• What are the "Grids"?
• A Few Words of Caution
• How Can I See the Grids?

What are the "Grids"? The "grids" are an invaluable collection of data organized by OCS that tells you the average GPA and LSAT score of every Harvard student admitted to, rejected from, and matriculating at each of the major law schools in a given year. The data are also broken out by school, so that you can see the GPA, LSAT, gender, ethnicity and home state of every Harvard candidate who applied to that school, and what happened to them -- whether they were accepted, rejected, wait listed, etc.

Obviously, the grids are an incredibly useful tool for deciding where to apply, and for evaluating your chances of admission at the schools that interest you. Most useful are the individual applicant data points for each school. Usually you can see a trend among the applicants -- you can look down the list and see roughly where the "gray area" is for each school (i.e., the point at which about half of the applicants are accepted and half rejected). Sometimes students even find a few applicants who had the same gender/ethnicity/GPA/LSAT combination that they do. Since schools' admissions standards don't change much from year to year (but see the special note on increased application levels), this is a great way to estimate your admissions chances.

We recommend that every student take a look at the grids before deciding where to apply (and especially before picking safety schools). See below regarding how to obtain access to the grids.

A Few Words of Caution. The grids are an extremely valuable resource, but they do have a few important flaws that deserve note.

• The grids don't incorporate all relevant information. Just because the grids suggest you will (or won't) be admitted to a school doesn't mean you actually will (or won't). Most crucially, the grids do not account for letters of recommendation, the dean's letter, or the personal statement -- factors that can and often do affect how admissions officers view the merits of an application. You'll see this if you look closely at the grids -- you'll notice, for example, that one candidate was admitted to a law school while another candidate with identical credentials was rejected. That happens, obviously, because law schools decide whether to admit students on the basis of more that simply gender, ethnicity, LSAT and GPA data. The grids are valuable only to the extent law schools emphasize these factors in their decisions.
  
  
• The grids do not use the most recent data. A lot of time is required to collect and collate the data represented in the grids, with the result that the grids do not reflect the most recent trends in law school admissions. (The grids indicate on their cover the year of the underlying source data -- typically it is 2-3 yrs behind.) This caveat is particularly important now, given that the last few years have seen an unusual spike in application numbers that presumably has driven upward the average GPA/LSAT of admitted applicants. Read more about the spike in law school applications.
  
  
• The grids reflect the average preferences of Harvard students. The grids incorporate only data from Harvard applicants to U.S. law schools in a single year. As a result, there is often insufficient data to draw meaningful conclusions about law schools that are less popular with Harvard students. For example, Notre Dame has a great law school, but the 2002 grids have only 3 data points for Harvard students. Similarly, there is only one data point for the University of Washington. Don't let the grids drive you away from applying to some of these schools -- but don't expect the grids to help you much in that department, either.

How Can I See the Grids? Unfortunately, OCS does not permit the House to post the grids online. Accordingly, there are two ways you can obtain access to the grids. First, you can see them at OCS during regular OCS hours. Second, you can contact the Resident Tutor in Law, who has several copies available to borrow for short periods. In the height of the application season, the resident tutor may also make a copy of the grids available in the House library.

Alumni/ae who are not within visiting range of Dunster House should contact the OCS to make alternate arrangements.