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Hey Everyone!
Just out of curiosity (I've already decided to withdraw from the December test), do schools seldom admit students who do not fall within their "25%, 50%, and 75%" LSAT/GPA numbers?
A friend of mine graduated from USC, and mentioned that he knows two people who were accepted with LSAT scores that were about 5 points below the "25%" number. I'm not sure if he was referring to USC law, but either way, how common is something like this?
I know that my GPA falls within the "75%" for the vast majority of schools, but my LSAT is lacking. Regardless of where I apply, I am aiming for a 165+, for the purpose of receiving a decent scholarship.
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7 comments
@pritisharma565 Indeed an interesting read. Thanks for posting it. I vote the LSAT be excluded from law school admissions, and replaced with a test of lawyering ability...who is in?
...kidding, I can only hope.
I found this interesting : http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in I guess they all need a "happy-bottom-quarter". This is a long read and maybe not all of it is relevant so just search for : law school and bottom-quarter separately to get to relevant parts.
Thanks everyone! I think I had a "D'oh!" moment, considering the numbers...
So to further touch upon your question, because they are medians and not averages, you could theoretically get in with a score far below the 25th and not hurt their 25th or median any more than something close would. So if a school has a 25/50/75 that looks like 160/165/170 then a 120 has the same effect on that dynamic as a 159 does. You are just adding a single occurrence of a number and then it's taken care of, so once a 159 is on the books then an infinite number of 159s would have no greater effect.
FWIW, because it is a median, the schools could only admit people within them. They just wouldn't change it to 0-100 since that is not what they are asked to report. If you only let in 200 people who each had a 170 then that will be your 25th, 50th, and 75th. So a school's 75th or 25th could actually be the upper or lower limit, but that is likely to be extremely rare.
@wraith985-4026 This is very helpful. Thank you!!
It's literally impossible for a school to not accept outside their 25-75s, because by definition 25% of the people they admit fall below their 25th percentile mark, the same way that 25% of the people they admit come above the 75th percentile mark. That's how those numbers are calculated, after all. If they didn't admit outside of a range, it wouldn't be a 25-75, it'd be a 0-100.
If USC matriculated 200 kids, that means 50 of them fell below the 25th percentile number, and your friend happens to know two of them. That's all.