ITT: New School Medians Revealed Forum

[avemundi]

@UP: Berkeley has always been critical of the LSAT and has been pushing for research into developing an alternative method.

Directly from Berkeley's research:
"To base admission to law school so heavily on LSAT scores is to choose
academic skills (and only a subset of those) as the prime determinant of who gets into
law and law-related careers that demand many competencies in addition to test taking,
reading and reasoning skills. Moreover, it allocates the scarce resource of legal
education, along with its ensuing influence and privilege, on the narrow basis of skills
that are heavily linked to wealth and class."
Source: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/LSACR ... nal-12.pdf

Kind of ironic they essentially link wealth and class to the LSAT but yet place such heavy emphasis on the GPA which is probably just as strongly correlated with wealth and class.

Also, Penn released some data. They released the 25th/75th percentiles but it doesn't look like they posted medians.
http://www.law.upenn.edu/prospective/jd ... stics.html

Re: Penn - Those are still numbers for c/o 2013, no?

Edit -What the, I just pressed refresh and it changed to c/o 2014. Still no info on medians though.

[Bildungsroman]

Berkeley just posted medians.
Berkeley: 167 (no change), 3.79 (no change)
25th percentile LSAT went up from 162 to 164 while 25th percentile GPA dropped from 3.64 to 3.62. Also, the entering class size dropped from 286 to 254 which is approximately an 11% decrease.

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/37.htm

TTT in decline confirmed.

How do you figure? Do you have reason to believe Berkeley is unable to accept more people with higher numbers - that it doesn't instead intentionally decide to factor things beyond numbers more heavily than peer schools and reject or waitlist more at its 75th LSAT than other schools?

Basically, why do you think a smaller class size than in years past and a .02 drop in the 25th GPA percentile is indicative of "decline"? The -.02 25th seems negligible to me, and as an entering student I'm hardly disappointed with a drop in the class size from 270 to 250.

They've been dropping in the rankings, tuition has gone through the roof, they barely maintained their numbers even when shrinking their class size, they have lousy biglaw placement, they rejected me, and their building is ugly.

[KevinP]

Re: Penn - Those are still numbers for c/o 2013, no?

It's for the class of 2014: "Introducing the Class of 2014"

25th percentile GPA went up from 3.54 to 3.58.
75th percentile GPA went up from 3.90 to 3.93.
Interestingly enough, class enrollment actually went up from 250 to 266.

Edit: Just saw your edit haha.

[Tiago Splitter]

Re: Penn - Those are still numbers for c/o 2013, no?

It's for the class of 2014: "Introducing the Class of 2014"

25th percentile GPA went up from 3.54 to 3.58.
75th percentile GPA went up from 3.90 to 3.93.
Interestingly enough, class enrollment actually went up from 250 to 266.

Edit: Just saw your edit haha.

That 75th gpa number for Penn is hardcore.

[Tanicius]

Berkeley just posted medians.
Berkeley: 167 (no change), 3.79 (no change)
25th percentile LSAT went up from 162 to 164 while 25th percentile GPA dropped from 3.64 to 3.62. Also, the entering class size dropped from 286 to 254 which is approximately an 11% decrease.

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/37.htm

TTT in decline confirmed.

How do you figure? Do you have reason to believe Berkeley is unable to accept more people with higher numbers - that it doesn't instead intentionally decide to factor things beyond numbers more heavily than peer schools and reject or waitlist more at its 75th LSAT than other schools?

Basically, why do you think a smaller class size than in years past and a .02 drop in the 25th GPA percentile is indicative of "decline"? The -.02 25th seems negligible to me, and as an entering student I'm hardly disappointed with a drop in the class size from 270 to 250.

They've been dropping in the rankings, tuition has gone through the roof, they barely maintained their numbers even when shrinking their class size, they have lousy biglaw placement, they rejected me, and their building is ugly.

Whoa whoa whoa, none of this below the belt stuff. Their building just became fucking awesome with all the recently completed additions.

Speaking seriously though, I get the tuition argument. The state of the UC system itself is definitely in decline. At this point, and apparently it's been this way for some time, the law school actually more than pays for itself with its tuition and fees and in fact has been used by the UC system to prop up the rest of the university. There's been some talk of Boalt following the route of UCLA's business program privatizing itself in order to escape that financial black hole. Either way, this just doesn't have anything to do with the GPA/LSAT quotients. If they ever become concerned about raising their LSAT percentiles, they most likely would be able to do it.

The ranking thing seems pretty moot to me. They didn't suffer any loss in points last time around. It was merely because Michigan kicked enough ass to rise 2 points that they traded places with Berkeley. Half the people on this forum call UM a school in decline too, which is equally as silly.

[minnbills]

I've never heard anyone say Michigan is in decline.

[Tanicius]

I've never heard anyone say Michigan is in decline.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p4592743

And that's from this summer. You should have seen the bullshit when Michigan dropped away from its tie with Penn into 8th or 9th place a few years back.

This kind of crap used to show up all the time: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p3433506

[071816]

I've never heard anyone say Michigan is in decline.

Me either.

[CanadianWolf]

Another longtime TLS poster at Northwestern frequently makes that claim. I disagree even though when I attended law school the big three were Harvard, Yale & Michigan.

[minnbills]

I've never heard anyone say Michigan is in decline.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p4592743

And that's from this summer. You should have seen the bullshit when Michigan dropped away from its tie with Penn into 8th or 9th place a few years back.

This kind of crap used to show up all the time: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p3433506

Zipping through that top thread it seemed to me most people were either defending michigan or bashing the state and its legal market rather than the school itself.

I mean, fundamentally we agree that people get alarmist when bad news comes out so I guess we don't really need to argue.

[birdlaw117]

I've never heard anyone say Michigan is in decline.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p4592743

And that's from this summer. You should have seen the bullshit when Michigan dropped away from its tie with Penn into 8th or 9th place a few years back.

This kind of crap used to show up all the time: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p3433506

Using quakeroats to further this point is silly. He is a huge anti-Mich and pro-Duke troll.

[Tanicius]

I've never heard anyone say Michigan is in decline.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p4592743

And that's from this summer. You should have seen the bullshit when Michigan dropped away from its tie with Penn into 8th or 9th place a few years back.

This kind of crap used to show up all the time: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... e#p3433506

Using quakeroats to further this point is silly. He is a huge anti-Mich and pro-Duke troll.

It's really not just QO. It was just the first bunch of results on the first place. Michigan + TTT in decline is a phrase thrown around a lot more than it deserves to be.

[Robespierre]

@UP: Berkeley has always been critical of the LSAT and has been pushing for research into developing an alternative method.

Directly from Berkeley's research:
"To base admission to law school so heavily on LSAT scores is to choose
academic skills (and only a subset of those) as the prime determinant of who gets into
law and law-related careers that demand many competencies in addition to test taking,
reading and reasoning skills. Moreover, it allocates the scarce resource of legal
education, along with its ensuing influence and privilege, on the narrow basis of skills
that are heavily linked to wealth and class."
Source: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/LSACR ... nal-12.pdf

Kind of ironic they essentially link wealth and class to the LSAT but yet place such heavy emphasis on the GPA which is probably just as strongly correlated with wealth and class.

Also, Penn released some data. They released the 25th/75th percentiles but it doesn't look like they posted medians.
http://www.law.upenn.edu/prospective/jd ... stics.html

Re: Penn - Those are still numbers for c/o 2013, no?

Edit -What the, I just pressed refresh and it changed to c/o 2014. Still no info on medians though.

That's weird, I'm still getting the 2013 numbers, even after refreshing.

[KibblesAndVick]

Columbia has class profile for 2014 up here - http://www.law.columbia.edu/jd_applican ... assprofile

Class of 2014:
Median LSAT -172 (No Change)
Average LSAT -171 (No Change)
25%/75% -170/175 (No Change)

Median GPA -3.72 (No Change)
Average GPA -3.70 (No Change)
25%/75% -3.60/3.82 (Slight change from 3.61-3.82)

Class size went from 404 to 406. Applicants went from 9,012 to 7,459.

I think I copied all of that right. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: I had the class size and applicant numbers backwards

[bk1]

ITT: A lot of people who don't understand jokes.

[piccolittle]

Columbia has class profile for 2014 up here - http://www.law.columbia.edu/jd_applican ... assprofile

I'm not sure that page is completely updated - they still reference the class of 2013 near the bottom of the page, and I haven't met the LLM in our class yet (if there is one). Those 'Advanced Degrees' numbers look awfully similar to the c/o 2013.

[KibblesAndVick]

Columbia has class profile for 2014 up here - http://www.law.columbia.edu/jd_applican ... assprofile

I'm not sure that page is completely updated - they still reference the class of 2013 near the bottom of the page, and I haven't met the LLM in our class yet (if there is one). Those 'Advanced Degrees' numbers look awfully similar to the c/o 2013.

The page from 2013 is still available from Google Cache - --LinkRemoved--

I think they updated all the numbers but not the Academic/Professional background section. The only meaningful difference seems to be they had 1,500 fewer applicants. Which makes the steady numbers pretty impressive.

[chrisbru]

Columbia has class profile for 2014 up here - http://www.law.columbia.edu/jd_applican ... assprofile

I'm not sure that page is completely updated - they still reference the class of 2013 near the bottom of the page, and I haven't met the LLM in our class yet (if there is one). Those 'Advanced Degrees' numbers look awfully similar to the c/o 2013.

The page from 2013 is still available from Google Cache - --LinkRemoved--

I think they updated all the numbers but not the Academic/Professional background section. The only meaningful difference seems to be they had 1,500 fewer applicants. Which makes the steady numbers pretty impressive.

Their yield rate must be up quite a bit... I'd assume.

[Robespierre]

Brooklyn just put up its 2011 numbers. http://www.brooklaw.edu/Admissions/stat ... stics.aspx

They slashed the class by almost 100 students (from 486 to 390). Even with the shrinkage, they couldn't maintain the GPA median; it fell .07 from 3.45 to 3.38. They did maintain the 163 LSAT median; however, their 25th percentile number went from 162 to 160. Oof.

These figures are for FT and PT combined. The FT-only figures aren't that different, though.

[Blessedassurance]

Kind of ironic they essentially link wealth and class to the LSAT but yet place such heavy emphasis on the GPA which is probably just as strongly correlated with wealth and class.

Pray elaborate.

A better argument against gpa is the influence of major, inflation (or deflation) and undergraduate institution among other things. What's wealth and class got to do with it?

[dakure]

UCLA has a higher LSAT median than Boalt? wow.

[ilovesf]

Hastings just posted their new numbers on their website. I can't believe that the median LSAT dropped 2 points.. that's effing huge. It's really crazy that the median and 75 GPA managed to be stable and the LSAT dropped so much. The thing that actually surprised me most is that the percentage of students of color is 45%. That seems like a really high number.. do other schools have such a high percentage? Last year's numbers are in parentheses.

GPA
25% 3.38 (3.45)
Median 3.60 (3.60)
75% 3.73 (3.71)

LSAT
25% 157 (160)
Median 162 (164)
75% 165 (165)

[Robespierre]

St. John's: --LinkRemoved--

LSAT median was down from 161 to 160.
GPA median was down from 3.50 to 3.49.
Class was slashed from 341 to 293, with cuts in both PT and FT.

[Hopefully2012]

Is it looking like the drop in applicants have affected T-25 to T-50 more than T-14?

[KevinP]

Pray elaborate.

A better argument against gpa is the influence of major, inflation (or deflation) and undergraduate institution among other things. What's wealth and class got to do with it?

I agree that those factors would probably make a better argument but that wasn't really the point of my post. I was merely pointing out the irony in Berkeley's actions; I'm calling Berkeley's actions ironic since they explicitly criticize the LSAT by stating that the LSAT tests narrow skills which are "heavily linked to wealth and class." Yet they really love the GPA which is in a similar respect linked to wealth and class, which are largely determined by income.

My conclusion is based on "The relationship between family income and schooling attainment: Evidence from a liberal arts college with a full tuition subsidy program" by Todd R. Stinebrickner and Ralph Stinebrickner. The following 2 paragraphs are direct quotes from their research.

"The coefficient on family income, .040, implies that the GPA of an individual with a family income of $40,000 is on average .16 higher than an individual with $0 of family income holding other observable characteristics constant. Further, the coefficient is statistically significant with a t-statistic of 10.0. Although the regression results are not shown, the effect of family income on term grade point average is also significant (at a .10 level of significance or lower) for four of the subsequent five semesters with point estimates of .023, .036, .041, .014, and .028.32 The pooled regression involving all grades in all years produces a point estimate of .033 and an associated t statistic of 4.013."

"Students from low income families are found to receive significantly lower college grades (even after controlling for college entrance exam scores and other observable characteristics) and these differences explain the majority of the difference in the attrition rates between income groups."