Top Law Schools

As in would a final exam from a T-14 be harder than a final exam from a law school ranked in the 50th or would they roughly be the same?

I know most people here are too stressed out to worry about such trivial questions, but I am just curious if anyone knows the answer.

Gamecubesupreme wrote:As in would a final exam from a T-14 be harder than a final exam from a law school ranked in the 50th or would they roughly be the same?

I know most people here are too stressed out to worry about such trivial questions, but I am just curious if anyone knows the answer.

I can't imagine a final being different between a T-14 school and a T-50 school. I think people forget at times that these classes teach pretty much the same material, at the same speed, in the same way. The difference in the education itself between the schools is very small, so the differences in final exams will likely also be very small.

The exams themselves are probably of similar difficulty. However, everything is graded on a curve, and the competition at t14s is supposedly harder, so the actual ease of the exam doesn't matter.

i had one prof who used to teach at a T50 or so, and at my school she was obsessed with making the exam harder because we were "smarter." holy shit that exam was hard (but the curve was generous). my other prof from T50's exam was so easy that it was hard (and the curve brutal).

Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

I had one professor bluntly tell my class not to look at his previous exams because they would be too easy. I'm at a T14, he taught at another T1.

marshponds wrote:Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

Just because someone isn't at a T14 school doesn't make them less intelligent than a student at a T14.

kalvano wrote:

marshponds wrote:Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

Just because someone isn't at a T14 school doesn't make them less intelligent than a student at a T14.

No, but the average student at a T14 is more intelligent then an average student at a T2...

pelmen74 wrote:

kalvano wrote:

marshponds wrote:Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

Just because someone isn't at a T14 school doesn't make them less intelligent than a student at a T14.

No, but the average student at a T14 is more intelligent then an average student at a T2...

Not really. Once you work your way down the bottom of the law school skank ladder, maybe.

But there are lots of people who are as smart or smarter than T14 students at a T2, for whatever reason. Just as there are people who don't believe anywhere near a T14 going to one.

Rank of school doesn't correlate to intelligence.

From what I've looked at of the exams at American (which are conveniently public) the exams here at NU are somewhat longer and more involved.

I'm not sure why this would be surprising. At Georgia Tech I noticed that my friend at Caltech had harder exams than ours, and my friend at George Mason had easier exams than ours.

The people at the T-14 and everywhere else are pretty similar. GPA is a joke. You can major in dancing and have a 4.0, so it doesn't mean much. The LSAT means something, because its curved and standardized. But really, since most people can practice the LSAT and get into the 160s and 170s if they work very hard and are competent, the LSAT doesn't mean much either.

On top of that, GPA + LSAT = 20% of the variance in 1L performance. Only 20%. Thats really shocking to me. Someone with a terrible GPA + LSAT could rock 1L and be in the top 20% with a good probability.

So, to get back to the point, the people are the same, the curve tends to be nicer at T-14, so you will have a higher GPA, and there are general habits which help kill the final exams. So, exams can't be much harder/different.

After preparing for 1L exams from a couple of profs who didn't have exams up, specifically Con Law, which I think is the most similar across schools, I think there can be great disparities in the 'difficulty' of the exam. (Since I did exams from schools and profs of all types that had them up)

My guess is that the higher ranked schools have a greater proportion of more difficult exams, and the lower ranked schools have a greater proportion of simpler exams. Of course you'll likely find some hard and some easy at both types, and it's probably not any sort of sliding scale or step function from one school to another but more of a general trend as the school rank goes down. This doesn't necessarily speak to the raw intelligence of the students attending the school as much as it might reflect the quality of the professor and the quality and depth of learning of the classes.

Well said animalcrkrs.

What did he say ?

kalvano wrote:

marshponds wrote:Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

Just because someone isn't at a T14 school doesn't make them less intelligent than a student at a T14.

So if you took a group of T-14 students and a group of T2 students and had them take an exam curved against each other, you don't think there would be any correlation between which group you were in and where you placed? None whatsoever?

(I'm ignoring your specific point about "intelligence" because that's not really the question here.)

kalvano wrote:

pelmen74 wrote:

kalvano wrote:

marshponds wrote:Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

Just because someone isn't at a T14 school doesn't make them less intelligent than a student at a T14.

No, but the average student at a T14 is more intelligent then an average student at a T2...

Rank of school doesn't correlate to intelligence.

Sorry to break it to you, but, yes, it does.

dissonance1848 wrote:The people at the T-14 and everywhere else are pretty similar. GPA is a joke. You can major in dancing and have a 4.0, so it doesn't mean much. The LSAT means something, because its curved and standardized. But really, since most people can practice the LSAT and get into the 160s and 170s if they work very hard and are competent, the LSAT doesn't mean much either.

On top of that, GPA + LSAT = 20% of the variance in 1L performance. Only 20%. Thats really shocking to me. Someone with a terrible GPA + LSAT could rock 1L and be in the top 20% with a good probability.

So, to get back to the point, the people are the same, the curve tends to be nicer at T-14, so you will have a higher GPA, and there are general habits which help kill the final exams. So, exams can't be much harder/different.

Although the bolded is true, people on here act like it's 90 percent. And frankly I don't know why you're that surprised that it is only a 20 percent variance. The LSAT really isn't that similar to a law school exam, and GPA is even less helpful as a barometer since you can major in whatever you want and apply to law school.

The 0.4 LSAT correlation is based on data at within given law schools. As a result the data is limited by admissions factors. Eg: there is only a narrow range of LSATs present in any given class (at most schools, the 25-75 is only 6 points out of a total range of 60), the way admissions indexes are structured people with high LSATs tend to have low GPAs, etc.

There was a Stanford study that predicted that if these factors were adjusted for, the correlation would be around 0.6.

rayiner wrote:The 0.4 LSAT correlation is based on data at within given law schools. As a result the data is limited by admissions factors. Eg: there is only a narrow range of LSATs present in any given class (at most schools, the 25-75 is only 6 points out of a total range of 60), the way admissions indexes are structured people with high LSATs tend to have low GPAs, etc.

There was a Stanford study that predicted that if these factors were adjusted for, the correlation would be around 0.6.

How many times do you have to correct TLS'ers before we finally dispel the myth? I think we succeeded in getting rid of the myth that the term "T14" originated from the observation that only the 14 schools were ranked within the top 10 at some point.

marshponds wrote:Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

So then Yale has the easiest exams on account of them not really having rankings or grades

kalvano wrote:

pelmen74 wrote:

kalvano wrote:

marshponds wrote:Of course they're harder. What makes an exam hard isn't the question being asked but the people against whom you are graded.

Just because someone isn't at a T14 school doesn't make them less intelligent than a student at a T14.

No, but the average student at a T14 is more intelligent then an average student at a T2...

Not really.

Really.

kalvano wrote: Not really. Once you work your way down the bottom of the law school skank ladder, maybe.

But there are lots of people who are as smart or smarter than T14 students at a T2, for whatever reason. Just as there are people who don't believe anywhere near a T14 going to one.

Rank of school doesn't correlate to intelligence.

there's probably a significant correlation, statistically significant... But significance regarding statistics just means that statistical center of the data are probably different 90-95% of the time. Doesn't mean that the difference is practically significant.

So speaking about "the average" guy at anywhere is kind of pointless, who gives a shit? Probably the below average guy at a below average T-14

BruceWayne wrote:

dissonance1848 wrote:The people at the T-14 and everywhere else are pretty similar. GPA is a joke. You can major in dancing and have a 4.0, so it doesn't mean much. The LSAT means something, because its curved and standardized. But really, since most people can practice the LSAT and get into the 160s and 170s if they work very hard and are competent, the LSAT doesn't mean much either.

On top of that, GPA + LSAT = 20% of the variance in 1L performance. Only 20%. Thats really shocking to me. Someone with a terrible GPA + LSAT could rock 1L and be in the top 20% with a good probability.

So, to get back to the point, the people are the same, the curve tends to be nicer at T-14, so you will have a higher GPA, and there are general habits which help kill the final exams. So, exams can't be much harder/different.

Although the bolded is true, people on here act like it's 90 percent. And frankly I don't know why you're that surprised that it is only a 20 percent variance. The LSAT really isn't that similar to a law school exam, and GPA is even less helpful as a barometer since you can major in whatever you want and apply to law school.

Is the bolded true? I thought GPA + LSAT = 40-50% of the variance (with GPA accounting for 10% and the other 30%-40% is LSAT).

Borhas wrote: but speaking about "the average" guy at anywhere is kind of pointless, who gives a shit?

People trying to get above median?

Helmholtz wrote:

Borhas wrote: but speaking about "the average" guy at anywhere is kind of pointless, who gives a shit?

People trying to get above median?

Speaking about "the median" guy is marginally more useful than the "average" guy, but even so, comparing the statistical center of different schools as part of a plan to get above median at a particular school seems to resonate with the "who gives a shit?" feeling.