Top Law Schools

Northwestern's 25th percentile GPA has bumped up from around a 3.35 pre-2014 up to ~3.55 the two cycles since then. However, the prevailing notion still seems to be that Northwestern is one of the best splitter schools to apply to.

Using MyLSN, I set out parameters of 170-180 LSAT and 3.2-3.5 GPA. These are numbers fairly consistent of a traditional splitter -- roughly below Northwestern's 25th GPA and above the 75th LSAT.

Filtered for each cycle:

12-13: 25 A 5 W 1 D = 81%
13-14: 18 A 11 W 0 D = 62%
14-15: 11 A 14 W 1 D = 42%
15-16: 4 A 11 W 1 D = 25% (It should be noted that 15-16 stats are still comparatively incomplete)


Overall, admissions have not become more difficult: 14-15 saw a record low in applications, for instance. In fact, reverse-splitters seem to be faring better lately:


160-165, 3.8-4.2

12-13: 7 A 18 W 2 D = 26%
13-14: 6 A 10 W 1 D = 35%
14-15: 11 A 11 W 4 D = 42%
15:16: 3 A 3 W 0 D = 50% (Once again, 15-16 is limited)


Northwestern's overall admit rate has not changed much during this timespan, nor has the rate of high test scorers. As far as correlation goes, these numbers seem to illustrate a disturbing trend for traditional splitters like myself -- NU is no longer a good shot for high LSATs/low GPAs.

It's interesting to note that Duke (who has went from 29% - 51% - 59% from '13 to '15) has pretty much gone the opposite way since.

This is really interesting--thanks for putting it together. I wonder if this trend is related to the law school replacing Dean Van Zandt with Dean Rodriguez in 2012. DVZ had spearheaded a number of initiatives to improve the school which (I believe) included selecting low GPA high LSAT splitters. After DVZ left, all of his old initiatives were killed off.

Yeah, that definitely seems like something that could do with it. Once again, pure speculation.

It is worth mentioning that the significant bump in high LSAT scorers last cycle made splitters more expendable across the T-14.