#retaking

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/greg-walden-to-retire-in-latest-sign-of-gop-doubts-about-retaking-house/

Greg Walden to retire in latest sign of GOP doubts about retaking House

Walden added: “So, I will not seek re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives, nor election to any other office, but instead I will close the public service chapter of my life, thankful for the friends I’ve made and the successful work we’ve done together.”

The Oregon congressman is the 19th House Republican to announce they are retiring at the end of this Congress, a sign of how difficult it will be for the GOP to win back the majority in what’s already shaping up as a tough 2020 election. Having President Donald Trump’s name at the top of the ticket will ensure turnout among his supporters, yet it’s also expected to bring Democrats out in huge numbers as well.

Walden — a former radio station owner with a booming voice — is well respected by colleagues from both sides of the aisle, who describe him as both a savvy politician and serious legislator who likes to dig into the nitty-gritty policy details.

Walden, a former chief of the House GOP’s campaign arm who earned a reputation for party loyalty over his past two decades in Congress, has been quietly picking and choosing his battles with Trump this year, fueling speculation he might be eyeing the exits.

The Oregon Republican rebuked the president over the hugely controversial border wall project, backed Russia sanctions over Trump’s objection, voted with Democrats to end the historic 35-day government shutdown and has been vocal about addressing climate change. But Walden also has stood by Trump throughout the Ukraine scandal and fallen in line on other key issues.

Walden is the fourth House GOP committee leader to call it quits this cycle. That list includes Reps. Mike Conaway (Texas), ranking member on the Agriculture Committee; Rob Bishop (Utah), ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee; and Mac Thornberry (Texas), ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee.

While Walden could have continued as the top Republican on Energy and Commerce until the end of 2022, Conaway, Bishop and Thornberry were all facing term limits next year. Under House GOP rules, a lawmaker can only lead a committee for three terms, regardless of whether they are in the majority or minority. But House GOP leaders have been considering relaxing that policy amid growing fears it could fuel more retirements and create an institutional brain drain among Republicans.

Before wielding the Energy and Commerce gavel, Walden spent years chairing the panel’s telecommunications subcommittee that oversees the Federal Communications Commission. He helped advance major legislation in that position, including a 2012 law that created the public safety communications network known as FirstNet and other measures aimed at fighting illegal robocalls, expanding broadband and freeing up airwaves to be used in 5G wireless networks.

A Beaver State native who graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism, Walden first came to Washington in the early 1980s as a congressional aide. In 1988, he won a seat in the Oregon House of Representatives, and was then appointed to the Oregon Senate in 1995. After winning the 1998 congressional race, Walden won a seat on Energy and Commerce in 2001.

Walden won reelection in his sprawling, rural district in eastern and central Oregon by 17 points in 2018. That was a comfortable margin in a bad year for the GOP, but much smaller than his previous wins. Trump carried the district by 21 points in 2016 and the GOP is likely to hang on to his seat.

Walden had a successful tenure at the National Republican Congressional Committee, serving as deputy under then-Chairman Pete Sessions of Texas in the 2010 and 2012 cycles before taking the helm for the next four years.

During the 2016 cycle, Walden notably maintained his friendship with his counterpart, Democratic Congressional Committee Chairman Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico. Both served on the same Energy and Commerce subcommittee.

John Hendel contributed to this report.

If you have multiple LSAT scores, will law school admissions officers hold that against you? Will they average multiple scores? Will they view you having to take the LSAT multiple times as a sign that you lack the intellect, the preparation, the acumen to be a law student? Is taking the LSAT more than once a moral failure?

These are questions that anyone who is even adjacent to the law school admissions process gets constantly (well, maybe not the last one). And for sort-of-obvious reasons — most law school admissions departments aren’t terribly candid on how they treat multiple LSAT scores, there’s a lot of outdated advice circulating the internet, and most law school applicants get their advice from other law school applicants, almost none of whom are particularly well-informed. As a result, people adjacent to the law school admissions process — like, say, yours truly, an LSAT instructor and blogger — get these questions from confused applicants a lot. I sometimes even get people who confidently assert, as a matter of fact, the wrong answers to these questions.

So let’s try to answer these questions today as definitively as we can. But first, we’ll need to take a brief journey into the past. So, let’s hop in the proverbial flux capacitor-powered DeLorean and journey back to 2005. In that year — and in all the years before it — the ABA required that law schools, when reporting admissions statistics, average multiple LSAT scores earned by accepted applicants. The all-powerful U.S. News & World Report — which ranks these law schools based, in large part, on the incoming class’s median LSAT scores — also averaged multiple LSAT scores. So, when assessing applicants, law schools also tended to average multiple scores earned by applicants. An applicant who earned both a 150 and 170 would be treated as if that applicant really earned a 160, more or less. This is why, by the way, you still might hear that law schools average multiple LSAT scores — they once did, based a mandate from their twin gods the ABA and USNWR.

But, fast forward to June 2006. The ABA loosened up that old mandate. The ABA decided that law schools could simply report the highest LSAT score earned by an accepted applicant who took the LSAT multiple times. And USNWR consequently decided it would use the highest LSAT scores, too. So it no longer behooved law schools to average the LSAT scores of applicants. It would be in any law school’s interest to just look at the highest score of applicants with multiple LSAT scores. Averaging scores would depreciate the entering class’s median LSAT score, along with that law school’s USNWR ranking. So, admissions deans had a strong incentive to just look at applicants’ high score.

Except, here’s the thing: 2006 and the next few years were boom times for law schools. Tons of people were taking the LSAT and applying to law school — way more than today, in fact. Law schools, especially highly ranked schools, didn’t have much trouble finding qualified applicants. So many of these upper echelon schools were slow to embrace the new wave of just looking at applicants’ highest score. They were getting so many great applicants that some could still afford to average. Applicants with more than one LSAT score could be put at a disadvantage, at least when applying to the tip-top schools. This is, again, why the rumor of score averaging persisted well after the 2006 ABA rule change.

But let’s travel forward once more to 2011. Those once-bustling admissions departments are much quieter. Those great applications with one amazing LSAT score aren’t rolling in quite like they used to. Struck by a dramatic decrease in applicants, law school admissions departments, slowly but surely, began to just start using the highest LSAT when assessing applicants with multiple scores. They could no longer afford to average the scores. And that continues today. Almost no law school still averages multiple LSAT scores. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just relying on outdated information.

But, is it still better to have just one LSAT score? After all, law schools can still see every LSAT score that you received. And when pressed, admissions officers will say stuff like they “look at applicants’ entire score history” or that they take a “holistic approach” to applicants’ score history. The answer to that is still, yes, probably. If an admissions officer were to get two identical applicants, who were the same in every way (GPA, quality of their personal statement and letters of rec, and cetera), except the first applicant earned a 172 the one time they took the LSAT, and the second applicant earned a 165 the first time they took the LSAT and a 172 on the second try — the law school would accept the first candidate first. Now, the law school would almost certainly also take the second applicant. And this hypothetical situation would never actually happen — no two candidates are that identical. But I suppose taking the LSAT once would give you a slight advantage. So ideally, you take the LSAT once, then apply with that amazing score.

Except almost no one lives in that ideal world. Many people have to take the LSAT more than once to earn the score needed to get into the law schools they want to attend. Which is totally fine! The small, nebulous disadvantage of having multiple LSAT scores will be more than offset by the significant advantage of having a higher LSAT score. So you should take the LSAT more than once, if that’s what’s needed to give you a reasonable chance to get into a law school you want to attend. Especially if you have reasons to believe that you can get a much higher score on the second try. Like, if there was a medical or family emergency that impeded your study plan the first time, or if there was some sort of test center disaster, or your practice exam scores were significantly higher than your test day score. You should, by the way, address any significant increase in your score in an addendum to your application.

But, we have one more year to stop by: 2017, when LSAC lifted its restriction on the number of times people could take the LSAT. Now that people can, theoretically, take the LSAT an unlimited number of times, is there a certain point at which someone has taken the LSAT “too many” times. That’s tougher to answer, since this change is still fairly recent, and law schools haven’t gotten that many candidates who have taken the LSAT five, six, seven times. My advice to someone thinking about taking the LSAT a third or fourth or seventh time is the same as my advice to someone thinking about taking the LSAT a second time. Do it, if that’s what’s needed to get into a law school you’d want to go to. Without an LSAT score that’s within the school’s 25-75 median LSAT score range, you’re probably not getting in. So if you don’t secure that competitive score, you don’t have a shot. With that score — even if it took you several attempts to get it — you at least have a shot.

In all, don’t look at having to take the LSAT more than once as some enormous failure in your application. Every applicant has their own story to tell — and if your story involves taking the LSAT more than once, that is totally OK.

Bitcoin Seeking Gains After Retaking Key Price Support

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Bitcoin’s immediate outlook will remain neutral while prices are trapped in the range of $3,658-$3,900.

If the bulls can keep prices above the 5-week MA support at $3,703, we could see a rally above $4,000. The average is reporting bullish conditions for the first time since August.

On the downside, a UTC close below $3,658 (Feb. 27 low) would revive the bearish view put forward by the…

Bitcoin Seeking Gains After Retaking Key Price Support

View

Bitcoin’s immediate outlook will remain neutral while prices are trapped in the range of $3,658-$3,900.

If the bulls can keep prices above the 5-week MA support at $3,703, we could see a rally above $4,000. The average is reporting bullish conditions for the first time since August.

On the downside, a UTC close below $3,658 (Feb. 27 low) would revive the bearish view put forward by the…

Who says LSAC can’t be nice sometimes? I’ll explain, but first, an action item: If you took the June LSAT and you’re not sure how it went or whether you might want to retake, you should register for the July LSAT now. The deadline is tomorrow. Here’s why.

So anyway, until last week, it seemed like June and July LSAT test takers were going to be in a tough spot. If you took the June LSAT, you’d only have a couple days to decide whether to register for July, and of course you wouldn’t know your score yet. July LSAT test takers were going to have to decide no later than the day of the test whether to take September. Seriously, you were going to have to leave the test center with the deadline to register only a few hours away.

LSAC seems to have recognized the problem because they just announced a solution and it’s pretty cool. If you’re registered for the July LSAT and you get your June score and you’re happy with it, LSAC will give you a full refund of your July registration fee. They’ll do the same for July test takers who are registered for the September LSAT. To get the refund, you just have to email LSAC by the deadline, which for both exams is a week after the day you get your score back.

If you’re not sure how the June LSAT went, there’s little reason not to register for July. If you get your June score and you’re happy with it, you’ll get your money back. If you’re not happy, you’ll probably be glad you’re registered for July since by then it would have been too late to sign up. One of the only reasons not to register for July is if you think you’d like more time to study, in which case it makes sense to target September.

There’s a good case to make for July test takers to just sign up for the September LSAT preemptively. By signing up early, you’ll give yourself a better chance of getting your choice of test centers. If July goes as planned, you’ll get your money back. You should know that you can get that money back only if you get a reportable score — in other words, you don’t withdraw or cancel or get caught breaking the rules. But if you were to, say, cancel your July LSAT score, you’d be looking to register for a future LSAT anyway so it still won’t cost you anything extra to register now for the September LSAT.

There are, of course, deadlines. The deadline for a refund on July is July 6 and you need a reportable June score. The deadline for a refund on September is August 17 and again, you need a reportable July score.

Good job, LSAC. This policy, for once, puts test takers’ needs first. It may be the nicest thing LSAC has done since they spread logic games out onto two pages each. Feeling the competition from the GRE much, LSAC?