Daniel Carens-Nedelsky (3L)
Admission to law school is critical to ensure access to justice. If underrepresented groups cannot get into law school, they cannot become lawyers or judges. Ontario Law School Application Service (OLSAS)—the application portal for all Ontario law schools—has several elements that needlessly complicate the admissions process. My three biggest concerns with OLSAS are its lack of a fee waiver for low-income students, the autobiographical “sketch” requirement, and its grade conversation formula.
Fee waiver
In order to apply to an Ontario law school, OLSAS charges a $200 fee that cannot be waived under any circumstances. In addition to this fee, there is $90 charge for each school applied to, which schools can waive at their discretion. U of T Law has commendably opted to do so for anyone who has been granted the Canada Grant for Persons from a Low Income Family in the past five years—a grant students are automatically considered for in all OSAP applications. However, the mandatory $200 fee is still a lot of money, and it will deter some low-income applicants.
This is frustrating because fee waivers are the type of administrative task which OLSAS should excel at. Rather than forcing low-income students to navigate as many as seven different sets of criteria for obtaining a fee waiver, OLSAS should create a uniform standard that is acceptable to all schools. (I would strongly encourage them to adopt the kind of automatic waiver that U of T Law has implemented.)
Each school could retain a residual ability to review fee waivers for students who don’t meet the OLSAS threshold, but the overall amount of work required by the schools would vastly diminish. The American Law School Admission Council (LSAC)—which centralizes applications to over 200 US law schools—has been granting this sort of fee waiver since 1968, and both Harvard and Yale Law School use an automatic waiver system as described.
The autobiographical sketch
Another barrier to applying to law school in Ontario is the autobiographical sketch. According to the OLSAS guidebook, the sketch is “a list of employment, extracurricular activities, awards, non‑academic achievements, community involvement and professional associations.”
Applicants are to use their “discretion in deciding which details to report,” and OLSAS notes that they “cannot advise you on the content of your sketch.” Immediately following this statement, OLSAS “recommends” that students:
- Consider and record (separate from the application) all activities since high school, and then
- Complete the application by arranging these activities into the categories listed above.
That certainly seems like OLSAS is advising applicants to provide a list of every activity since high school. As if this weren’t already a daunting task, OLSAS requires applicants to provide the name, address, and telephone number of someone who can verify involvement in each activity listed on the sketch.
This presumes that applicants graduated from high school no more than four to five years ago. Otherwise, the idea of providing a complete list of activities with verifiers is manifestly absurd. Additionally, it adds a significant amount of unnecessary stress to the application process. I know many of my friends applying to law school worried about the sketch as much as, or more than, their personal statements.
Professors Weinrib and Alarie stated that they found the sketch helpful in gaining a fuller picture of applicants, and that applicant sketches are read alongside their personal statements—incidentally, the law school should state this in its admission information. Given this, my recommendation would be to change the sketch requirement, instead requiring that applicants provide their resumes. Most applicants will already have resumes, and they serve the same purpose as the sketch. Perhaps not surprisingly, McGill University uses resumes as an application requirement.
The grading scale
The grading scale is the least pressing of my concerns, but the scale which OLSAS uses has some problems. It causes entirely unnecessary distortions of averages as result of operating on a 4.0 rather than a 4.3 scale.
|
Grade |
OLSAS conversion |
LSAC conversion |
| A+ | 4.0 | 4.33 |
| A | 3.9 | 4.00 |
| A- | 3.7 | 3.67 |
| B+ | 3.3 | 3.33 |
| B | 3.0 | 3.00 |
| B- | 2.7 | 2.67 |
| C+ | 2.3 | 2.33 |
Going forward
To clarify, I am in no way advocating that U of T Law withdraw from OLSAS at this point. I think there are great advantages to be gained both by applicants and law schools by having a centralized admission process. However, I do think it is important that U of T Law advocates on behalf of its applicants and students.
I have been told that U of T Law is eager to hear student concerns and will advocate on our behalf if we express our frustrations to Jerome Poon-Ting, the Senior Recruitment, Admissions and Diversity Outreach Officer. While I strongly encourage all students to express their concerns to Jerome, I also think that U of T Law has an independent obligation to consider how its relationship with OLSAS may be disadvantaging low-income applicants.
At a minimum, I believe the law school should make implementing an OLSAS fee waiver a pre-requisite for any long term continuing use of OLSAS. Although I appreciate that there are larger governance issues involved in a potential withdrawal from OLSAS, I think that anything less than this position is morally unjustifiable.
