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What percentage of the applicant pool is on LSN?

RedBadger2112 wrote:What percentage of the applicant pool is on LSN?

A post from Mike Spivey said only about 4-5% of applicants are on LSN

It might be higher for T13 applicants though. I'd wager for sub-50 it's pretty low.

peege wrote:

RedBadger2112 wrote:What percentage of the applicant pool is on LSN?

A post from Mike Spivey said only about 4-5% of applicants are on LSN

whoa! I always assumed it was a lot higher...

Barack O'Drama wrote:

peege wrote:

RedBadger2112 wrote:What percentage of the applicant pool is on LSN?

A post from Mike Spivey said only about 4-5% of applicants are on LSN

whoa! I always assumed it was a lot higher...

If you really think about it, whenever I search on the site there are at most 12 people at each school who have comparable numbers, and a lot of those users overlap. It's a good indicator of how you'll perform but it is certainly not holistic data. What I've been told is that it can predict fairly well schools where you absolutely will not get in and schools where you absolutely will get in, but you should not let the data from LSN discourage you if you're within a schools LSAT and GPA ranges.

peege wrote:

Barack O'Drama wrote:

peege wrote:

RedBadger2112 wrote:What percentage of the applicant pool is on LSN?

A post from Mike Spivey said only about 4-5% of applicants are on LSN

whoa! I always assumed it was a lot higher...

If you really think about it, whenever I search on the site there are at most 12 people at each school who have comparable numbers, and a lot of those users overlap. It's a good indicator of how you'll perform but it is certainly not holistic data. What I've been told is that it can predict fairly well schools where you absolutely will not get in and schools where you absolutely will get in, but you should not let the data from LSN discourage you if you're within a schools LSAT and GPA ranges.

Thank you. That's a good point. It definitely makes me a bit more optimistic about my chances at some schools.

It probably depends on school - higher ranked schools seem to have a higher percentage of applicants on LSN (the total number of applicants is listed in the school profile, and you can look at the number of pages of applicants on LSN for a rough estimate of numbers)
For example for 2016-2017:
HLS: 700 out of 5000 (14%) are on LSN
Northeastern: 200 out of 3000 (6.6%) are on LSN
Suffolk: 60 out of 1800 (3.3%) are on LSN

It also seems that the LSN applicant pool is slightly "better" than the overall pool. I only looked at HLS's numbers but it looks like ~25% of the LSN applicants were admitted, whereas in reality the admit % is closer to 18.

sample not census

To be fair, my data comes from the work a school did years ago. Like 6 years ago. I suspect that percentage has likely crept up a little. Law schools use LSN to look at scatter plot patterns, so it has value. But it's really dangerous to look for a few people similar to you and say "those will be my results" because it's a fallacy of a single cause. Admissions is fascinating. Obviously the best thing you can do is have a high LSAT and GPA. But at the margins sometimes it literally comes down to the mood the file reader is in that day, or having a crazy standout name. Or any of 2,000 other variables. None of which LSN captures.

Also, and it's likely been noted already, I would imagine happy people are ,such more apt to take the time to go there and report their results than upset applicants.

I'm crunching some of the data on this (which takes time on the McWifi), but my preliminary findings are that within the top 19 schools (aside from Yale), LSN had somewhere between 473 and 956 applicants checking in last cycle. Oddly enough, those extremes are Texas and Georgetown, respectively (Yale only clocked in at 305, but I suspect there's some self-selection in play there, as applicants who aren't amazing decline that New Haven fishing expedition). Once you get outside of the top 19, it becomes rare to find more than 200 applicants unless the school is in a major East Coast city - Notre Dame, at 273, is the only major exception I've found (some of the Virginia schools also do well, but I suspect that's the pull of DC, which has a pronounced distortion to the point that GWU has more reporting applicants than Chicago, Berkeley, or Cornell).

I'll dig into the ABA data so that we can see what these raw numbers mean in terms of the total applicant pool, and then post my results.

wmbuff wrote:I'm crunching some of the data on this (which takes time on the McWifi), but my preliminary findings are that within the top 19 schools (aside from Yale), LSN had somewhere between 473 and 956 applicants checking in last cycle. Oddly enough, those extremes are Texas and Georgetown, respectively (Yale only clocked in at 305, but I suspect there's some self-selection in play there, as applicants who aren't amazing decline that New Haven fishing expedition). Once you get outside of the top 19, it becomes rare to find more than 200 applicants unless the school is in a major East Coast city - Notre Dame, at 273, is the only major exception I've found (some of the Virginia schools also do well, but I suspect that's the pull of DC, which has a pronounced distortion to the point that GWU has more reporting applicants than Chicago, Berkeley, or Cornell).

I'll dig into the ABA data so that we can see what these raw numbers mean in terms of the total applicant pool, and then post my results.

I'd love to hear the results of this pet project. Thanks in advance for taking the time to try and do this!

LSN and the total applicant pool, 2016-17 cycle

Okay, this won't tell you much about how useful LSN is outside of the upper tier of law schools. I only ran numbers down to schools ranked #30 or better, plus Fordham and William & Mary (I started looking at a few others, but decided to limit my time commitment - if someone wants to continue the project and add everything ranked X or better, PM me and I'll give you edit access). I think it helps paint a picture of who uses LSN, and how that could skew our perception of our odds. However, since not every school (especially those near the top) publishes a chart of admissions vs. applicants in various LSAT and GPA bands, we still find LSN useful. I think this spreadsheet will just tell us how large a grain of salt we need to take LSN data with.

And to follow up on the mind-blowing percentage of admits from Duke showing up in my data, I ran the comparison for other years I had ABA disclosures available on Duke, Emory, and Columbia. LSN seems to always contain a massive proportion of Duke admits, and Duke is somewhat exceptional in this regard.

Duke:
Year, %Apps, %Admits
2017 15.0% 35.9%
2016 10.2% 26.5%
2015 13.9% 31.9%
2014 12.6% 31.3%
2013 13.4% 33.6%
2012 13.5% 38.0%
2011 12.2% 29.7%

Emory:
Year, %App, %Admits
2017 9.7% 14.8%
2016 7.9% 12.1%
2015 9.8% 12.8%
2014 9.7% 12.0%
2013 9.4% 12.4%
2012 9.5% 13.2%
2011 9.6% 13.0%

Columbia:
Year, %App, %Admits
2017 12.4% 21.0%
2016 8.2% 13.2%
2015 11.2% 19.5%
2014 10.5% 16.8%
2013 11.1% 18.5%
2012 11.1% 18.5%
2011 10.2% 18.1%

wmbuff wrote:And to follow up on the mind-blowing percentage of admits from Duke showing up in my data, I ran the comparison for other years I had ABA disclosures available on Duke, Emory, and Columbia. LSN seems to always contain a massive proportion of Duke admits, and Duke is somewhat exceptional in this regard.

Duke:
Year, %Apps, %Admits
2017 15.0% 35.9%
2016 10.2% 26.5%
2015 13.9% 31.9%
2014 12.6% 31.3%
2013 13.4% 33.6%
2012 13.5% 38.0%
2011 12.2% 29.7%

Emory:
Year, %App, %Admits
2017 9.7% 14.8%
2016 7.9% 12.1%
2015 9.8% 12.8%
2014 9.7% 12.0%
2013 9.4% 12.4%
2012 9.5% 13.2%
2011 9.6% 13.0%

Columbia:
Year, %App, %Admits
2017 12.4% 21.0%
2016 8.2% 13.2%
2015 11.2% 19.5%
2014 10.5% 16.8%
2013 11.1% 18.5%
2012 11.1% 18.5%
2011 10.2% 18.1%

This could be a byproduct of Duke's PT admissions system since Duke is often the first (by far) acceptance for applicants who are targeting T13 schools. Since these applicants are already overrepresented on LSN, it would make sense that Duke is the most overrepresented given its quick turnaround on PT decisions

WMBuff did such a crazy job we took it on over to here and I made him VP of Data.

http://blog.spiveyconsulting.com/law-school-numbers/