Law Schools Game US News; Admission Processes Become More Just

It's widely known that law schools use a variety of tools to game the US News law school ranking process.  One effective way to increase the LSAT's of entering first years is to reduce class size.  But this reduction has an economic impact on a law school; tuition revenues drop (and fairly precipitously, in many cases, because these students are often the most likely to pay full freight.)  To pay for this US News gambit, schools often accept sizable cohorts of second year transfers.  Transfer students have two particular traits: they have actually proven they can succeed in law school and they don't get much, if any, scholarship money.  I'm particularly interested in the first trait.

One ongoing critique of university admissions procedures is that their high dependence on standardized tests is both unfair (with arguments, for example, about the role of cultural context in testing) and inaccurate (as a proxy for success in school itself.)    While the LSAT may be a fairly good predictor of law school success, it strikes me that first year grades are a much better predictor.  Thus, to the degree that US News gaming causes good law schools to set aside a substantial number of slots for transfers (and I understand that Georgetown may take as many as 100 rising 2L's), these schools create many more opportunities for students who are great at the task of studying law, but not so good at the proxy.   With or without US News rankings, Georgetown and its kin are likely to lean heavily on standardized tests.  They're a cheap and fairly effective way to compare people with highly dissimilar undergraduate experiences.  But if US News rankings cause these schools to open up more slots to those who have proved their worth in the law school trenches, can that be a bad thing?  I'm not sure that 1L grades are a proxy for intellect or likelihood of success in practice, but they've got to be more relevant to a law school's admissions aspirations than some lousy standardized pre-law test. 

Comments

[Christine Hurt]

I guess I'm glad that my copy of the seventeenth edition is famous? http://www.theconglomerate.org/2005/07/eighteenth_edit.html

[Dan Filler]

It is true, Christine. I appropriated your fine photo - it just seemed better than the official images of the book. I hope you'll see this as fair use!

[real gambling]

i love gambling

[David hogard]

It's widely known that law schools use a variety of tools to game the US News law school ranking process. One effective way to increase the LSAT's of entering first years is to reduce class size. But this reduction has an economic impact on a law school.

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