<p>The conventional wisdom on Harvard (perhaps Columbia and NYU and Chicago as well; certainly not Yale and Stanford) is that it's numbers-orientated. Exceed the 75th percentile with your GPA and your LSAT, have some ECs, and you'll be okay.</p>
<p>This naturally led me to wonder, how limited is the supply of applicants with a 3.95 and 175+ (Harvard's current 75th percentile mark)? I can't imagine it being large, but my general question is this--is there any way of determining the gross/total number of applicants with a certain GPA and LSAT score (besides going on law school boards where people haphazardly post their numbers and whether they got accepted)?</p>
<p>Or, perhaps even better, is there any data for the acceptance rate for those applicants that meet the 75th percentile of Harvard/Columbia/etc.</p>
<p>Edit: I--quite idiotically--forgot to consider the law school numbers calculator. Apologies. So, I suppose this thread has become moot.</p>
<p>Regardless, it's an interesting question of supply. Harvard's 75th percentile is a 176, which is the 99.7th percentile. One more point -- to be above the 75th percentile -- is a 177 (99.8). So 2 out of every thousand LSAT takers are **above **Harvard's 75th percentile for LSAT scores.</p>
<p>There are approximately 140,000 students who took the LSAT last year.</p>
<p>Of these, then, about 280 of them are above Harvard's 75th percentile. Given that:
1.) Some of these kids are going to go to Yale and Stanford.
2.) Some of these kids have low GPA's.
3.) Some of these kids will be lured to other schools, either by personal situations, low tuition, or scholarships.</p>
<p>I think it's safe to say that Harvard can comfortably fit that pool into their class of 560.</p>
<p>Stats have never been my "thing" but...I think BDM may be using the wrong #. 140,000 is the # of LSAT tests administered last year. That includes people who didn't apply to law school and counts those who took the test twice two times. It does NOT include those who took the test in previous years and then applied. </p>
<p>Nowhere near that # actually apply to ABA law schools. For fall 2007, the prelim # was about 83,500. The all time high is just over 100,000, I suspect that a higher pecentage of those applicants had high scores though--I think those with bad scores are less likely to apply. That's just a hunch though. </p>
<p>I don't know anywhere you can find out what percentage of those who actually apply to law school had any given score. </p>
<p>I'm really not just being difficult for the sake of being difficult....I just don't think you can assume that the % of folks who actually apply to law school have exactly the same distribution of scores as that on all tests administered. So, I don't think you can do what BDM did to figure out the # of applicants who had a 177+ or whatever. </p>
<p>Am I missing something? (If it's not obvious, that's a serious question.)</p>
<p>It does, though, serve to tell us the maximum number of kids who could possibly be applying to Harvard. While it's a one-year snapshot, we're probably pretty close to some kind of an equilibrium. So some of the 2006 takers will apply in 2008; some of the 2004 takers applied in 2006, etc.</p>