What percentage are we? Forum

[Kiersten1985]

I know we're all obsessed with TLS, LSN, LSP, etc. and many of us treat these sources as final verdicts regarding our application outcomes. But what percentage of law school applicants do you think actually use these sites (particularly LSN) and therefore how accurate are they?

Any pseudo-scientific reasoning for figuring this out is welcomed. For example, I was thinking about comparing "Accepted, Attending" folks on LSN for particular schools vs. what I know to be the actual number of matriculating students that year for that school.

[APimpNamedSlickback]

while its impossible to come up with anything to be confident about, i think the best way to do this would be to take the number of applications to each school on lsn as a percentage of the official total number of applications as given by the ABA. you might use that as a starting point, and then try to extrapolate from there how many of these people also post on tls.

[ogman05]

Doesnt matter how many as long as lsn gives truthful answers it will be accurate. At some schools you can see sharp acceptance, denial lines. For the traditional applicant easier to predict. Nontraditional is never easy to predict. In regards to what percentaeg of applicants I would do the same as poster above says. Take the total amount of apps on lsn for a particular school. ie. for uva (2009) there were 4869 total apps reported and there were about 1000 or so apps on lsn for that same period. So I would guess about 20-25%. This also varies by school however.

[MTC87]

even if users of LSN and TLS did skew disproportionately to the high end on LSAT/GPA, why would this lessen the predictive reliability of these sources for a given LSAT/GPA combination?

the fact that all stats are self-reported does pose a reliability problem, but that is a separate issue.