Agree with this. On the other hand, if you do well on high stakes timed tests requiring speed and time (which/when questions to skip, when to guess) management, you will be at an advantage when taking the bar exam.
The statistics may have changed since when I graduated from law school, but the top law schools may not have had the highest bar passage rates in the past. The bar exam is based on “black letter” law whereas at the top law schools, the professors were not so much teaching what the law is as the philosophy of law. I am not so sure how well I would have done on the bar exam if I had gone in cold vs having taken a bar prep course (paid for by my employer).
I don’t understand why your response to my second post is still focused on the bar exam.
I don’t know how well the LSAT correlates to the bar exam. The exam varies greatly by state and is heavily influenced by knowledge of specific content. It’s not really an ability exam; it’s a “did you study for the bar” exam. Prep courses are hugely helpful.
The bar is also, for many, even more high stakes than the SAT. For some, like me, when you take the bar, the law firm that paid you a living stipend and gave you $$ for the bar review course is waiting to hear your results. And worse, again like for me, you’re clerking somewhere first year out and are scheduled to take part in a special ceremony with the other law clerks in the big courtroom with all the wood and marble and special programs with your name in it, family, friends, the other judges, where your justice is to present you for admission to the bar. A LOT of pressure.
Law schools care about bar passage rates, and the higher ranked schools usually have very high passing numbers. But I can venture a guess with some degree of confidence that it’s not what Yale is concerned about.
I don’t doubt that you’re right. It wouldn’t make any sense for law schools to pay a staff of readers if they just needed an LSAT/GPA formula. That said, though, one student I worked with 15+ years ago made me quite cynical about schools’ willingness to look past the numbers. The student had the best possible excuse for only taking the LSAT once and not doing much preparation: he was a submarine officer, and he was underwater for most of the year prior to his application. He had taken the LSAT during a brief shore leave in a foreign country. He couldn’t even download a practice test. He had great essays full of stories about his leadership experiences and fascinating career plans. I didn’t have any question that he would thrive in law school.
He didn’t get into a single higher ranked law school than his LSAT score by itself would have predicted. He went where he got in, and he thrived, of course, and he’s fine. But I can never forget just how little wiggle room I saw in practice for a remarkable story and obvious potential when it didn’t have the right numbers attached.
Right, which isn’t terribly surprising. So my first question stands: will schools pulling out of US News (and presumably other rankings) increase the odds for the submarine applicant in the future?
The washington bar, at least in my time, was all written answers. Each question was a scenario and you had to IRAC a short answer in the space provided. Two days of that crap. No choices to pick.
Given all the discussion about US News and the lack of discussion about the other rankings, I’d say for sure US News is the most followed ranking - in the US at least.
I’m not sure I know ARWU and THE…? For schools we were interested in, I made a spreadsheet and plot showing the dispersion of rankings from WAshington Monthly, USNews, Forbes and Niche. It was insightful to show how widely they vary. This both shows not to put too much stock into any one rating, and to study what metrics matter for any ranking system (and whether those metrics matter to YOU). Still, I appreciated seeing some clustering for some schools – ie a handful of schools were clearly peers of each other, and were consistently regarded in a certain “quality band”. Other schools had widely varying rankings (from 20ish to 150ish depending on the system). That made D23 and I ask why? What’s different on the ranking system and does that matter to us?
The world rankings all seem to be focused on research. Any ranking like ARWU that would put Dartmouth behind schools like University of South Florida, UofArizona, ASU, Brandeis, and UC Denver, to name a few, is clearly focused on things about which I could not have cared less when guiding my kids to choose a school. Before I get torched, I’m not disputing the existence of the ranking. It can exist and is probably useful for someone for some purpose. It’s just useless for me and mine. And mind you, my alma mater always fares quite well in any world ranking I’ve ever seen. But for selecting an undergraduate institution for your kids, I find them absolutely useless.
To be fair, I wouldn’t use those rankings for undergraduate programs, but the talk initially was about law school, which is not an undergraduate program.
This has always been my issue with most of the rankings. They’re focused on criteria like research dollars, number of publications, number of citations, number of Nobel Prize winners, etc., which are products of graduate and professional programs. Though flawed like all rankings, one of the things I like about US News is that its National University rankings seem somewhat more focused on undergraduate education. That’s one of the reasons it garners such disdain from alumni and supporters of big, public flagship and research schools like Berkeley, UCLA and Michigan.
Thanks for the link. THE covers universities across the whole world? Honestly, I don’t find that helpful at all. Not sure what I would do with this, unless I was simply chasing prestige.
Anyway, not the subject of this thread so I’m moving on.
You can restrict the listings to the US and the whole point of this thread is about how for most people “rankings” are about prestige. Your individual mileage may vary. THE and ARWU at least use other criteria in their methodology that go beyond prestige, which is why I prefer them to USNews and QS which are far more prestige weighted.