As we have podcasted on before, misinformation in the law school admissions process comes from all directions, and law school admissions consulting firms claiming to be experts (with little or no real admissions experience) are a growing source. Here's an example—the example that spurred me to write this post.
A law school admissions consulting company (one I hear applicants talking about with some frequency and which employs over 60 consultants) recently published an article titled "How to Get Into Harvard Law." The article is rife with inaccurate information, but let's just look at one brief section near the top:
In only five sentences, I immediately spotted no fewer than eight glaring errors, errors that show a disconcerting lack of even the most fundamental knowledge of law school admissions. Let's walk through each of them now.
1. "Average GPA" – No law school publishes their "average" undergraduate GPA. Law schools release medians.
2. "In the 2023-24 application cycle" – Harvard Law has not yet released their incoming class statistics from the 2023-2024 application cycle. We track the release of medians extremely closely every year, keeping a spreadsheet of new medians as law schools informally post them online in advance of the release of official 509 reports, and as of the time this article was published, Harvard Law has simply not released these stats.
3. "GPA of accepted students" – Harvard Law does not release statistics about their "accepted" students. They post data on their matriculating class (as all law schools do), which does not encompass any admitted applicants who chose not to attend.
4. "The range of accepted GPAs went as low as 3.84 and as high as 3.99" – This is blatantly false. They are referencing Harvard's 25th and 75th percentiles here, meaning 50% of the incoming class fell outside of this range. We'll also note, again, that these statistics are not for the "accepted" applicants, but rather matriculating students.
5. "Average LSAT Score: 174" – Again, this is not an average; this is a median.
6. "The class of 2027" – Again, the stats for the class of 2027 (matriculating this fall 2024) have not yet been released.
7. "25% of admitted students" – Again, the published stats are for matriculating students, not admitted applicants.
8. "171, which is still in the 95th percentile" – This is the least glaring error, as it doesn't on its own indicate a lack of basic understanding of law school admissions, but as of the most recently published official data from LSAC, a 171 LSAT was at the 96.67th percentile.
This article blew me away. How, I asked myself, did a firm holding itself out as experts in this field publish an article full of such inaccurate information? And worse, apart from #8 above, these are not errors of statistics or fact-checking—these are errors that show that the author is unaware of some of the most basic, fundamental aspects of how law school admissions works. Remember, this is a company claiming to have a level of expertise in law school admissions such that applicants should pay them large sums of money in order to access that expertise.
We have long spoken publicly about the prevalence of bad advice online—but for most of our firm's history, that bad information has come almost entirely from applicants themselves, most of whom are doing their best to help but are operating under incorrect assumptions. Now, though, blatant misinformation is being formally published by companies whose business relies entirely on their knowledge of and expertise in law school admissions.
So this is a PSA: just because information or advice is coming from an official-looking website published by people claiming to be experts, that doesn't mean that that information is even remotely accurate. As we have always advised, triangulate your sources, and rely most on those with actual experience working in law school admissions offices, reading applications, and making decisions on files.