The numbers, man, the numbers!
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of online resources for budding Legal Eagles like myself, and I’m not just talking about the LSAC’s chock-full-o-services-but-built-with-shit-code website. Somehow in my travels I ended up at JD2B.com, which is billed as a “non-commercial coummunity[sic] for law school applicants”. It has a nifty blog section, but oh lord, the links. The sheer multiplicity of them. Multiple links for abso-fucking-lutely everything a law student could be concerned about. Most interesting for me, though, was lawschoolnumbers.com. Everyone tells you that all that matters is your GPA and LSAT score, but this site tells you how they matter. Using the internet for what it’s good for, these guys simply set up a database and a registration system and asked people to put in their info: GPA, LSAT score, schools they applied to and whether they got in or not. You can put in more info if you like, but those data points give us prospective applicants a very sound basis for comparison with our GPA/LSAT. At this point they’ve got over 3000 users and it’s growing.
I’m particularly fond of the lawschoolnumbers approach because I’ve never understood why it isn’t considered polite to discuss things like test scores and salaries. In both cases you’re presenting yourself to an evaluator who has all the facts, and yet you’re restrained from getting a sense of where you stand in the competitive landscape by social norms. Certainly, if everyone knows your score/salary, there’s some potential for embarassment, but there’s also a greater good being served. The employees/applicants as a group are much better informed if each individual shares their information, and if an individual finds their information embarassing, that’s all the more motivation to improve it by retesting or renegotiating. Even if you don’t agree with me that the potential harm of the embarassment is outweighed, an anonymous database like lawschoolnumbers removes the potential entirely. So why don’t they have something like this for all application-type processes we go through in life? Fuck modesty and decorum, man, I need the numbers!
evan :: Jul.26.2004 :: NetBits :: 5 Comments »
After you told me about lawschoolnumbers, et. al. I really expected more. It seems like the overriding theme is that most people know better than to apply to high end schools unless they potentially belong there (except for that one Harvard applicant with GPA 2.7 and LSAT 149), and the rest fully expect to go to a top-25 school, but also apply to the top-10 just in case.
Sounds like everyone already has pretty good information. However, I will point out that your obsessing over the minutiae of the application process bodes well for your success once you’ve been admitted.
Perhaps I did oversell the actual site; really I’m much more enamored with the idea. The site doesn’t have enough data yet to be really useful, either in terms of number of users or the quality of data it collects from those users. But if I could see the data just for UChicago grads, for instance, I think that would be really useful.
You’re certainly right that everyone already has pretty good information, and maybe the site is overkill for most, but I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as too much information; someone out there will make good use of it.
hey, i found your site while doing a search for Dujeous. You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find an mp3 of theirs hosted online would you? Also, I’m applying ot law school in a year, are you already a law student or are you still an undergrad?
I’m neither, I suppose. Graduated in ‘02 and now I’ll be applying to law schools to start in ‘05. Took me a while to figure out a legal education was the way for me (even though I spent two summers working at NYU Law).
As for Dujeous?, the best places to hear their shit are their label’s site, their own site and of course iTunes. Sorry I can’t point you to full downloads but they’re opposed to that, though I’m trying to change their minds.
I take your point about never having too much info. And I did like the graphical representations. I think that you hit upon a key problem, though. You need to know how you are likley to fair against your classmates rather than against the whole world out there. Also, it is very hard to quantify the impact your specific work experience will have. It will definitely help you, but it is unclear how much, and how much for which schools.
Then there is another quetion you have to ask yourself once the acceptances are back. Do you go to the very best school, or do you go where you might get (significantly) better grades? I didn’t have the luxury of such a choice, but you might consider staying away from Harvard & Yale for the chance of being amid a larger pool of slackers here at NYU!