“How difficult was it for you to succeed in undergrad?” isn’t a question you usually have to answer when you’re applying to law school. You may offer your GPA or LSAT score as a shorthand response to how difficult things were, but you usually can’t tell from grades alone if the student attended a well-funded school or if their peers were generally successful. A new way of processing applicant information could change that. From Reuters:
The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) is developing a new “environmental context” metric pertaining to colleges and universities based on factors such as institutional student spending, graduation rates, and the percentage of undergraduates who received federal need-based Pell Grants.
The “environmental context” metric looks like a way of indexing if an applicant was born with a silver spoon in their mouths.
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The aim of the new college metric—along with the existing neighborhood and high school ratings—is to help law schools better understand the advantages or hurdles their applicants have encountered and to offer a fuller picture of their potential beyond undergraduate grades and standardized test scores, council research director Elizabeth Bodamer said [.]”
It is easy enough to know what an applicant’s GPA is: they usually tell you that much in their resume. But how do you measure grit or tenacity? Someone in admissions could see a well-performing applicant from a “high-challenge college” and make inferences about the skillsets the student developed to get there.
Be on the lookout for challenge assessments!
Law School Applicants’ Socioeconomic Hurdles Measured By New Metric [Reuters]
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.