Creating Your Own Rankings List

September 25, 2010 at 3:58 pm (Applying to Law School)

After submitting most of my law school apps, I immediately began fantasizing about receiving acceptances to law schools and how I would decide which one was right for me.  I’m less concerned about what U.S. World News & Report tells me about which law school is best and more focused on what I think which law school is best for me.  There are several factors I’m most concerned with: 1) Employment Rate;* 2) Bar Passage Rate; 3) Student to Faculty Ratio; 4) Overall Vibe From the School; and 5) Desirability of the City/Location.

*Disclaimer on Employment Rate: be careful when looking at a school’s employment rate.  Generally, the statistics provided by the school is a percentage made up of all of the law students who voluntarily reported they were employed.  Common sense dictates that law students who are not employed may sheepishly decline to participate in the survey.  Further, employment means employed.  This may mean working as an over-educated barrister, oops, barista at Starbucks or actually working as an attorney. 

With the help of my mathematically-inclined best friend, I came up with a rubric and points system that I could assign to each law school and come up with a number that I could use to assess which school placed higher in my own rankings.  I wrote-up a long blog post about how I came up with this and how you could do your own mathematical equation but put it aside for a few weeks.  Then, I was listening to the Law School Podcaster on my ipod and someone mentioned that the www.admissionsdean.com website had a free user-friendly (no math required) tool to create your own rankings.   Eureka! This is way easier and faster.  You can select from a drop down menu up to five elements that will be factored into your own rankings, including what percentage/weight each factor is given in computing your list.  So I scrapped my previous draft blog post and instead provide you with this link: Create Your Own Rankings

Admittedly, Admissions Dean has pretty much become my new obsession.  Every chance I get I can’t resist but log-in to checkout my profile, see if other applicants have applied to schools I have applied to, and read up on the exclusive interviews with law school deans.  All of this, mind you, is free! Plus they have monthly contests and giveaways. 

Shortly after updating my profile to include my first law school acceptance and scholarship, I received my first wall post congratulating me.  The author: the President and Founder of Admissions Dean himself!  When I first tried out the “create your own rankings” feature on my outdated internet browser and had a minor technical difficulty when trying to submit my selected criteria for the ranking, I contacted the admissions dean administrator and received a response in minutes.  This was a stark contrast to the communication (or lack thereof) I attempted with www.lawschoolnumbers.com which is basically an abandoned site that users continue to use.  Law School Numbers is valuable in the sense that there is a good history of past admissions cycles to look back on. But it seems that Admissions Dean is quickly emerging as the gold standard of tracking the law school admissions cycle (who has applied with what numbers, who has gotten acceptances, who has received rejection letters, etc.).  Admissions Dean also provides helpful articles, tools, and a search feature that really makes the provided data even more useful. For example, I wanted to know how many people have already received law school acceptances. I was able to browse the users and sort by acceptances.  (BTW, it was just me and a few other lucky individuals).

During my email communications with the AdmissionsDean.com President and Founder, Don Macaulay, he acknowledged that there is not much that can be done to compete with the historical data that Law School Numbers has amassed, but he says, “We have surpassed LSN during this cycle (2010-11) in the number of applicants we have registered (we have about 850 and they have about 410).”  It seems to me that this early number is a good indication that AdmissionsDean.com is the preferred site for law school applicants.  We are still very early in the cycle, so I’m sure that number (and the gap) is growing daily.  Obviously, sites like these are more useful with the greater number of users inputting data. So I hope that my law school applicant readers will consider sharing their information (anonymously) on AdmissionsDean.com.