I was curious about the impact of the Fall 2L three pools (0.5, 0.6, credit hours) calculation on the number of honors given in 2021. In addition, the HLS website (
https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/ocs/employ ... ng-policy/) says that if multiple students are on the percentage cut off for honors, they will all get honors. I think this means that if multiple students have tied GPAs at the top 40% cut off, they would all get cum laude honors. Here are the honors numbers for 2020 and 2021:
2020:
JDs = 570
Honors awarded = 245 (1 summa; 64 magna; 180 cum laude)
Regular honors = 229 (570 * .4 + 1 summa)
Three pools + margin tie honors = 16
2021:
JDs = 594
Honors awarded = 243 (1 summa; 63 magna; 179 cum laude)
Regular honors = 239 (594 * .4 + 1 summa) = 1 summa; ~60 magna; ~178 cum laude
Three pools + margin tie honors = 4
I think the most surprising thing is that the 2021 class had 24 more JD graduates but 2 less JD honor students than the 2020 class. It appears that the three pools calculation had very little impact on the 2021 graduating class. In fact, 2021 only had 1 more cum laude graduate than expected and that might have been due to a margin tie and not the three pools calculation. While I doubt GPAs are normally distributed (maybe trimodel?), I would assume GPAs have some concentration around the median. Thus, one would assume the three pools calculation would help a decent number (maybe 10+) of students make honors. This would make up for the fact that the missing 2L semester limited the ability of students to improve their GPAs after 1L. I am not sure what to make of this. Maybe the three pools calculation was not fully applied?
Also, please feel free to redo/check my calculations. I might have made some errors since I am definitely no statistician. For example, the off-May graduates (5 in 2020 and 7 in 2021) may have offset things a little, but probably not too much since there was only a difference of 2 such graduates between 2020 and 2021.