RVP11 wrote:Journeybound wrote:Sure a lot of the 3Ls and some 2Ls with SAs have checked out, but I would still guess that more than 30% of my upper-level classes have students that are still working hard. That means that if I wanted to land top 10%, I would still need to beat out the same people at the same level of competitiveness as last year...
You're gonna need more than hard work if this is reflective of your capacity for logic.
There is a valid point in there, if you presume that the 30% of people still working hard are the same ones who occupied the top 10% field the previous year.
TBF, that isn't an entirely unfair presumption to make, either. A good chunk of the people who continue to work hard in 2L are the clerkship gunners. Those folks are going to be the top 10-20%. So, if you want to elbow in on that turf, you're going to need to be at that level.
Totally falls apart lower than 20% or so (I agree whole-heartedly that transfers really have an easier time landing in the ~25% range,) totally falls apart if you're generally taking uncurved classes or classes where the clerkship gunners don't tend to congregate (both of those aspects are going to vary from school to school - it's impossible to dodge the curve at Chicago, but I'm under the impression it's easier to do elsewhere,) etc.
But anyone who argues that it's easy for
anyone to waltz in to the top 10% at any respectable school is full of it.