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Does anyone have a sense of how accurate a "no preference" OSCAR GPA/law review cutoff actually is, particularly in the COA realm? It seems hard to believe that too many COA judges would hire someone with sub-median grades and no LR. Is the "no preference" just a placeholder, or do some COA judges legitimately put significantly less weight on GPA and LR? If the latter, it would be good to know who those judges are.

Anonymous User wrote:Does anyone have a sense of how accurate a "no preference" OSCAR GPA/law review cutoff actually is, particularly in the COA realm? It seems hard to believe that too many COA judges would hire someone with sub-median grades and no LR. Is the "no preference" just a placeholder, or do some COA judges legitimately put significantly less weight on GPA and LR? If the latter, it would be good to know who those judges are.

I think it's less that they don't have a preference, but that they're more uncomfortable saying top 20% when there's a big difference between Stanford and Wake Forest. I think they just assess it more qualitatively and would rather not indicate an artificial cut off

From what I've seen, some judges put "no preference" when they are extremely competitive judges and are generally taking people only in the top 5% if not top people in the class. Other judges put "no preference" and their colleagues in the same district/circuit put anything between 10% and 33% and it seems like that it just means they will select something similar.

This is mostly speculation but I feel like it's a reasonable interpretation.

Do the ones that put top 33% or 30% actually consider that far down?

Anonymous User wrote:Do the ones that put top 33% or 30% actually consider that far down?

I always assumed yes, but they're referring to Columbia or Chicago--not WUSTL

Anonymous User wrote:Does anyone have a sense of how accurate a "no preference" OSCAR GPA/law review cutoff actually is, particularly in the COA realm? It seems hard to believe that too many COA judges would hire someone with sub-median grades and no LR. Is the "no preference" just a placeholder, or do some COA judges legitimately put significantly less weight on GPA and LR? If the latter, it would be good to know who those judges are.

From what I understand anecdotally at the District Court level, no GPA cut-offs means there will likely not be a clerk pre-sort - same for law review. The stack will go to the judge and they will thumb through them. A judge I interned for who does this says each resume gets a minute. If something jumps out (a lot of times it's one of your interests), they will look at the writing sample then recs and grades. Can't write - can't clerk.