@Demosthenes49 So against my better judgment, I went to the LSN site you are constantly flogging to look at it. I don’t see how you can draw much conclusion from the scattergrams that they have there. Maybe you see a pattern (I do note that you cherry picked the Penn graph because that one is a little more clear than all the others), but I honestly don’t see much of a pattern unless you get out to the 177 and above LSAT. Take a look at Chicago here: http://chicago.lawschoolnumbers.com/stats/1314 as an example.
First of all, I don’t see much pattern at all. It has rejections and waitlists all over the place. I would assume for purposes of the graph, a waitlist is the same as a rejection. If so, there are waitlists at all levels, all sorts of people with 3.8 and 173 got waitlisted by UofC. And there are acceptances of many students (non-URM) with LSATs in the 160s. The beauty of your taking such a hard line that GPA and LSAT solely explain law school admissions, even a few examples of where that is not true disproves your hypothesis.
Second, there are not “clear bands” of acceptances. I note that people with 173 on their LSATs were rejected/WL by Chicago more than the people with 172s. And rejectees with 175 or 176 on their LSATs outnumbered those with a 174 according to this graph. How would you explain that contrary data?
Third,we’re talking about totally limited data sets; these are self-reported statistics by people who choose to report and choose to update. This is not only unreliable but it is all scientifically not significant given the thousands of outcomes that are not reported.
Fourth, tell me again how a scattergram can tell you to exclude other factors of admission? It makes no sense to me how there is enough data here to say there is a correlation let alone that these two factors make up 10%? 50%? 90%? of the admissions decision. What is clear is that it doesn’t come close to making up 100% of the decision.
Fifth, I think you’re overly enamoured of having this law school data and are caught up in the thrill of seeing it. For parents of college age students who have access to Naviance in college admissions, this is old hat. I dare say that the patterns in college admissions scattergrams are much more clear than what’s presented at LSN,and Naviance has the advantage of being complete and reliable data sets because they are reported by the high schools themselves. Even if the scattergram patterns are more clear, you’d be stupid to say that college admissions is solely based on SAT/ACT and GPA. But you make this error here because you are blindly following a bunch of over-sharing students who are willing to lift the kimono on one limited aspect of law school admissions. It doesn’t make you an expert.