Cornell Law School Selectivity

With the ridiculous 52 percent jump in applications, it would make sense for the law school admissions committee to be more selective. They've stated that they don't want to increase the size of the entering class, so they can't be admitting too many more people this cycle than last cycle.

However, at least from a somewhat unscientific standpoint, it's not clear that this is happening.

The site LawSchoolNumbers.com is a pretty cool way to see who's getting into which law schools. Users record their important data (GPA and LSAT are basically the two main components of law school admissions) and then report their admissions decisions at various schools. LSN creates a neat scatterplot for each school based on these reports.

Here is Cornell's graph for last year's cycle (2008-09) - click for bigger and non-blurry. Green is admitted, yellow is waitlisted, and red is rejected. GPA is on the y-axis and LSAT score is on the x-axis.

And here is Cornell's graph for this year's cycle (2009-10):

Although we still have a couple more months of admissions decisions to add to this year's graph, it doesn't look like things are much different. Note that, in both cycles, an LSAT of 167 or higher is basically enough to gain acceptance. The GPA distributions are also pretty similar.

Of course, it may just be that the people who have received decisions already are the ones who applied the earliest, before Cornell realized they would be besieged by applications. The people who applied later in the cycle might have a significantly harder time getting in.

Still, at least so far, it doesn't appear (at least from this data) that Cornell has raised its admissions standards much this cycle. We'll see what that means for the size of the fall's incoming class.