A little about the admissions process at U of T (from a former student in the Admissions Committee)

[sunnyc]

Hi everyone. I was a student rep on the Admissions Committee last year, and I thought with two weeks to go before the application deadline, I’d write a post about the admissions process at U of T, specifically the personal statements. Some of this information is already available online, but some of it is new, and according to Prof. Alarie (Chair of the Admissions Committee), none of it is confidential. Hopefully this will be useful information, and if not, I hope it’s at least a little interesting.

About the process

Student reps are 3Ls who volunteer for the position. Some are from the Students’ Law Society and some are from equity groups at the school. The SLS usually does a call-out for volunteers in the fall semester, and they select from the volunteers based on a short blurb we write about our involvement in the law school/community when applying.

As a student rep on the Admissions Committee, I only dealt with personal statements. Personal statements represent 1/3 of the application. As you all know, GPA and LSAT factor into the admissions process, and those are topics that have already been well-covered on this forum. Student reps did not participate in that part of the admissions process whatsoever (an algorithm does it??). But, I can confirm that U of T believes that GPA is a stronger indicator of future success than LSAT, and they will take into account the number of times an applicant wrote the LSAT.

Every PS is read by multiple people on Adcom. Profs and admin are obviously part of Adcom as well. Scores from student reps are not treated differently from scores from profs.

Scoring happens in three rounds that take place before U of T sends out acceptances. The rounds are sorted by LSAT/GPA, with the theory that we will be more likely to admit stronger applicants, and we want to give them acceptances before other schools do. Despite U of T’s insistence that they do not care about yield rate, I can assure you that the school definitely wants to lock down the top applicants instead of losing them to other schools. (Interestingly, we were told that top applicants tend to get acceptances early but confirm later, because they want to see what other options they have. Weaker applicants tend to receive acceptances in the second or third rounds, but they will accept sooner.) That being said, there’s no auto-accept, and I read statements from top-scoring applicants that were Not Good.

Every person is assigned a list of PS to read. The lists are designed so that a variety of Adcom members will read the PSs and the scoring should average out to something fair. Last year, the statements were not anonymized. So, your name will be associated with your file. This was a point of contention among members of Adcom, but I don’t know how that will be handled this year. (If it makes you feel better, I did not care about anyone I read about and have zero recollection of the applications already.) If we see a name on our list that we know, we must flag that as a conflict and not score the PS.

For every applicant, we receive (1) their PS, (2) their biographical sketch, (3) their optional essay (if applicable), and (4) their resume (if applicable). After reading their materials, we are to assign them a score out of 4, with 4 being, “We need this person at U of T,” and 0 being, “This person cannot come here.” The average score is 2, which should be like, “Sure, they could come here.” (I will say that when we did Adcom training, we thought the sample statements were just okay and the profs said they were good, and we were quite confused until we dove into the bulk of the PSs and realized there’s some pretty bad writing out there. So rest assured that even if you think your application is uninspired or boring, it’s probably just average.)

We submit our scores two weeks after receiving our lists, and the scores are processed along with the GPA and LSAT to determine if an applicant will be admitted.

Tips for applicants

The optional essay is only optional in the sense that you can submit your application without having written one. Apparently an applicant who wrote an optional essay scores, on average, 0.3 points higher than an applicant who did not. This is certainly something that’s been discussed on this forum, but it’s interesting to know it’s been quantified by Adcom. And there’s been times when I read a cool PS and thought, “I wish I knew more about this applicant,” or times when I read a decent PS and thought “This statement is average, but I feel like knowing more about this person would have pushed the score higher.”

Please, please, please, use paragraphing in your PS. Generally, you want to make the PS easy to read. I was reading dozens of these at a time, often at the end of the day. If you can have a clear narrative, a clean structure, and spacing/paragraphing that makes sense, it will be so much easier to understand. The worst experience was opening a PDF and seeing a wall of text to parse through. The same goes for large fancy words – please avoid these if they're not necessary. You don’t sound smarter, you’re just making it confusing to read. (Plus, as a past applicant myself – don’t large words take up too much of your valuable 5,000 character allotment?)

Most applications run along the same themes. This is fine. It also doesn’t necessarily have to be a sob story. Don’t worry if your application is about your immigrant parents, or some previous encounter with the law, or your life-changing experience in undergrad Model UN. There are no unique experiences, just unique ways to write about how they’ve affected you.

We don’t see your LSAT or GPA. So, be careful how you want to highlight that in your application. If you want to talk about how much you failed undergrad, but your actual GPA was like 3.8, the reader might think you did worse than you actually did.

Don’t forget that the goal of the PS is to explain why law, and why U of T. Please don’t just ramble about your past experiences without mentioning law school at all.

Try to write the correct university name at the end of the PS. We know you’re probably submitting the same statement to many schools, and it’s certainly not the end of the world if you submit it with another university name, but still. As a member of Adcom said: if your PS says your dream is to attend XYZ Law, who is U of T to stop you?

We don’t really look at verifiers, but it can help expose lies if there’s something fishy about the application.

We were told that in very rare cases, the higher-ups will read letters of reference. I have no idea how true this is, who it applies to, or how effective it might be. It was only mentioned in passing, and I imagine it’s only for fringe applicants. I recommend against submitting letters of rec just for the hell of it.

 

That’s all the info/advice I can think of for now. Thanks for reading, and best of luck!

[StoneMason]

Thank you for sharing! If you're allowed to share, how often is it that a bad PS prevents an otherwise above average candidate from being accepted? And in those cases (thinking about the 175 LSATs and 4.0 GPAs), how egregious do the PSs have to be?

[Jujube]

Does UofT provide special considerations for STEM, Ivey HBA, or Queens Commerce students?