Harvard Law has its LSAT medians posted and I am wondering what the practical implications/takeaways are for someone who wants to apply. I understand what medians are, but am just confused about what the take away would be given the much bigger difference between 50 and 75 vs 50 and 25. The numbers are as follows:
25h percentile: 170
50th percentile: 174
75th percentile: 176
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https://hls.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Standard-509-Information-Report.pdf
In: 5
To understand percentiles, take the list of scores and sort them in order from lowest to highest. The 25th percentile is the score you see when you go 25 percent of the way down the list. About 25 percent of the scores is lower than that score, and about 75 percent of the scores are higher.
If there’s a larger difference between the 25th percentile and the 50th percentile vs the difference between the 50th and 75th, it is reasonable to assume that the scores in the lower half are more spread out than the scores in the upper half.
What does this imply for a prospective applicant? It’s hard to say definitively. Harvard’s acceptance criteria include the LSAT, but there are many more facets as well. Also, we’re lacking information because we don’t know the distribution of LSAT takers nor the distribution of all Harvard Law applicants, accepted or not accepted. Harvard is highly selective, but we can’t quantify how selective without that information for comparison.
Probably, an applicant who scores on the lower side of the distribution has a vanishingly small probability of acceptance unless they also have a different star quality or are heavily networked into the school. The posted percentiles also imply that a non-trivial number of the accepted class got a perfect 180 on the LSAT, a truly outlandish feat. So, any applicant is being compared against those monsters.
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