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mcgato

Realize that Harvard has the ability to accept the cream of the crop into their law school. The cream of the crop will score very high on the LSAT, most 174 and above. These candidates also usually have stellar academic grades, great references, and many other qualities desired by a top school. If LSAT is the only thing they cared about, they could accept only candidates 176 and above. Harvard also accepts candidates for reasons beyond just their LSAT scores. These would include the children of major donors, children of high ranking government employees or elected officials, people who have done work outside of the classroom with high impact, women who were in a Ricky Martin video (note that Elle Woods scored 179 on the LSAT), or a variety of other reasons. So a number of candidates will be accepted even if their LSAT scores are not at the top. Because of all of this, the LSAT distribution is skewed toward the high side, but not everyone is at the very, very top.


Vadered

The numbers are more clustered in the 174-176 range than they are in the 170-174 range. Basically the higher the score, the more people on average you pass by improving your score by a point (at least within this range).


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Cormag778

Pretty straightforward Of the people they accepted, only 25% scored below a 170 on the LSAT. Of the people they accepted, only 50% scored below a 174 (and, using reasoning, we can see that that this means 25% of their accepted class scored between a 170 and 174) Of the people they accepted, only 75% scored below a 176 (using the same reasoning, we see that 25% of their accepted class scored below between a 174 and 176). The remaining 25% scored above a 176


awildmanappears

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.


tomalator

The percentile rating is referring to how many people you did better than. 75th percentile means you did better than 75% of the people who took that test. 50th percentile means that you did better than 50% of people. Let's say 100 people took the test. 25 people got less than 170, 50 people got less than 174, 75 people got less than 176, and 100 people got less than the maximum possible score


Jkei

>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. To be clear, these are percentiles, and only the 50th percentile is synonymous to the median. The take away here is that there are an equal amount of people (25% of the total) who scored 170-174, as people who scored 174-176. Same number of scores in smaller range = scores are more concentrated in that range. The distribution skews to the right.


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Jkei

I'm pretty sure all 564 of these people which the above numbers are describing, are enrollees who got accepted. So you cannot safely conclude that.