August 09, 2005

The Other Exam You Take

by PG

I interrupt this symposium on the test that closes most of our legal education, for a brief remark about the test that begins it: the LSAT. Volokh Conspiracy guest-blogger Andrew Morrison has been posting on his research into the relationship between applicants' exam scores and law school rankings. If I am reading his work correctly, it would provide at least one answer to something that puzzled me last year.

My law school application experience can be boiled down to low GPA, high LSAT, lots of applications ranging from the University of Houston to Harvard and a wide variety in reception. Some schools accepted me quickly and even threw in merit-based scholarships. As I told my mother would happen when she pushed me into applying to Yale and Harvard, I was quickly rejected. (In the years for which I had statistics, those two schools accepted not a single applicant with a GPA as low as mine.)

I was surprised to be waitlisted by several top ten schools, yet summarily rejected by "second tier" ones. However, if the top schools are more likely to select students based on LSAT, my record is easily explained. That admissions decisions are so strongly affected by US News jockeying is sad but apparently worked to my benefit.

August 9, 2005 04:29 AM | TrackBack
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