Top Law Schools

Made a spreadsheet to ESTIMATE the number of people who were accepted into the top 18 or so schools who scored in the 170's.

Used this years data to ESTIMATE how many it would take to keep roughly the same medians.
Assuming schools favor higher LSAT score over GPA this could be a great year for splitters.


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... sp=sharing

I said the word ESTIMATE a lot because I know people will be very tempted to complain about accuracy. If you notice a grievous error/assumption let me know.

EDIT: There are now two tabs on the workbook you can edit the first one all you like, the second is a locked copy of the first so we don't lose data if someone deletes stuff. Feel free to edit all you like.

For the those curious about retakers here is the data published by LSAC, I assumed it was the same for 2013, but there could be way more repeaters
http://www.lsac.org/docs/default-source ... erdata.pdf
I excluded those with 170's that retook and scored lower than 170 (poor souls).

One other thing, I realize that not every test taker applies this cycle, but there may also be people applying that took the LSAT last year so I called it a wash.

Did you know we have the actual number of 170+ applicants through December? You could use that instead of the 2% calc you did. I'll try to dig that up. Some of those people who took could be re-takers. Also this would eliminate your issue of distinguishing between people who took it and who actually applied.

Edit: As of 12/06 there were 1526 people with 170+ LSATs who had applied. You could use this to eliminate the 2% x June and October for now. Once we get updated data again in a week or two you can update with that.

Not sure what to make of this, but this is kind of fun.

Maybe crazy sample size distortion based on this site, but I'd be interested to see the number of 170s who retook a 170. (I see that's estimated in the doc)

lawschool22 wrote:Did you know we have the actual number of 170+ applicants through December? You could use that instead of the 2% calc you did. I'll try to dig that up. Some of those people who took could be re-takers. Also this would eliminate your issue of distinguishing between people who took it and who actually applied.

Wow I didn't know we had that... thanks

nothingtosee wrote:Not sure what to make of this, but this is kind of fun.

Maybe crazy sample size distortion based on this site, but I'd be interested to see the number of 170s who retook a 170. (I see that's estimated in the doc)

that is not an estimate... you'll notice the link I provided on the sheet is straight from LSAC

Really interesting idea. A couple questions: Column G is matriculating students, right? Presumably, the number of admits would need to be substantially larger, especially outside HYS.

Also, do we have any estimate of the % of 170+ LSAT takers actually apply to law school? I'm sure it's high, but less than 100%.

Also, I'm sure some 170+ scorers from previous years are in the app pool this year (i.e. took in 2012 but decided not to apply until now). No idea how to estimate that, though.

I think my edit may have been buried above:

As of 12/06 there were 1526 people with 170+ LSATs who had applied. You could use this to eliminate the 2% x June and October for now. Once we get updated data again in a week or two you can update with that.

If you do this, I'm getting somewhere more in the neighborhood of 2,479 applicants...1,526+[.02*(19,286+28,363)] = 2,479. This will ultimately be lower though, because a certain percentage of December and February takers will be re-takes.

The poster above who makes the point about matriculants is correct, they will have to admit more people than ultimately attend. That actually helps applicants, so your model is more conservative (which is a good thing).

Definitely very interesting to see this.

knicker wrote: Also, do we have any estimate of the % of 170+ LSAT takers actually apply to law school? I'm sure it's high, but less than 100%.

Also, I'm sure some 170+ scorers from previous years are in the app pool this year (i.e. took in 2012 but decided not to apply until now). No idea how to estimate that, though.

I think this is a good point. Given no other information, I think it would be fair to assume that the number of 170s who sit out this year would be roughly the same as all pre-2013 170s who apply this year-- meaning this shouldn't affect the data that OP provided too much.

It just amazes me that HLS needs/gets over 400 170+ to ultimately matriculate, and we are estimating only 2,000ish 170+ applicants total.

lawschool22 wrote:It just amazes me that HLS needs/gets over 400 170+ to ultimately matriculate, and we are estimating only 2,000ish 170+ applicants total.

And then how many 170s go with gpas <3.4ish...

lawschool22 wrote:It just amazes me that HLS needs/gets over 400 170+ to ultimately matriculate, and we are estimating only 2,000ish 170+ applicants total.

I could believe it, simply because it's Harvard. Of HYS, it's perhaps the most attractive for 170+ applicants because Yale is a black box and Stanford is a West Coast (and very small) school.

The others all seem to be far more forgiving to sub-170s students, and are also all smaller than Harvard.

patfeeney wrote:

lawschool22 wrote:It just amazes me that HLS needs/gets over 400 170+ to ultimately matriculate, and we are estimating only 2,000ish 170+ applicants total.

I could believe it, simply because it's Harvard. Of HYS, it's perhaps the most attractive for 170+ applicants because Yale is a black box and Stanford is a West Coast (and very small) school.

The others all seem to be far more forgiving to sub-170s students, and are also all smaller than Harvard.

Oh no, I believe it. It's just amazing they get that many and still hold such a high GPA median.

I will update the table with the input so far.

Thanks guys.


Also, I realize that all of these schools are going to accept many more applicants than they matriculate. But each applicant will be accepted to more than one school, so if we included all of the acceptances we would be double counting students.

This just shows that the top 18 schools (I am considering reducing it to the T14) need almost all of the 170+ applicants to maintain medians.

knicker wrote:
Also, do we have any estimate of the % of 170+ LSAT takers actually apply to law school? I'm sure it's high, but less than 100%.

This would be nice to see...

I'd also like to get more precise data on the number of 170+ matriculating for schools. Even those with a median of 170 there could be more than 50% that have a 170, but 170 is still the median.

As for the ones that have 169 75th percentiles the number of 170+ matriculating is a shot in the dark all we know is that fewer than 25% of students enrolled have that score.

Any suggestions where data like this may be found??

Quick question-- where did you get the medians for these schools? NYU's median for the class of 2015 was 171 according to its ABA profile. Are we just assuming it dropped to 170 for the class of 2016? NYU just publishes its middle 50% and doesn't make its median public. Same with Penn-- some here say that it's 169, but I can't find anything to substantiate it.

drumstickies wrote:Quick question-- where did you get the medians for these schools? NYU's median for the class of 2015 was 171 according to its ABA profile. Are we just assuming it dropped to 170 for the class of 2016? NYU just publishes its middle 50% and doesn't make its median public. Same with Penn-- some here say that it's 169, but I can't find anything to substantiate it.

http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 2&t=215104

drumstickies wrote:Quick question-- where did you get the medians for these schools? NYU's median for the class of 2015 was 171 according to its ABA profile. Are we just assuming it dropped to 170 for the class of 2016? NYU just publishes its middle 50% and doesn't make its median public. Same with Penn-- some here say that it's 169, but I can't find anything to substantiate it.

http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/fi ... 9-Form.pdf

https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/2644-aba-required

Edit: scooped by drawstring. Also "middle
50%" is the median if by middle 50% you mean 50th percentile.

.

frcarpen wrote:I will update the table with the input so far.

Thanks guys.


Also, I realize that all of these schools are going to accept many more applicants than they matriculate. But each applicant will be accepted to more than one school, so if we included all of the acceptances we would be double counting students.

If you got each school's yield rate you could generate an estimate of the number of accepted 170+ applicants with formula (x="no. matriculating 170+scorers"/"yield%"). This would presumably be a conservative estimate since it seems safe to guess that 170+ scorers are have more competing offers than sub-170s.

That is, if you wanted to track down yield rates

lawschool22 wrote: As of 12/06 there were 1526 people with 170+ LSATs who had applied. You could use this to eliminate the 2% x June and October for now. Once we get updated data again in a week or two you can update with that.

Where did this data come from? Do they also provide data for the GPA's of the people applying? I would like to know the GPA distribution of 170+ takers, I think that would help determine a lot about who is getting in where.

I guess they have a lot of numbers on My LSN but I think it would be nice to have all the data points.

frcarpen wrote:

lawschool22 wrote: As of 12/06 there were 1526 people with 170+ LSATs who had applied. You could use this to eliminate the 2% x June and October for now. Once we get updated data again in a week or two you can update with that.

Where did this data come from? Do they also provide data for the GPA's of the people applying? I would like to know the GPA distribution of 170+ takers, I think that would help determine a lot about who is getting in where.

I guess they have a lot of numbers on My LSN but I think it would be nice to have all the data points.

This came from Mike Spivey via his twitter page, @spiveyconsulting. I don't think GPA data was given. Even if it was you wouldn't be able to match the GPA data to the LSAT data you have.

Interesting spreadsheet - it would be fantastic if it was possible to match 170+ scores with GPA. Oh well.

As an aside, re. the link provided with LSAT retake data by LSAC - is there a similar sheet for breakdown of scores by individual scores per year (not retake, but general test scores)? ie. #170s, # 171s, #172s, ... #179s, #180s.

If so - can someone provide the link? It might be interesting to look at the same analysis as this post but with more specific scores rather than just 170+.

I tried searching the forum and on LSAC but wasn't able to find anything that specific.

Quest4Knowledge wrote:Interesting spreadsheet - it would be fantastic if it was possible to match 170+ scores with GPA. Oh well.

As an aside, re. the link provided with LSAT retake data by LSAC - is there a similar sheet for breakdown of scores by individual scores per year (not retake, but general test scores)? ie. #170s, # 171s, #172s, ... #179s, #180s.

If so - can someone provide the link? It might be interesting to look at the same analysis as this post but with more specific scores rather than just 170+.

I tried searching the forum and on LSAC but wasn't able to find anything that specific.

No, but we do have it for 170-175, and 175-180. As well as lower groupings. If you look at the Twitter link you'll see that data.

Ah okay, thanks. I've seen those numbers (170-174, 175+) but was wondering if there was something even more specific.