The new US News ranks are out. Harvard moved to 3 and Columbia / NYU are tied at 4. Also Boalt moved to 8. These are worth checking out on the US News site.

Doesn't seem like there was any of the inflation you were talking about before dtrossen. The interquartile range seems approximately the same.

Yale did not move. Stanford, Columbia, and NYU had 25th percentile LSAT bump up 1 point. Harvard had both 25th and 75th percentile LSAT move up 1 point. GPAs for top 5 stayed similar.

Inflation is closer to .5 LSAT point.

Harvard LSAT went up one point, but GPA went down a LOT. 3.68? They must be gaming to keep their LSAT quartile ranges up while sacrificing the lower end of the gpa scale. Great news for me I guess.

I think a straight point analysis of the LSAT is giving incomplete information. A move from 175 to 176 is pretty substantial in terms of the number of people who get these scores (like 500 to 300 people)

A move from 167 to 168 is not really that much (3000? to 2500? people). I'm too lazy to look up the numbers right now but in absolute terms, low end inflation doesn't seem to matter.

And Boalt's gpa-heavy admissions doesn't seem to be filtering out as many people any more on gpa, 3.67 25th percentile? I think the race is on to increase and narrow down LSAT quartiles at the expense of gpa quartiles.

Harvard GPA 25% dipped .05, which isn't that substantial (equivalent to around .4 LSAT points). Their 75% went down .02. This is much less of a dip than the increase in LSAT of 1 point on both ends.

Boalt's 25% GPA of 3.67 is up .04 from last year's 3.63. NYU GPAs are also up, as are Stanford's.

Overall the numbers went up for the top 5 schools by an average about .5 LSAT points. The presence of soft factors is pronounced with Yale, who clearly has the choice of accepting higher indexes but they decline to do this in favor of soft factors.

I don't see an LSAT focus at the cost of GPA in the numbers, except with Harvard. However, Harvard did not just trade LSAT for GPA, its net index went up substantially (about .6 to .7 LSAT points). The shift in focus in favor of LSAT is an advantage to you, as you are a high LSAT / low GPA candidate.

Yeah, you're right. Analyzing this further so I may input some information to other readers ...

I got my reasoning backwards.

A 1 point LSAT inflation from 166 to 167 is different from an inflation from 175 to 176 because of the way the LSAT is scaled. From my previous post I pointed out that the percentile change in the 170 to 180 range is from about 98.5 to 99.9. The percentile change from 160 to 170 is much more about 83 percentile to 98.5 percentile. Hence, a 1 point change from 167 to 168 would represent a greater increase in terms of percentile change than 175 to 176, and a greater decrease (in absolute terms) in both the number of applicants who will now fit into the "likely" piles at top schools since LSAT is the biggest limiting factor. This is bad for people in the 160-170 range as it puts pressure on them to do better. However, for those in the 170 range, it helps them a lot because schools are now competing for them in order to boost their LSAT quartile ranges (which are weighed more heavily than GPA).

So their is inflation, but since only about 2000 people get about 170+'s each year and and about a 1000 get 172+'s and all the top 14's are competing for them, this helps people with good lsat's and hurts people with good gpas conversely. The top 5 law schools have about 2000 slots open alone. In short, the lack of supply of 172+ LSAT applicants makes lsat inflation of more positive benefit to people good at the LSAT at the expense of Low GPA people.

I wonder if a null hypothesis test of the fluctuations in the index scores from previous years would review inflation at all; it could just be statistical deviation. And if there is inflation, maybe it is caused by the recent spike in LSAT exam takers (from 100k to 137k in about 5 years). A rise in LSAT exam takers which seems to be going back down to previous levels thanks to the booming economy. I ponder ...

You make a good point - the difficulty of a school moving its 75th % LSAT scores is a strong function of the 75th % score. If you treat the LSAT distribution as a Gaussain, it becomes increasingly more difficult for a school to increase it's 75th % score because it is working with a smaller and smaller Normal Distribution tail. There is no doubt that the difference in average LSAT between 2000 and 2006 has do with the increased number of applicants, resulting in a simple linear scale of the high end tail - i.e. more big LSAT scorers because there are more test takers. Hence, your chances of admission to Harvard in 2008 will rely heavily on how the number of test takers changes with year. If it keeps increasing you can expect some 75th % LSAT shift, but if it holds steady or diminishes you should be in great shape.

The single point change in a quartile cuttoff rarely signals a change in the LSAT distribution at a school. At a tier 2 school the middle 50 range (25th to 75th percentile) is 3-4 points while the next 20% are probably captured by a 2 point spread and the top 5% can range much more broadly.

What this means is that a 75 percentile score can easily range from an ACTUAL 65 percentile to a 85 percentile but the next closest LSAT score is even more at variance from the target 75 percentile. If the difference between the two scores is close than a change in the LSAT 75th percentile cuttoff COULD be prompted by a single percent change in the distribution at any percentile level. Or stated another way, it could come from anywhere in the distribution and it could represent a tiny number of scores shifting by a single point. These distinctions are rarely meaningful because the LSAT is not parsimonious enough for a given schools distributions to make fine distinctions between people. Setting aside the more serious problem of LSAT validity and reliability.