Don't Throw Away Your (Five) Shots (Ep. 495)
Thinking LSAT
Nathan Fox and Ben Olson
4.8 • 868 Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Don’t Throw Away Your (Five) Shots (Ep. 494)
You have five attempts at the official test. Should you use all of them? This week, Ben and Nathan encourage students to plan on taking the test five times, but not to waste their official attempts by signing up before they’re ready.
Later, they discuss a student’s question about requesting a sixth LSAT attempt, and they caution applicants not to make excuses when writing appeals. The guys also advise a listener about character and fitness requirements. And they review how students should and should not use AI on their law school applications.
0:35 - April LSAT Sign Ups - Registrations for the April LSAT close on February 27.
3:50 - Am I Ready for April? - Ben and Nathan advise a listener to prioritize accuracy when evaluating readiness for the April exam. But they also encourage students to take the pressure off any one test by planning to use all of their five official attempts.
16:29 - Reading like Ben and Nathan - A departing Demon says that they felt as if Ben and Nathan were in their head, helping them spot bad arguments when taking the official LSAT. The guys explain why attacking each argument leads to success on the LSAT and beyond.
19:45 - Sixth Attempt Appeal - Ben and Nathan encourage a listener to shoot for a sixth attempt, but discourage them from making excuses for poor performance. And they expand that advice to all application materials.
28:47 - Character and Fitness - Ben and Nathan provide direction for character and fitness questions. They advise a student to reach out to law schools they’re considering and the state bar to determine if they would be permitted to practice law before going any further in their application process.
37:17 - AI and Law School Applications - The guys circle back to a discussion from Thinking LSAT Episode 452 about the use of AI and law school applications. They read and evaluate several AI policies from law schools.
51:50 - Word of the Week - I am crestfallen that this incident undermined the degree of professionalism we seek to uphold.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's funny because we've been doing this long enough now that like the spidey senses start tingling, right? |
| 0:07.3 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 0:07.8 | The second, when someone gets to the, it's like their first excuse is already like, okay, where are we going with this? |
| 0:13.2 | And then on the second excuse, it's like, oh, here we go. |
| 0:29.1 | Hello and welcome to episode 495 of the Thinking Elsaid podcast. I'm Ben Olson. With me is Nathan Fox. We're the co-founders of Elsaid Demon.com and the Elsaid Demon Daily podcast. The upcoming |
| 0:35.2 | April LSAT registration deadline is February 27th. The rule is pretty simple |
| 0:41.1 | there. If your practice tests are where you want them officially, then go ahead and register |
| 0:47.6 | for that April LSAT. If they're not, just wait. Your most important asset in the application |
| 0:53.6 | process is your GPA and your LSAT score. So don't sign up when you're not ready. |
| 1:00.4 | It's amazing how many people sign up when they're not ready. And it's one of the main, you know, I would say it's easily in the top five mistakes that people make in LSAT prep is just signing up before they've even really prepped. |
| 1:12.0 | I got one that I saw last night that was like, I've scored, I'm embarrassed at how bad I've |
| 1:17.6 | scored on my two previous tests. And I'm taking it again in April. And I'm like, well, hold on a |
| 1:24.7 | second. Let's talk about your practice test scores. Because if your practice test scores aren't where you want them to be, then you really should |
| 1:30.6 | not be already scheduled to take it in April. |
| 1:34.3 | What are you doing? |
| 1:35.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:36.1 | I got another one that was, you know, very common from some older student, really worried |
| 1:42.3 | about prep because they're going back, you know, |
| 1:44.5 | I'm going back to school. I haven't studied for anything for 10 years, you know, the typical |
| 1:48.3 | thing that a slightly older students like to talk about. And it was like, I really don't have |
| 1:55.6 | very much time to get up to speed. I need to get up to speed right away because I'm taking the |
| 1:59.9 | test in April or June or |
... |
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