Employment: Law GPA or Class Rank more important

[Broncos15]

Hello,

I was wondering in terms of both employment and transferring law schools ( although at the end I will explain why this post is largely geared towards employment rather transferring).....when you have two schools that are equally comparable in the USNWR ranking, does class rank matter more than Law GPA ? ( The main reason why i ask is I am aware that lower ranked schools generally have a much harsher curve than T14/or other highly ranked schools, it would be wrong to assume this general trend happens at every school)

While certainly other factors come into play such as relevant work experience, it does seems law performance plays a large role on job prospects

I want to use a hypothetical example: For the sake of this example, If UT Law and SMU law were equally ranked in the Top 15-20 schools ( or if SMU was slightly ahead), how would you compare the two as far as grades/class rank are concerned

http://www.law.smu.edu/Career-Services/ ... Ranks.aspx

1l Median - 3.05 Top Third 3.18

http://www.utexas.edu/law/career/employ ... rt-1Ls.pdf

1L median 3.37 Top quarter- 3.65


If two students were at the median....would one be at a disadvantage by having a 3.05 at SMU v the 3.37 GPA at UT, or would two students be treated similarly when it came to interviews/jobs if the two schools were similarly ranked

Or additionally Would a top third student at SMU with a 3.18 fare off better than a Median student from UT despite the having a bit of a lower GPA but having a higher class rank?

( And I would be also interested to see with these same numbers how that would play a role into transfer admissions...since for transfers their Law GPA does not go into the UNSWR rankings, so I'd imagine having a higher Class Rank is important than a higher Law GPA....more so for information purposes as I know it is unwise to expect to transfer/also unwise to predict class rank before going to a certain school so therefore it is best prior to choosing a law school to look at what the jobs are like for the median graduates and if one is unsatisfied with that then generally it is best not to go to that school rather than having high hopes of transferring out)

Thanks1

[Nikki Siclunov]

Hi Broncos15,

Thanks for your question. While this is all relative and largely depends on which schools you're comparing, in general you will fare better if you're at the median at a top-14 school vs. at the top-1/3 at a regional school. That much is clear. To answer your other question, when conducting on-campus interviews, employers are aware of the disparity in grading curves between different schools, and do indeed take that into account. In your hypothetical example, where UT and SMU were similarly ranked, a 3.05 student at SMU would be just as competitive at securing a given job as a 3.37 student at UT (in most cases). The vast majority of law firms specify class rank, not GPA, as a requirement for the purposes of on-campus interviewing, or tailor the GPA-requirement to the curve at that particular school. You gain little benefit from attending a school with rampant grade inflation.

Generally speaking, the lower you go in the rankings, the higher the class-rank requirements a particular law firm will have. It's important to recognize, however, that we're looking at tiers more than individual schools. For instance, the same NYC BIGLAW firm might require a student to be in the top-50% of his or her class at HYS, top-30% at a top-14 school, and top-10% of the class at Fordham. Although most top law schools do not reveal class rank, and some don't even have grades, employers usually know what the medians are at each school they interview at. So, just because Michigan has a slightly more forgiving curve than, say, Penn doesn't matter, because our hypothetical NYC BIGLAW firm requires you to be at the top-30% coming out of either school.

Note, also, that at most national schools, it is you who chooses which employer to interview with, not the other way around. By "bidding" on law firms, you can interview with a slightly higher caliber of firms than your GPA would typically allow. However, you better be sure you can bring something more to the table, or else you risk not getting any callbacks. It's a tricky game of risks and benefits, but you'll learn how to play it once you become a 2L.

As far as transferring goes, it usually doesn't make sense to do it for purely employment reasons. The vast majority of top schools will only allow you to transfer if you performed exceptionally well as a 1L at your home school. Oftentimes, the same GPA that can qualify you to transfer from, say, Fordham to NYU will also be sufficient to get you the job you want at Fordham. There are, of course, exceptions to this: if you're a star student at a 4th Tier school, then it makes sense to transfer up because your prospects may be abysmal regardless of how high your GPA is. Or maybe NYU offers opportunities that are not at all open to graduates at your home school. Say you want a circuit-level clerkship: your best shot would be coming out of a top-6 school, so it makes sense to transfer to one, if you can. Or maybe you're dead set on becoming a law professor. If so, go (or transfer) to Yale. For the vast majority of students, however, transferring offers few employment benefits, and in some instances it can be detrimental to your academic career. You may forfeit the opportunity of making Law Review, or lose important networking connections at your old school.

If I were you, I'd worry about these questions when you have a few offers on the table: then you can weigh the pros and cons of each offer, and arrive at a more informed decision as to which school to attend. It's a complicated cost/benefit analysis, made even more so by the fact that we're working with pure hypotheticals.

Let me know if this makes sense.

Good luck!