Splitters: Power of Persuading Law School Admission Officials

A common obstacle for law school applicants is how to overcome being a “splitter”. A splitter is an applicant with a substantial difference between their GPA and LSAT score. One score is high or competitive while the other scores is lower.

In a perfect world you would have a high GPA that mirrored your high LSAT score. But in the real world there is often some discrepancy between GPA and LSAT. In my experience with splitters, their biggest success results when they take the time to craft personal statements, addendum, and perfectly pitched emails to admission teams.

Most of the clients I’ve run across have unique circumstances that led to the split between their GPA and LSAT score. Even with these circumstances, too often, students count themselves out at a law school that may genuinely consider their application if they’d only taken the time to carefully craft their personal statement.

I’ll never forget when I heard the long time admissions director of UC Berkeley Law Center tell a small gathering of alums how he saw his role as looking for colleagues for Berkeley’s faculty.

Just as successful attorneys must be persuasive, for splitters, now is the time to bring your skills of persuasion to the table. Increasingly, law schools are looking at soft factors to help persuade admission decisions. What I try and help clients understand is that embracing their narrative and understanding what motivates admissions officers can often make a difference in admission outcomes. Most of my success with clients has come from listening to a student’s story and helping them to tell their story using the tools and mediums that admission professionals know and expect.

Over the years, what I have found is that students don’t know exactly how to highlight the parts of their life experiences that would give their application the most color for an admissions’ officer.

For instance, simply writing that you are an “international student” or that you contributed to important academic scholarship is not enough. You must give the reader the context of your International experience or the real world application of the scholarship.

Specifically, you want to show how your experience ties into the very law school you’re targeting and how it illustrates your ability to contribute and be successful there. Understanding the target law school’s culture and what matters most to their faculty and admission staff really helps when crafting a persuasive narrative. If you take your time to research your target schools and weave in your narrative to their culture you can overcome a number of the obstacles every splitter faces.

Once you make your story come alive to the admissions team they can begin to see how your narrative could enhance the cultural quilt that many top tier law school admission teams want to manufacture.

Contributed by: Crystal Ridgley

Crystal Ridgley is a law school admission expert specializing in admission solutions for applicants facing challenges with GPA, LSAT or Character and Fitness.