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The most crucial, vexing, and, very likely, the most subjective decision to be made by a la w school admissions committee is to choose a way to combine the LSAT Score (denoted by LSATScore,) and the UGPA into the number that is "best suited to" the law school's "particular admission procedure."
The CREDENTIAL ASSEMBLY SERVICE (CAS) implicitly suggests using what CAS calls the "admission index." It is denoted by INDEX and is defined by
INDEX = A*LSATScore + B* UGPA + C,
where A, B, and C are chosen by the law school, the LSAT score is denoted by LSATScore, and * denotes multiplication.
INDEX is used by 166 law schools (over 80 percent).bu nine of the top eeighteenlaw schools (Yale, Hafvard, U Chicago, New York U, :U Pennsylvania, U Michiga,, U Vairginia, Georgetown U, and U Texas) do not use INDEX.
The important propertries of INDEX are determinded by B/A, where B/A denote B divided by A. To establish the important properties of B/A, we shall let M = B/A and define INDEXM by
INDEXM = LSATScore + M*UGPA,
INDEXM, pronounced INDEX M, is imply the admission index when we choose A=1, B=M, and C=0.
Yale and Harvard being the most prominent exceptions).
EXAMPLES.
INDEX can be considered a Linear Combination of the LSAT Score and UGPA. The simplesr way to combine the LSAT score and the UGPA is to use, what is called, a linear combinationof the of LSAT score and the UGPA. That is, to use
A*LSATScore + B* UGPA.
Without abusing language too much, we can consIider
A*LSATScore + B* UGPA + C
to be a linear combination of LSAT score and the UGPA. This is so since C is for aesthetic purposes only; for example, if, for a pacticular law schooll,,all the admission index scores are between 143 and 243, decreasing the value of C by 143 will leave all the admission scores between 0 and 100. |
