<p>It seems that part of the reason why law school admissions became so number-oriented is the pressure to do well in the USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>But medical school admissions, which takes into account a lot of other factors (such as volunteer service/research/character/the lengthy interview process, etc), seems not so negatively affected when it comes to USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>Instead of producing lawyers like a factory who got in based mostly on GPA/LSAT, shouldn’t law school also take into consideration character, service, and other various ECs like medical school?</p>
<p>Among the Top 14 Law Schools, Yale and Stanford seem to take into account those other factors…but very little compared to medical school admissions. </p>
<p>Don’t you think law school admissions should resemble that of medical school?</p>
<p>Yea right, the world would stop turning if some lowly school, like Duke, Northwestern or GASP! a state school, actual ended up ranked above Harvard or Yale.</p>
<p>Plus I seriously doubt the lawyer world would want to put such a disruption into the status quo, imagine all the biglaw firms all of a sudden having a bunch of employees who were no longer from a top school.</p>
<p>First, medical school really does require more people skills than lawyers–you deal with a much higher number of contacts in medicine amid much more stressful situations.</p>
<p>Second, law students naturally tend to be more well-rounded, so it’s much less important for law schools to screen for it.</p>
<p>Third, law school places more emphasis on standardized testing because raw intelligence is actually more important in law school than it is in medical school. Medical school is about study habits.</p>
<p>Fourth and finally, medical schools have a surplus of numerically-qualified applicants and therefore can afford to select based on other attributes. By comparison, law schools have a shortage of high-GPA, high-LSAT candidates. What’s CLS’s mean GPA? Where would that rank if it were a medical school? Not #4, I bet.</p>
<p>My answer is yes. My dad, who did medical school admissions for a while, said that if a medical school candidate didn’t include some version of “I want to help humanity” in the interview then he’d say no, because that is what medicine is about. </p>
<p>Law schools higher up the food chain do give lip service plus to the concept of helping humanity but many law schools function more as trade schools for people who want to make a living.</p>
<p>Something like 82,000 people applied to ABA-accredited law schools last year, compared to about 45,000 who applied to US medical schools. 17,370 students matriculated at one of the 158 US medical schools last year; there are about 45,000 total matriculants at the 192 ABA-accredited law schools each year.</p>
<p>Note that there are almost as many medical schools as law schools, but nearly three times as many law students. You would be correct in concluding from this that law students have much bigger classes: 235 first years, compared to about 110 at an average medical school. Faculty-student ratios are much smaller in law school as well, thanks to the Socratic method. (This is not unrelated to the fact that universities can actually make money off of their law schools.)</p>
<p>There would be logistical problems if law schools granted as many interviews as medical schools do. </p>
<p>They weren’t doing interviewed when I applied to law school nearly thirty years ago, either. That was before U.S. News started ranking law schools.</p>