LSAT Score: Acing One of the Nation's Toughest Tests
ARCHIVED PRESS RELEASE FROM UTEP NEWS
August 4, 2000
Contact: Christian Clarke-Casarez
Public Information Officer, University Communications
915/747-5526
LSAT Score: Acing One of the Nation's Toughest Tests
Scoring in the top percentile for Hispanics - and all test takers - on the Law School Admissions Test, Jerry McLain has been accepted to some of the nation's most prestigious law schools, including NYU, Duke, the University of Chicago and UT Austin.
Jerry scored a 174 on the LSAT, which places him in the 99.6 percentile for all test takers. During the semester he took the standardized test, Jerry was enrolled in 20 hours - one hour shy of the maximum course load - and served as a peer mentor, tutoring students who were also preparing for the LSAT. Balancing his studies with his LSAT preparation, he earned a 4.0 that semester.
At UTEP, the political science senior also worked with William Weaver and Robert Webking. co-directors of the Law School Preparation Institute, which holds great promise for widening the pool of fully qualified applicants to the nation's most prestigious law schools.
The number of UTEP graduates admitted to the nation's top-50 law schools - including Harvard, New York University, Cornell, Columbia and Duke - for this fall is almost triple the average admitted to those schools in previous years (20 this year compared to an average of seven a year in the past).
The program provides intensive instruction in analytical skills, preparation for taking the LSAT and applying to law schools. The LSAT scores of the institute's graduates have risen by an average of eight points over their initial practice test (on a 60-point scale), and more UTEP graduates are being admitted to highly prestigious law schools than ever before.
"The Institute curriculum helped a great deal. But, I think that Dr. Weaver's and Dr. Webking's confidence in us is what mattered most. Before the Institute many of us felt that we might not get accepted into a good school. They had confidence in us before we had confidence in ourselves," McLain said.
"Here were two professors who knew the score, who had seen many undergrads pass through the law school process and knew what it took to succeed, and they believed that we could make it into a top tier school and succeed there. They believed it so much that they were willing to spend the greater part of their summer and much of their time afterward in helping us to make it happen."
For more information about McLain, log onto the El Paso Times web site at:
www.borderlandnews.com/stories/borderland/20000804-31364.shtml
For more information about the Law School Preparation Institute, log onto:
www.utep.edu/law
