Top Law Schools

I saw a thread where people described outperforming their numbers in terms of admissions.

I'm curious how people have performed relative to their numbers once they actually GOT to law school. I'm particularly curious about those at T14s who entered with stats below one or both medians, but anyone is welcome to answer.

Feel free to share where you were statistically at the time of your admission (<25% LSAT, <50% GPA, etc. - actual LSAT score and GPA are welcome, but less useful on their own, as medians and whatnot change every year), whether you've under- or over-performed relative to the curve, or whether you've performed as your LSAT score predicted.

It'd also be useful to mention where you're studying or graduated from, as well as when you graduated. Tips are also appreciated, if you feel you've done well!

I made median my bitch

Outperformed

GPA is meaningless and LSAT is only helpful as a predictor if you didn't study that much for it.

cdavis1024 wrote: It'd also be useful to mention where you're studying or graduated from, as well as when you graduated. Tips are also appreciated, if you feel you've done well!

Curious as what you mean by "useful"

TheUnicornHunter wrote:GPA is meaningless and LSAT is only helpful as a predictor if you didn't study that much for it.

GPA is meaningless, except as a proxy for work ethic. People who slog out a 4.0 in undergrad aren't necessarily smarter, they're just better able to study consistently as opposed to getting drunk and cramming.

TheSpanishMain wrote:

TheUnicornHunter wrote:GPA is meaningless and LSAT is only helpful as a predictor if you didn't study that much for it.

GPA is meaningless, except as a proxy for work ethic. People who slog out a 4.0 in undergrad aren't necessarily smarter, they're just better able to study consistently as opposed to getting drunk and cramming.

yeah, but I think work is overrated in law school, at least for traditional issue spotters.

Performed consistent with my LSAT at UT (and at 1L at another Texas Tier 1). <75%ile.

TheUnicornHunter wrote:GPA is meaningless and LSAT is only helpful as a predictor if you didn't study that much for it.

Anecdata-ly, I would agree with this.

TheSpanishMain wrote:

TheUnicornHunter wrote:GPA is meaningless and LSAT is only helpful as a predictor if you didn't study that much for it.

GPA is meaningless, except as a proxy for work ethic. People who slog out a 4.0 in undergrad aren't necessarily smarter, they're just better able to study consistently as opposed to getting drunk and cramming.

I'd disagree. You can hit a 4.0, or at least a 3.8, by being drunk, cramming, and skipping class if you have the right institution/major composition. Similarly, you can be smart and work your ass off and barely hit 3.5, depending on the institution/major composition.

I don't know, I think anyone who gets a 4.0 has got to be pretty smart. All the majors you people complain about being "easy," they're hard to fail, but they're also hard to get straight As in. Now imagine getting straight As in every class, including all your general requirements, major classes, and everything else regardless of subject. (I can only imagine it, anyway, since I don't know what that's like from experience.)

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I don't know, I think anyone who gets a 4.0 has got to be pretty smart. All the majors you people complain about being "easy," they're hard to fail, but they're also hard to get straight As in. Now imagine getting straight As in every class, including all your general requirements, major classes, and everything else regardless of subject. (I can only imagine it, anyway, since I don't know what that's like from experience.)

For many institutions, they don't have A- or A+. Any A is a 4.0. It's not hard to imagine that at a jankey state school (or prestigious school with rampant grade inflation) with a jankey major, one could get at least a 90% in every class with minimal effort. I've seen some organic chemistry exams; they looked like my high school AP chem tests. My girlfriend is an English major. She's smart (of course I'd say that), but according to her, the grading is a joke. She's an excellent writer, but she could literally write about whatever she wanted, and professors would give her an A. She has a 4.0 currently, spends ~15-20 hours a week playing video games, and the weekends with me (studying maybe 1-2 hours total).

I think most institutions have A-. A+, sure, those are rare; A- is really really common.

And I think your girlfriend is selling herself short. People who get 4.0s their whole lives don't usually realize that they're actually a lot smarter than average. I've taught at a number of schools, and the people who get all As are pretty smart. The top students at any given school are as good as the top students anywhere.

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I attended a T14 some years ago after getting in off the waitlist. I was a classic splitter, 2.9 (below 25 for GPA) and 170 (right at the median for LSAT).

In the end I overperformed. But it wasn't easy. (Pretty sure due to response bias that most people in this thread will have overperformed.) I made friends with a lot of other splitters and found that their results were all over the map.

My first semester I worked harder in school than I'd ever worked before. Yet at the end of that first semester I was roughly at the median. I thought about just giving up--it was incredibly discouraging to see classmates take it easy all semester and end up with super high grades. But I just kept my head down and redoubled my efforts my second semester. I improved a lot and ended up with slightly higher grades.

I also struggled with legal writing at first. Had some terrible, worst-in-the-class grades on early memos. But I kept at it, went to talk to my professor, and tried hard to improve. I eventually did better and surprised myself when I made law review. Totally unexpected. The combination of decent grades and LR helped me land some post law school jobs I never thought I would be in the running for (fed clerkship/V5).

In my observations, your numbers are surmountable obstacles for your law school performance. If your grades are on the low end, you will struggle with discipline, or knowing how to study, or whatever it was that kept you from having a high college GPA in the first place. If your LSAT is on the low end, you will struggle with writing a large amount of analysis quickly in your law school exams. Having a dominant ability in either domain (GPA or LSAT) may help alleviate your weakness in the other domain.

One final thing I'd add is that your personality, motivation, and drive will affect your long term performance in the law. I have one friend who had decent grades but an unusually low LSAT for the T14 (high 150s). He struggled in doctrinal classes, and was probably around bottom 25% after 1L. But because he was so motivated, he (1) did super well in legal writing where test taking speed wasn't an issue; and (2) hustled hard during the job search process. After 1L year he was still below median but over the next two years he worked hard to improve his grades. Dude graduated with honors and now works at a V10. These kinds of stories happen with regularity.

I underperformed by a lot.

I overperformed a lot based on LSAT but underperformed a little bit based on GPA. I took the LSAT sick so I'm not sure how much this matters.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I don't know, I think anyone who gets a 4.0 has got to be pretty smart. All the majors you people complain about being "easy," they're hard to fail, but they're also hard to get straight As in. Now imagine getting straight As in every class, including all your general requirements, major classes, and everything else regardless of subject. (I can only imagine it, anyway, since I don't know what that's like from experience.)

Depends how smart you play it with picking easy classes/professors. If that's your mission, it's not too difficult in a usual Humanities/Social Science discipline.

Nah, someone who gets a 4.0 is smart. There could be plenty of people with lower GPAs who are equally smart, but to say that someone who gets through 4 years of college with a 4.0 isn't smart is way overestimating the general population.

I think the easiest way to look at it is this: people who obtain a 4.0 through diligent class choice are smart, just not necessarily smart in the same way as people who are naturally-skilled test takers.

As a splitter who knew other splitters (and their reverse), my thoughts generally line up with zombie associate's.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:Nah, someone who gets a 4.0 is smart. There could be plenty of people with lower GPAs who are equally smart, but to say that someone who gets through 4 years of college with a 4.0 isn't smart is way overestimating the general population.

Sure, but I don't necessarily see them as smarter than the person with the 3.7 who wasn't a system gamer, which is going to effect where your GPA falls on the entering class totem pole.

star fox wrote:

A. Nony Mouse wrote:Nah, someone who gets a 4.0 is smart. There could be plenty of people with lower GPAs who are equally smart, but to say that someone who gets through 4 years of college with a 4.0 isn't smart is way overestimating the general population.

Sure, but are they necessarily smarter than the person with the 3.7 who wasn't a system gamer?

At least at NU (and I suspect at many other schools as well) being a good system gamer is highly relevant to getting good grades in law school.

bk1 wrote:

star fox wrote:

A. Nony Mouse wrote:Nah, someone who gets a 4.0 is smart. There could be plenty of people with lower GPAs who are equally smart, but to say that someone who gets through 4 years of college with a 4.0 isn't smart is way overestimating the general population.

Sure, but are they necessarily smarter than the person with the 3.7 who wasn't a system gamer?

At least at NU (and I suspect at many other schools as well) being a good system gamer is highly relevant to getting good grades in law school.

Oh yeah, no doubt, after 1L (or even including 2 electives second semester) with all the uncurved classes it can make a big difference on someone's final gpa based on what classes they pick.

star fox wrote:

A. Nony Mouse wrote:Nah, someone who gets a 4.0 is smart. There could be plenty of people with lower GPAs who are equally smart, but to say that someone who gets through 4 years of college with a 4.0 isn't smart is way overestimating the general population.

Sure, but I don't necessarily see them as smarter than the person with the 3.7 who wasn't a system gamer, which is going to effect where your GPA falls on the entering class totem pole.

No, but I didn't say they were. And the thing is, you don't know whether the person with the 3.7 also gamed the system and couldn't get the 4.0 regardless, or whether the person with the 4.0 actually gamed the system at all. I get that there are a lot of problems with comparing GPAS across majors/schools, but I just find it weird that people are so quick to say that getting a 4.0 is easy. (For one thing, there are usually a bunch of requirements beyond your major, and it just doesn't seem likely that you can game every single one of them.)

Also let me curse again my law school that curved every class, all 3 years.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:Also let me curse again my law school that curved every class, all 3 years.

TTT behavior.

at or among the highest lsats in my class. dead median 1L. splitter tho.