Mean LSAT by UG College Forum

[Esc]

BeastCoastHype and Lawyer2012 are right. Marko Ramius is wrong.

Of course! Thank you, Mr. Arbiter.

You're welcome! Thanks for being so accepting about how wrong you were!

[dbt]

BeastCoastHype and Lawyer2012 are right. Marko Ramius is wrong.

Of course! Thank you, Mr. Arbiter.

You're welcome! Thanks for being so accepting about how wrong you were!

Hook 'em!

[prezidentv8]

BeastCoast - I don't think the point was that no one from state schools can be extraordinary, or that every kid from an Ivy league school is smarter/better than every kid from a state school. More so, it's that there's such an amazing amount of people doing incredible things, to the point where extraordinary is the rule, not the exception.

Elite schools do not have have a monopoly on brains and ambition, but they have a big concentration of it. The sheer magnitude is staggering - in a class of 1300, we had 5 Rhodes Scholars, 31 Fulbright scholars, 120+ kids going to HYSCCN for law school, 150+ kids going to big 3 consulting firms or bulge bracket investment banks. Speechwriters for major politicians, UN workers in Afghanistan, journalists for Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc., etc. I'm not sure what the the relevant statistics are for med school, grad school, and other jobs, but I imagine they're similar.

These things might not be subjectively admirable (I-banking comes to mind), but the point is that almost all your friends will be doing things that are considered extremely impressive in their respective fields. Of my freshman year suite (6 guys), one is at Yale law, one is going to Columbia law, one is a chem PhD at Stanford, one trades oil for Goldman Sachs, one does arbitrage trading for JP Morgan, and one works in investment banking at Citi. In the room across the hall, there was Yale law, Harvard law, TFA, and a Fulbright.

I don't mean this as a dick-measuring contest, and I'm sorry if it comes off that way. There are undoubtedly people at "non-elite" schools doing similarly extraordinary things. But the point is at some of these elite schools, everyone is doing extraordinary things. The benefits of the network only increase over time. Regardless of what field you choose (business, law, medicine, academia, politics, etc), you will have well-placed friends. I'm not saying this is "fair" or "the way it should be", but that is how it is.

The Deresiewicz article is true, but simultaneously misleading. Does the kind of rat-race, overly-planned intellectual constipation he describes exist at these colleges? Sure, it does in spades. But there are also tons of people who are genuinely intelligent, thoughtful, intellectually curious people, regardless of whether they pursue conventional or unconventional paths (and there are plenty that do the latter). Deresiewicz can ramble all he wants about the "life of the mind" and "the German Romantic idea of bildung", but I think it's wrong to endorse that path as better than any other. In effect, he's not saying each of us should be unique and do what we want, but rather each of us should conform, but to the intellectual ideals that he prizes, rather than the practical ideals that many people justifiably want as well.

The extraordinary things that people do at elite schools is the result of being given extraordinary opportunities, which in turn is the result of the self-perpetuating snowball effect of prestige. I was lucky to have been able to do some "extraordinary" things in the company of Yalies and other Ivy leaguers. How? By working my way up and proving myself time and time again. Opportunities that are gift-wrapped for Harvard students do not require some sort of esoteric knowledge or skills that students from TTTs do not possess or cannot obtain. While the experiences that I had were great, they didn't make me any smarter or add 10 points to my LSAT score.

Call it smugness or call it self-confidence, but attending one of those elite institutions tends to develop that particular trait. As I sought to make my own opportunities, I learned that temporarily acting in such a manner will get you far in certain situations. People are perceptive, whether they are aware of it or not, of the self-confidence of others. They intuitively make assumptions based upon how one carries him/herself. It is easy to have this self-confidence when you are attending a prestigious institution, but it doesn't preclude others from developing it either. My point is that intelligence, as measured by a standardized test, is not the dominant factor when it comes to securing many of these opportunities. This is not to say that the people who attended elite institutions aren't, on average, smarter than TTT graduates; they are. However, opportunities are given by people with power to those whom they deem worthy, regardless of actual intelligence. Incredible achievements may belong to incredible people, but it is the opportunity that is the catalyst for those achievements.

I like this response.



Also...

one does arbitrage trading for JP Morgan

Ewwww. If this is the job I'm thinking of, that guy clearly got the short stick out of all the suitemates in your room.

[wreckem]

Texas Tech University 150

Its pretty depressing. 2% scored between 90-94%'tiles, and 2% scored 95%tile and up.

17% scored in the 0-19 range.

[RVP11]

Texas Tech University 150

Its pretty depressing. 2% scored between 90-94%'tiles, and 2% scored 95%tile and up.

17% scored in the 0-19 range.

I thought TTU was a better school. Turns out my Directional State U is quite a bit better.

[spike]

Reed College, 161

[royal34]

Syracuse =153
GW = 157

[biggamejames]

Anyone know University of Louisville?

[dresden doll]

I've always seen the advantage of going to a high ranked school as having access to top professors in their fields and being surrounded by students who are, on average, smarter and likely to be more successful. I have a lot of really interesting friends who are going on to do pretty cool things all around the country, so I like having that kind of network.

On the other hand, a motivated student could certainly find a niche at a "lesser" school and have a core set of academically inclined friends. A student who so wishes can pretty easily find like-minded individuals at any school, I would argue.

Not really true in my experience.

[biggamejames]

I've always seen the advantage of going to a high ranked school as having access to top professors in their fields and being surrounded by students who are, on average, smarter and likely to be more successful. I have a lot of really interesting friends who are going on to do pretty cool things all around the country, so I like having that kind of network.

On the other hand, a motivated student could certainly find a niche at a "lesser" school and have a core set of academically inclined friends. A student who so wishes can pretty easily find like-minded individuals at any school, I would argue.

Not really true in my experience.

UG is the new high school, anyways - it's more to socialize people than to actually teach them anything. Might as well have a good time, pursue your own interests outside of class, and then actually learn stuff in grad school.

[Tuukie11]

Calvin College (In Michigan, not real well known outside midwest) = 157. That's with 93 people taking.

[prezidentv8]

I've always seen the advantage of going to a high ranked school as having access to top professors in their fields and being surrounded by students who are, on average, smarter and likely to be more successful. I have a lot of really interesting friends who are going on to do pretty cool things all around the country, so I like having that kind of network.

On the other hand, a motivated student could certainly find a niche at a "lesser" school and have a core set of academically inclined friends. A student who so wishes can pretty easily find like-minded individuals at any school, I would argue.

Not really true in my experience.

UG is the new high school, anyways - it's more to socialize people than to actually teach them anything. Might as well have a good time, pursue your own interests outside of class, and then actually learn stuff in grad school.

I think this is about right. As much as I learned in undergrad, it was very high school-ey (how to write, how to manage/socialize with people, and a few skills here and there (basic accounting, statistical stuff, etc.). I seriously doubt that these "top professors" can innately teach things any better than a TTT adjunct. Of course, top undergrad schools do command a pretty high degree of prestige, if that's your thing, and grant their students something of a super-awesome-radical-cool experience - but I tend not to care about those things so much. Hence, I took what is apparently a TTT, and am quite happy with my decision to save my money.

[biggamejames]

bump.

[vasiok]

Heh I beat my college mean by 20 points... that's sad.

[biggamejames]

Heh I beat my college mean by 20 points... that's sad.

I'm still waiting for someone to post my college mean. I bet it's bad, though.

[06132010]

Heh I beat my college mean by 20 points... that's sad.

I'm still waiting for someone to post my college mean. I bet it's bad, though.

check your LSDAS report foo.

[biggamejames]

Heh I beat my college mean by 20 points... that's sad.

I'm still waiting for someone to post my college mean. I bet it's bad, though.

check your LSDAS report foo.

Damn, my college mean was 151.

[Noble]

UCLA and UCB's averages are skewed by the huge number of CC transfers they admit. A ton of them want to go to law school and get pwned on lsat

[RVP11]

UCLA and UCB's averages are skewed by the huge number of CC transfers they admit. A ton of them want to go to law school and get pwned on lsat

That's a pretty dumb theory. Their means are in line with schools of similar rank.

[heyyitskatie]

UCLA and UCB's averages are skewed by the huge number of CC transfers they admit. A ton of them want to go to law school and get pwned on lsat

I was actually surprised that Berkeley's was that high. We have a ton of people, it's still a public school, and there's no entrance barrier to taking the LSAT, so I expected it to be worse. Also, not to say that people outside of the technical fields aren't impressive at Berkeley, but that's where most of our prestige comes from, and most of those people aren't going to law school, so in the end, not bad.

[darkarmour]

UCLA and UCB's averages are skewed by the huge number of CC transfers they admit. A ton of them want to go to law school and get pwned on lsat

I was actually surprised that Berkeley's was that high. We have a ton of people, it's still a public school, and there's no entrance barrier to taking the LSAT, so I expected it to be worse. Also, not to say that people outside of the technical fields aren't impressive at Berkeley, but that's where most of our prestige comes from, and most of those people aren't going to law school, so in the end, not bad.

Berkeley's mean is the best of any public school, beating UCLA, Michigan, and UVA by a point. Noble's theory makes no sense.

Allow me my 2 cents: the elite public schools have many more test takers per year (anywhere from 1000-2000 per year) than your typical elite private school. What effect, if any, might this increased test-taker pool have on the mean score? The obvious (and probably correct) interpretation is that there is both (1) a wider range and (2) a greater standard deviation within that range. Given those assumptions, in addition to the fact that "average" student quality is probably higher at elite privates than at elite publics, no one should be surprised that elite public LSAT means are lower than those of elite privates.

The REAL question we should be asking is: if we control for test taker pool size, what then? What's are the SDs and ranges for elite privates? If elite publics produce more "high" (say, 165+) scores per student than elite privates, how should that affect our analysis?

Theoretically possible distributions might look like this. I've probably overestimated the # of test takers at MIT, but it's all hypothetical anyway.

[narfkarta]

UCLA and UCB's averages are skewed by the huge number of CC transfers they admit. A ton of them want to go to law school and get pwned on lsat

As someone who went to UCLA I know what you're talking about...the hoards of iranian transfer students from santa monica college who figure they can go to law school easily. In case you were wondering, most of them end up in Loyola... Powell library is a loyola feeder.

[darkarmour]

UCLA and UCB's averages are skewed by the huge number of CC transfers they admit. A ton of them want to go to law school and get pwned on lsat

As someone who went to UCLA I know what you're talking about...the hoards of iranian transfer students from santa monica college who figure they can go to law school easily. In case you were wondering, most of them end up in Loyola... Powell library is a loyola feeder.

lol. the persian mafia on powell steps, and asian mafia (lol) on kerkhoff steps.

[frogdog]

Carleton College wasn't on the list. FYI its mean LSAT as of this year is 162.

[Tave]

Gustavus Adolphus College (is this college real?)

HAHA! Yeah, it's in the same conference as St. Olaf and Carleton.

Located in St. Peter, MN, 10 minutes north of Mankato.