4.8 • 868 Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Law schools manipulate scholarships to obscure what they’re actually willing to pay for LSAT scores. Ben and Nathan reveal how some schools offer up to $40,000 per LSAT point. They introduce the “Disparity Index” to show how wildly different financial outcomes can be for students at the same school. Don’t settle for mediocre scores—top LSAT performance unlocks the best deals.
0:30 – LSAT Buyer’s Club
Ben and Nathan dig into how much law schools pay for LSAT scores. They introduce the Disparity Index—calculated by subtracting a school’s 75th percentile grant from full price—as a measure of that school’s willingness to buy scores. Some schools pay $10,000 per point while others offer up to $40,000. At full price, you might be paying 20 times more than a classmate. The key takeaway: the 75th percentile grant should be your floor, not your ceiling.
LSAT Demon Scholarship Estimator
31:09 – Scholarship Reconsiderations
The guys explain why you shouldn’t expect schools to negotiate openly. Many schools pretend to have fixed offers or use pre-law advisors to dissuade students from pushing back. Protect your leverage—don’t visit schools, don’t volunteer information. “Exclusive” opportunities are often just marketing ploys to increase tuition revenue.
50:43 – Last Call for Uncle Sam’s Wallet
Recently proposed policy changes threaten to disrupt the current tuition landscape of law schools. Limitations on student visas, loan amounts, and repayment options all have the capacity to change the way law schools play the scholarship game.Â
1:07:05 – RC Comprehension
Ricky scores nearly perfectly on Logical Reasoning, but underperforms at Reading Comprehension. Ben and Nathan suggest that Ricky aim for two perfect passages and guess on the rest. With time and practice, two will lead to three, but perfection on two gives a strong base and builds confidence.
1:10:07 – Grammarly
Ben and Nathan discuss the value of Grammarly. They suggest a smart workflow: use tools like Grammarly to generate suggestions, then double-check those suggestions with Google or other AIs. Cross-referencing recommendations can teach you good writing while improving your output.
1:13:00 – Personal Statement Gong Show
Ian sends in his submission for the Personal Statement Gong Show, the show where Ben and Nathan read personal statements and hit the gong when something goes wrong. The standing record to beat is ten lines, held by Greta.
1:18:31 - Word of the Week - Compatible
Which one of the following statements about cells is most compatible with the views of late nineteenth-century biochemists as those views are described in the passage?
Get caught up with our Word of the Week library.Â
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Scholarship reconsideration. |
0:01.9 | I don't think they like the word negotiation at all. |
0:03.8 | No, they hate the word negotiation. |
0:05.4 | They always avoid that and they say, we don't negotiate scholarships. |
0:10.1 | We sometimes reconsider scholarships. |
0:16.6 | Hello and welcome to episode 510 of the Thinking ElSat podcast. I'm Ben Olson. With me is Nathan Fox. We're the co-founders of Elsaid Demon.com and the Elsad Demon Daily podcast. Let's jump into this, Nathan. We have on the agenda first, the LSAT Buyers Club. |
0:38.6 | U.S. News law school rankings have self-reported average indebtedness included on the |
0:44.9 | school's profiles. Demon team member Michael took that data and made this spreadsheet to compile, well, a bunch of statistics. |
0:57.0 | And maybe, I don't know how much, Ben, you've looked at this, |
0:59.5 | but maybe we should just go through it a bit together. |
1:03.7 | It highlights how much one point of LSAT is worth. |
1:08.9 | And it also shows which schools are uh bigger offenders in this |
1:16.2 | scholarship game that we keep yelling about on the show um i'm gonna for those of you who watch |
1:23.2 | on video i'm gonna try something new today'm going to try to actually share my screen. |
1:28.3 | Great. Cool. So if I just, I'll just walk through the spreadsheet here. We have, |
1:33.1 | this is US News ranking. We have the name of the law school. We have their per year nominal |
1:39.9 | tuition times three. Is this column? Yep. Okay. We have fees times three. Okay. And we add all that up and we get |
1:48.9 | full price for three years. Wow. Okay. Sorry, just to pause for a half second, I'm surprised by how |
1:57.2 | different the fees can be for different schools. So for example, three years of fees at Penn is $17,000, |
2:05.9 | whereas three years of fees at Chapman is $225. |
2:13.0 | Like, that's insane. |
2:15.0 | Yeah, I mean, it's just like how much do they, |
... |
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