Posted April 6, 2008

No feasible measure of student quality is particularly ideal, but LSAT scores are the best, crude proxy we have available. GPAs can be hard to compare, without knowing about the undergraduate institutions the students are coming from, and the courses of study they pursued. It would be useful to know about students in the incoming class with advanced degrees, or high quality work experience, but such data is not available, nor is it easily comparable. Class size is a further factor complicating comparisons, since the midpoint of 500 is not like the midpoint of 200, though each provides pertinent information.

Below is a ranking of the top 40 schools in terms of student quality as measured by the average of the 75th and 25th percentile LSAT scores for the class that entered in fall 2007. Many academics and admissions officers, to be sure, favor 75th percentile rankings only, because they do not penalize schools for “alternative admissions” procedures which may drag down the numerical credentials of the bottom end of the class. Others point out that the number of “top students” is more important than the “average.” (How schools fare in placing their graduates in Supreme Court and appellate clerkships and law teaching jobs is also a good proxy for how strong the high end of the class is.) On the other hand, some believe the “bottom” of the class matters more.

Class size (rounded to the nearest 50) served as a tie breaker: the larger school with the same LSAT credentials was ranked higher. (Class size is for the day class only; schools with evening programs, usually have lower numerical admissions standards for those programs.) For Harvard to boast an average LSAT higher than schools half its size, like Stanford and Chicago, requires Harvard to recruit two to three times as many students as other top schools with those outstanding credentials. That speaks both to Harvard’s attractiveness, and to the existence at Harvard of an enormous pool of highly credentialed students, a fact, needless to say, that prospective employers register. There are, to be sure, more complicated statistical techniques for making comparisons between fractions of differently sized groupings, but the tie-breaker device is, we thought, the easiest to understand and involves the least intrusive manipulation of the data.

In the ranking, we have listed the corresponding average 75th/25th GPA. Since it is clear that some schools sacrifice GPA in order to boost LSAT, we have factored in GPA as follows: where schools are within 100 in class size, and have the same LSAT, a school with a GPA 0.1 or more higher than its peers is ranked first in that cluster. (Differences of 0.1 or more are probably significant, though one would still need to know more about the undergraduate schools and the student majors to make a fully informed comparison.) This was important for, among others, Stanford, which clearly weights GPA heavily in admissions.

Rank by Average of 75th/25th LSAT