Following up on Dan's Second Shoe Drops At Illinois: Four Years Of Fudged Admissions Data, which has the details of the actual and reported LSAT and GPA medians of Illinois law's last four entering classes:
- The class years reported are the presumptive 3-year graduation dates, so the entering classes involved are the Fall 2008 through Fall 2011 cohorts.
- It's good that the school has corrected its median data, but the 25th and 75th LSAT and GPA percentiles give a better look at what is happening. And it's what the ABA requires. So, what are the corrections for those? Is Illinois going to make those publicly available, if only via a press release?
- The press release says that the ABA only requires GPA data to be reported to a single decimal. But the 2012 Official Guide (list of law schools) entry for most schools report the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles by two decimals (Chicago Kent, 3.70/3.55/3.20, John Marshall, 3.43/3.22/2.92). Illinois is not the only school, even in Illinois (Northwestern & Southern Illinois, that reports only the first decimal place, but the GPA entries for such schools is listed at 3.90/3.80/3.40 (Northwestern). Rounding can mislead. Perhaps the corrected median for the entering classes of 2010 (3.6) and 2011 (3.7) might have 3.64 and 3.66--not a big change, but enough to change the rounding.
- It has been widely reporting that applicants for the Fall 2011 class fell by 10% or more. Fewer applicants mean law schools have to dip lower into the pool. That's what the Illinois numbers show--a three-point drop in LSAT from Fall 2010 (167) to Fall 2011 (163) entering classes. Even if you take away the upward blip in Fall 2010, the 163 LSAT median for the Fall 2011 class is two points lower than the 165 median for the Fall 2008 and Fall 2009 entering class. Again, we would have a clearer picture of the extent of the change in entering-class credentials if Illinois would
- give us the corrected 25th and 75th percentiles for both LSAT and GPA, and
- start using two decimals to report its GPA data.
Comments