up 29%. So 23% more individual people applying. |
| 1:14.5 | Yep. 29% more applications filed, which if this were an LSAT logical reasoning question, we could infer from those two facts that there must be more applications per applicant being filed. |
| 1:24.1 | That could easily be a logical reasoning question. Go get that team. We have a team of people who are writing LSat questions and we need them to write that question. |
| 1:34.1 | Yeah. Okay. So more applicants, more applications per applicant. All LSATs being taken are up only 20.8%. So even though there are more applicants and more applications, |
| 1:48.1 | and there are more LSATs being taken, not as many LSATs are being being taken. |
| 1:55.6 | So that either means people who took it previously are applying this cycle or it means that there are an |
| 2:03.5 | increase we don't know yet until we see like actual numbers but there could be more people |
| 2:07.1 | getting in through a no test option there could be more people getting in with the gree option |
... |
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