The U.S. News law school rankings are a pretty big deal. Everyone (in the law school world) cares about them. Why? Because prospective students care about them far, far more than they should. In fact, there are no shortage of students who base their choices solely on those rankings.
Having worked with the admissions office at IU for the three years I was in law school, I can tell you that schools try really hard to keep their LSAT and UGPA medians up. Typically they do it by offering scholarships or other benefits. Behind the scenes, the schools are playing a careful balancing act, trying to keep their median numbers up by being very careful about who they offer on the margins.
It has really always been a bit of a game, but nobody has ever (at least as far as I know) tried quite so hard to gimmick their way into the top 5. Enter Michigan Law’s new admissions policy:
UM undergraduates who have at least completed their junior year … with at least six full-time semesters of attendance on the UM-Ann Arbor campus and a UM cumulative grade point average of ≥ 3.80 are eligible to apply.
And they have to agree not to take the LSAT.
There’s really just not a reasonable explanation for this aside from: “We’d really like to move up in the US News rankings, and this is an easy way to do it.”
My former Corporations professor has this to say about it:
More seriously, there are terrible externalities from this alleged merit-based program. It is impossible to deny that the Wolverine Scholars program will encourage students to (a) take easier classes and majors to avoid the need to take the LSAT to get into an elite law school, (b) discourage extracurriculars that will threaten the 3.8, and (c) make a lot of Michigan undergraduate professors miserable with complaints from students that their B+ or A- grade is going to blow their Wolverine Scholar application.
From a rankings perspective, what happens when you get 20, 30, or 40 candidates with 3.8+ UPGA and no LSAT score? From day 1 of admissions season, Michigan has much greater latitude to lock in higher median LSAT and UPGA numbers–because zero Wolverine Scholars are dragging down the LSAT and all are helping the UPGA numbers. Further, because of the idiosyncrasies of the USNWR rankings formula . . . at the upper ranges, small changes in UGPA have a much greater sway on rankings that a single LSAT point. For example, in the simulation model that Andy Morriss and I created, a move from 3.64 to 3.66 has a greater effect than a move from 169 to 170. If Michigan can get to a 3.80 UGPA, they could tie with NYU at #5.
Crazy, crazy stuff. This is a really terrible idea. You have to wonder if something like this would end up hurting them in the long-run. They get a ratings bump for the next few years, but eventually they end up with a reputation for letting in any fool who can pick easy enough classes to get a 3.8.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Not saying you’re wrong on what they’re trying to do, but doesn’t it say that students with a GPA > 3.8 are “eligible to apply”? Not “automatically granted admission.”
I can’t see the law school admissions department being impressed by someone who got that 3.8 by taking every 100 Level social science class out there.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
If they weren’t trying to game the system they would just admit these folks rather than making them promise not to take the LSAT. There are two scenarios:
1. They’d do better than UMich’s median on the LSAT and, therefore, get into a better school, or
2. They’d do worse than UMich’s median, thereby helping the UGPA median at the expense of the LSAT median.
The current plan avoids both “problems”. Further, as Prof. Henderson points out, that’s an incredibly high GPA requirement and completely rules out, say, an engineer with a 3.78 in favor of a poly-sci major with a 3.81.
We’ll see how serious they are about this when US News inevitably takes some sort of counter-action to preserve the legitimacy of the rankings.
September 25th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I also think it’s hilarious that they’re using the ACT/SAT to get by the ABA’s accreditation requirement of “a valid and reliable admission test”.
September 26th, 2008 at 6:58 am
The first thing I thought when I was this, was, geez, 3.8 is pretty high!
But if the field of your undergrad degree is unimportant, it seems to me that if you know you want to go to UM law school, just take 120 hours to get a general studies degree and get all A’s and you’re in!
In your opinion, is the obsessive nature of the rankings caused by law students (whom we all know are competative by nature) wanting to get into the so-called best schools (best being determined by this ranking), or is it the law firms that only want to hire students from these highly-ranked schools? Or… does one feed the other?
September 26th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I actually don’t have any idea quite how the cause/effect works there, I’m sure there’s a good bit of self-reinforcement to it. One thing’s for sure — students from the top schools have a much different experience in the job market than even those farther down the first tier, so it’s not unreasonable for students to want to make it into those schools, the real problem is when they put so much emphasis on the difference between, say, 25 and 30 or 50 and 60.