Customer Reviews

Law School Essays that Made a Difference (Graduate School Admissions Gui)

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I imagine that most students buy this book with the hope that it will get them in to the more difficult schools. It probably won't. There's no one trick or one strategy that will, so that's really not a criticism.
This book will help the student who has already put signiificant effort into getting into law school. There are some pretty good tips, and definitely a good sense of what not to do, in the first section.
The essays are a little trickier to work with. You don't want to only focus on one brilliant essay (which is the girl who went to Harvard, if you're wondering), and you don't want to just skim through all of them. I thought it was helpful to go through the book with a pencil and just underline some of the sentences or ideas I liked. It's also helpful to choose some of the essays you liked generally and figure out why they were so good.
Will this book help the 150 LSAT get into Yale? No. Will this book help the 172 who needs a little something more to get into Harvard? Maybe. Other reviewers are right though, not all of the essays are amazing. Some you almost wonder how they got included (Coincidence that so many of the authors taught for Princetonreview?). Just work through the okay ones and find the gems. But don't copy.

This book is divided up into two (or three, if you count the Games bonus section) sections. If you have been reading law school admissions books, the first will tell you ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING NEW. It is general advice about drafting a personal statement and some questions and answers from admissions officers. If you haven't been reading law school admissions books and you just want some personal statement advice, I imagine it would be very enlightening. It wasn't anything new to me.

The second section is essays, and I found them extremely useful. I found looking at other personal statements and analyzing what worked and what didn't work in them was VERY helpful in helping me draft my own. The point is not to mimic any of them, of course, but to develop a sense of the range of what is effective and ineffective. Some of the "differences" the essays in this book show aren't positive: at least one of them seems to be an instance of an otherwise excellent candidate arguing himself OUT of law schools where he should have been competitive by trying a tactic that seems to have backfired.

The personal statement is really your only chance in the application process to make yourself stand out as more than just a score and a GPA, so it's in your best interest to do whatever is honorably in your power to make it excellent. I found that mine (which I spent considerable time on) was key in my admissions success, so really, if you even think it will help--GET THIS BOOK.

As for the "games" section, I didn't so much as glance at it before I handed the book off to a friend who will be applying to law school next year.

Some of these essays are good, while others are unoriginal and dated.

For a better value, check out "Ivy League Admission: 160 Successful Law School Personal Statements." You can't go wrong.