Is your Law Review Process Transparent Forum

[lawhopeful10]

I go to UGA and just did my write on and we are told whether we make law review is some combination of our mini note score, our bluebook exercise score, and grades. There is however no clear weight they give to each thing and the process seems very much like a black box. I feel like more transparency is almost always a good thing and was wondering what they do at other schools.

[First Offense]

I go to UGA and just did my write on and we are told whether we make law review is some combination of our mini note score, our bluebook exercise score, and grades. There is however no clear weight they give to each thing and the process seems very much like a black box. I feel like more transparency is almost always a good thing and was wondering what they do at other schools.

UVA's is. Most positions are graded on (and I think the LR office posts the grade-on GPA on their door), and then ten positions are for the best write-ons, with up to five positions reserved for diversity.

[lawhopeful10]

Yea I was thinking most places have something like that. It seems really strange to me that they aren't clear how it is done here.

[A. Nony Mouse]

My school (lower T1) was pure write-on. Applicants got told it was based on their write-on grade, their bluebook exercise grade, with a small boost for grades (boost = each submission was graded by I think 5 people? and applicants with top 10% grades got their lowest essay score dropped). I'm not sure we told applicants exactly how the boost worked, though, and I don't even remember what weight the essay and bluebook part each had or if we told applicants what the weights were.

They may not give you a more concrete breakdown because they may want to retain some discretion - for instance, if the submissions have mostly had crazy good essays but sucky bluebook portions, they might decide also to take someone with a mediocre essay if they had crazy good bluebooking skills, because you need both skills on LR.

[lawhopeful10]

My school (lower T1) was pure write-on. Applicants got told it was based on their write-on grade, their bluebook exercise grade, with a small boost for grades (boost = each submission was graded by I think 5 people? and applicants with top 10% grades got their lowest essay score dropped). I'm not sure we told applicants exactly how the boost worked, though, and I don't even remember what weight the essay and bluebook part each had or if we told applicants what the weights were.

They may not give you a more concrete breakdown because they may want to retain some discretion - for instance, if the submissions have mostly had crazy good essays but sucky bluebook portions, they might decide also to take someone with a mediocre essay if they had crazy good bluebooking skills, because you need both skills on LR.

Ours could be similar to this. It would be nice for them to give the explanation you just have though haha. The rumor is that grades count the most since most people with good grades make it on but that could be more a factor of people with good grades also being good writers and less about the mechanics of scoring. Who knows.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Honestly, if it's a write-on, I doubt that grades are dispositive, or they'd just have a grade-on system. But that's just a hunch.

[BVest]

Ours was part grade on (top 10%, but had to put forth a good faith effort in all three parts of the writing, editing, bluebooking competition), with remainder being judged based on the competition (but requiring top 50% GPA -- but once you were above top 50% there was no other inclusion of grades -- i.e. a student at 25% had no advantage over a student at 33%). There wasn't any transparency re the scoring of the competition, but it was done anonymously, so I'm not sure how much room for hijinks there was. Given the number they took (about 40 slots in a class of 200), if you assume that all the top 10% participate with a GFE, then there were about 20 slots for pure write-on.

ETA: 40-50 ranked school.

[bsktbll28082]

T50-60 school: Top 10% grade on with good faith effort, everyone else has a combination grade (25% 1L grades, 25% BB, 50% casenote). Other journals give different weights and do not include grades, but they have an interview.

[LeDique]

My school (lower T1) was pure write-on. Applicants got told it was based on their write-on grade, their bluebook exercise grade, with a small boost for grades (boost = each submission was graded by I think 5 people? and applicants with top 10% grades got their lowest essay score dropped). I'm not sure we told applicants exactly how the boost worked, though, and I don't even remember what weight the essay and bluebook part each had or if we told applicants what the weights were.

They may not give you a more concrete breakdown because they may want to retain some discretion - for instance, if the submissions have mostly had crazy good essays but sucky bluebook portions, they might decide also to take someone with a mediocre essay if they had crazy good bluebooking skills, because you need both skills on LR.

If I remember right from last year, we don't tell them how the boost works, but if someone asked me I wouldn't have thought about it and told them. We show them the rubric so they know how the essay is scored, and I think we tell them the breakdown for the percentages.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Yeah, I didn't mean there was some policy to keep it secret, just that I didn't remember it as part of the initial information.

I don't even remember what the percentages were, so I probably shouldn't even be answering.

[skw]

At my T1, 13 students purely grade on (contingent on a GF effort with the write-on portion), 13 students get on with 50% weight to grades and 50% weight to the write on, and 13 students purely based on the write-on. The BB portion of the write-on competition was included in the "write-on" portion of weight, but I don't recall if they told us how much weight they assigned to it.

[ph14]

Yes, my school's law review was pretty transparent. All the information on the grading system is on the website for anyone to read.

[sap]

T14, full write-on, everyone is told what % each part gets (bluebook, P.S, note), though we don't publish our rubric for the grading. It feels decently transparent.

[jbagelboy]

Ours is pretty nebulous. 1/3 the spots are strictly write-on from the memo/citation exercises. Then grades, the writing assignment and a diversity metric comprise the remaining 2/3 spots. It's generally acknowledged that of that remaining holistic 2/3, about 1/3 will be 'diverse' candidates, 1/3 will be the highest grades in the class. But we don't know for sure.

[dudley12]

My school (lower T1) was pure write-on. Applicants got told it was based on their write-on grade, their bluebook exercise grade, with a small boost for grades (boost = each submission was graded by I think 5 people? and applicants with top 10% grades got their lowest essay score dropped). I'm not sure we told applicants exactly how the boost worked, though, and I don't even remember what weight the essay and bluebook part each had or if we told applicants what the weights were.

They may not give you a more concrete breakdown because they may want to retain some discretion - for instance, if the submissions have mostly had crazy good essays but sucky bluebook portions, they might decide also to take someone with a mediocre essay if they had crazy good bluebooking skills, because you need both skills on LR.

ours is almost purely mini-note with a small percentage of the grade allocated to BB exercise and a tiny bit based on the cover letter. school ranked in 30's.