<p>“Is it really all that worthwhile to have human beings in the process if they’re there only to deal with that 20% of the admissions that are not numbers-based?” In my view, yes.</p>
<p>Robert Sullivan (a professor at Yale) wrote the following about YLS’s admissions process in the Connecticut Law Tribune last August: “…let me tell you how it works at Yale Law School. The admissions office gets thousands of applications for a class of 180. Less than 1,000 of these get read by faculty members. Each of us reads the files of 50 applicants and all of them have exceptional credentials. Good is not good enough. If it were up to me, I would accept about 40 of my 50 files, but, based on the scoring system, I can give the top grade to approximately 20 and, of these, only a few will be offered spots.”</p>
<p>The 80% factor we were talking about happens largely in selecting which applicants even get read. if they’re not close to the threshhold, an acceptance won’t be forthcoming. Past that threshhold, the human element plays a large role. The top schools get so many applications, they can select a diverse class (in every sense of the term) from those who pass this numerical threshhold.</p>