I know there are a lot of you stressing about Early Decision deadlines and LSAT performance.
Here’s my rule:
Early Decision makes sense only if your profile is not expected to improve after the ED deadline.
So if you expect your score to go up after the ED deadline, you’re better off applying RD with a higher score than ED with a lower score.
Caveat 1: Keep in mind that ED also really only makes sense at a given school if the odds are roughly even (say, 40-60%*).
If it’s a reach school, then the most likely outcome (and best case scenario) is that you get deferred into the Regular pool, in which case you’ve lost the chance to use ED at a school where it might have made the difference and tipped you into the Accept pile.
HYS don’t offer ED, and so some of you will want to leave those doors open at any cost. That is entirely your prerogative and your call. The trade-off is that you are not optimizing your chances at an ED school where your chances are so-so. If your chances are so-so at those ED schools, chances are really slim that you’d get into HYS. Or to put it another way: If you’d need to rely on ED to help you get into that ED school, then you probably weren’t going to get into HYS anyway. That’s for you to sleep on.
The data in LSAC’s LSAT/GPA odds calculator are always at least one cycle behind. At some point, LSAC will refresh the underlying data so that the calculator reflects the data from the last completed cycle. You have to scroll down to the bottom of the search results to confirm which data set they are using.
You’ll also see that some schools don’t participate in the odds calculator. I give them some side-eye for that — I believe there should be more transparency in the application process and not less.
Caveat 2: You are allowed to have only one ED application pending at any one time.
But there are opportunities to do some ED deadline arbitrage. If School A has an early ED deadline, and they don’t admit you out of the ED round (either because they deny you or defer you into the RD pool), then you are free to apply ED to School B that still has an upcoming ED deadline.
Those later ED deadlines (usually called ED 2) are typically the same as the Regular deadlines, so they’re not “early” so much as “binding.” (Yes, they should come up with a different name for those. Yes, I’d prefer more precision from a law school.) Recall, though, that not all schools offer ED, and not all schools that offer ED offer a later round. If you want to engage in ED deadline arbitrage, you’ll need to track dates very carefully. If you haven’t heard back from your first ED school yet, you may not submit another ED application somewhere else. You can get into hot water if you try.
I hope that helps with your strategizing!