Largeish fish, smaller pond? Forum

[JohnBlaze]

I go to a T4. I picked it partly because I needed a local part-time program and they gave me an excellent scholarship. CALI/Witkin awards (top two spots in each class) were just announced for first semester. They were dominated by scholarship kids. While TLSers repeatedly state that you can't predict law school performance based on LSAT/GPA, the high LSAT/GPA students at my school seem to be high performers. These same students are the ones invited to the Dean's brunch with influential alumni. They are the ones the professors pick as research assistants. They are the ones getting the decent interviews on campus. They are the students invited to be on law review. Depending on your situation and goals you still may be better off picking a T14 instead of a lower ranked school with a big scholarship. And TLSers are right, a high GPA/LSAT doesn't guarentee that you will be a "big fish" in your TTT pond. But meta-analysis of the "GPA/LSAT to performance" studies show a correlation.

Correlation does not equal causation. Not even close. Probably around 30% of a law school class is on some sort of scholarship. Out of a class of 200, this is 60 students. Only 20 students overall will make top 10%. Only 2 (1%) qualify for these CALI/Witkin awards. I'm not betting 100k on those numbers. No way. My numbers are guess-timations, but you get the point. Correlations can predict a general trend that will hold up with a representative sample over time, but they can NEVER be used to reliably predict an individual instance.

Really? Correlation doesn't imply causation? There could be a totally unrelated factor (like underlying raw intelligence or work ethic) that caused both things? (/sarcasm).

I don't think anything I said implied that good LSAT scores cause good law school performance (that would be a fairly ridiculous statement). As a statistician, I hate when people inapproriately say "correlation does not equal causation" in an effort to make other people look bad.

I wasn't trying to make you look bad. I wasn't even disagreeing with you. All I was trying to say was that even with a correlation between LSAT/GPA and 1L performance, it would be unwise to base your decision on this. I was just pointing out that most famous of all flaws of logic: mistaking a necessary condition (the intelligence that accompanies high scores) for a sufficient condition. I don't think you said anything contrary to that, but I know that sometimes people who are applying thinking of attending law school overestimate their abilities relative to their prospective classmates (some underestimate) and find faulty methods for rationalizing their thinking. That is all.

[nahgems]

I wasn't trying to make you look bad. I wasn't even disagreeing with you. All I was trying to say was that even with a correlation between LSAT/GPA and 1L performance, it would be unwise to base your decision on this. I was just pointing out that most famous of all flaws of logic: mistaking a necessary condition (the intelligence that accompanies high scores) for a sufficient condition. I don't think you said anything contrary to that, but I know that sometimes people who are applying thinking of attending law school overestimate their abilities relative to their prospective classmates (some underestimate) and find faulty methods for rationalizing their thinking. That is all.

Sorry. I totally overreacted. Its just one of those things that bugs me.

[JohnBlaze]

Sorry. I totally overreacted. Its just one of those things that bugs me.

Gotcha. No worries.