Reading the Cycle Tracker

What the tracker shows

The dashboard pools data from every law school on the site, not just the T14. It surfaces application volume (how many apps have been submitted), decision velocity (how quickly schools are working through them), the mix of accepts, waitlists, and rejects by school and week, and the cycle-over-cycle trend against the prior three years. Each chart marks today's date so you can see where we are relative to past cycles at the same calendar point.

Two terms to know. Cycle day is days since September 1 of the prior calendar year — Sept 1 is day 0, early January is around day 120, the full cycle runs about 365 days. Using cycle day instead of calendar date keeps comparisons apples-to-apples across years. Cycle pace is the cumulative share of applications with a terminal decision (accepted, waitlisted, or rejected) by a given cycle day. The solid line is the current cycle; dashed lines are prior cycles.

Reading the comparisons

The pace chart labels the current cycle as ahead, behind, or on pace relative to last year at the same cycle day. More than two percentage points above is ahead, more than two below is behind, anything inside that band is on pace. Small wiggles aren't signal. A cycle that runs five or ten points behind last year for several weeks means schools have slowed down, volume is up and they're rationing decisions, or both.

The weekly decision waves chart bins self-reported decisions by week with the prior cycle overlaid, so you can see when the first acceptance wave typically hits, when waitlist movement picks up, and when the tail tapers. Silence in November doesn't mean much if the first wave at your schools historically lands in late January. If you're past the usual peak and still haven't heard, check the admissions predictor (which conditions on timing), the heard back page for your specific schools, or the live recent decisions feed.

Volume caveat: "applications tracked" counts self-reported rows on LSD.Law, not nationwide submissions. One applicant with ten apps shows up as ten rows. Pace and mix are comparable across cycles; raw counts track how many users report, which grows year over year.

When pace differences are meaningful

Most cycle-to-cycle jitter is noise. Schools don't pace decisions identically year to year, committees turn over, and a week of bad weather can push a release batch by a few days. Two-point swings within a week aren't signal. Worth noticing: sustained multi-week gaps around historical peak weeks, and shifts in the accept/waitlist/reject mix rather than just the pace. If a cycle is releasing the same volume as last year but acceptance share is down and waitlist share is up, that's a more aggressive waitlist strategy, not a slower cycle.

The dashboard also surfaces national trends from ABA 509 disclosures for every ABA-accredited school back to 2011. That view drops the weekly granularity and zooms out to multi-year drift: total applications, total enrollment, average median LSAT, average median GPA. One year of movement is noise; four or five years of drift says something about the applicant pool. For per-school acceptance rates and full history, drill into the school profile .

T14 reference table

At the bottom, the tracker pins last cycle's final top 14 LSD rankings with each school's median LSAT and GPA. It's a static reference — the current cycle's rankings aren't final until it closes. For how the rankings are computed, see Rankings Methodology .