lawyer

Advice for Getting Into Law School

Admission to law school is very competitive. Consider Arizona State Law School. I offer this hypothetical as an example of what happens at law schools generally. What I'm going to say here about Arizona State could be said about every law school in the country.

Arizona State is a good school, ranked 53rd in the nation (out of 187 law schools). Each year, Arizona State has an entering class of about 500 law students. For those 500 seats in its first-year law class, Arizona State receives over 7,000 applications. About 1,400 (20%) of the 7,000 applicants will be admitted, since some people will be accepted at many law schools and will turn down Arizona State's offer of admission.

Now, imagine that I'm a member of the Admissions Committee at Arizona State Law School. My job on the Admissions Committee is to accept only those applicants about whom I can make a reasonable prediction of satisfactory performance in law school. But how can I make such a prediction? What information about an applicant will most reliably tell me he or she will succeed in law school?

If I look at personal statements, for example, most of those will try to convince me that a given applicant will be the best law student anyone could ever want. That is, it's highly unlikely a personal statement will reveal anything about an applicant except the most flattering information. And the same can be said about letters of recommendation.

So, after looking at personal statements and letters of recommendation, I'm still left with the same 7,000 applications with which I began.

How do I weed out all but the most promising 1,400?

Suppose I look at college grade point averages. They indeed might give me some reliable information. How a person has performed academically in the past might accurately predict how he or she will do in the future. So I might adopt a strategy of first admitting all those people with 4.0 GPAs and then work backward from 4.0 until the entering law-school class is filled.

But there's a problem with this strategy. The 7,000 applicants have attended more than 250 different colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. How do I know that a 4.0 GPA at one college represents the same level of academic achievement as a 4.0 at another college? One college might have very high academic standards, while another might not. So an "A" at one school is not the same as an "A" somewhere else. Also, one student with a 4.0 GPA might have majored in basket weaving, while another 4.0 student from the same college majored in a far more difficult field. So, two 4.0 GPAs of students from the same school may not represent comparable academic achievements. Thus, even using GPA, I can't be 100% sure about selecting the incoming law-school class.

What else is left? The Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). This is an examination every law-school applicant must take, which is graded uniformly across all applicants. Scores on the LSAT range from a low of 120 to a high of 180. In other words, a person can take the LSAT and get all the questions wrong, but still receives a score of 120. Another person getting all the questions right receives a 180.

In theory, the LSAT is a consistent measure for an admissions officer to compare all 7,000 applicants with each other.

Indeed, look at how much Arizona State relies on the LSAT. The information below represents the LSAT scores for those applicants to Arizona State recently who had a 3.5 GPA or better. In other words, these are the most promising applicants in terms of their academic performance in college.

LSAT Score Percent Admitted