Check out RateMyAward.com Forum

[LawAdmissions]

Check out RateMyAward.com to receive an objective analysis of your law school scholarship offer. This site launched recently and will benefit many on this message board! Good luck with decisions!
-SW
Twitter: @RateMyAward

[WaltGrace83]

lol @ "objective."

I typed in 160/4.0 in for uPenn for 30k (someone with those stats shouldn't even have a shot at GETTING IN). The response? "Your award is low." I typed in 200k. The response? "Your award is low."

[guano]

I tried LSAT: 120, GPA 2.0 for Yale and for Columbia
$50k is "Fair"
$15k is "Very Low"

[Ricky-Bobby]

The previous posters talked about the quality of the response, so I won't comment on that.

My issue is with the data collection. The second page, under "Help us improve" asks whether that award is for the 2013-2014 application cycle. Are you using this exclusively for data collection? If so, are you somehow correcting for multiple runs from the same users? What about hypothetical runs? Relying on end-users to accurately respond to that question without noting the implications of false data seems sketchy.

[LawAdmissions]

Thank you for the constructive comments.

@Ricky-Bobby – Yes, we are collecting the data that is submitted to the site so that we can improve our formula. It is true that users can submit fake data and claim that it is a real offer. However, based on our experience, we believe this is not very common and we are able to detect multiple hypothetical runs like you mention.

I’ve been working with a great Carnegie Mellon educated engineering staff to make certain that all calculations are accurate and supportable. We are working to continually improve the accuracy and quality of the service.

I should clear up what this site is not. The service in no way is meant to be a predictor of the likelihood of being admitted to any law school. There are great tools out there that already meet that need. Furthermore, the service is not a declaration of what an individual law school’s merit goals may be for any given year. To that end, a law school’s budget for scholarships is not taken into account. The law school applicant market may continue to decline or rebound, not aligning with what a particular law school planned to accomplish in a year.

Previously, individual applicants had no yard stick with which to measure their real, tangible awards except on public forums and on an individual basis or by relying on law schools for their transparency. Individual applicants should use Rate My Award as a single tool among many evaluation measures to support a decision strategy.

The service is designed to run, at peak functionality, for those candidates who have actually been admitted to a certain school and have actually received a written offer from that school.

Rate My Award is interested in how this service might be able to assist in developing trends in the, often volatile, law school scholarship market. Using the information provided by the user and the behavior of users on the website, the engineering team has several detective and corrective mechanisms in place to account for select users who may be feeding false information. Before Rate My Award launched, the most popular forums for sharing information about scholarships made no attempt to verify or classify trends.

-SW
https://RateMyAward.com