Having lunch at a spot frequented by Georgia Tech students yesterday, I overhead the following:
"After MIT, Tech has the second highest LSAT to GPA ratio of any school. That's an empirical statistic that shows we don't have grade inflation like other schools."
Well, I'm glad I'm an economist,not an engineer; and a Bulldog, not a Yellow Jacket.
Whether or not a student takes the LSAT is endogenous. I can imagine that engineers are relatively more likely to go to work or get a graduate degree in business or the sciences than are those who don't attend a trade school. It's likely that engineers who go to law school are largely made up of those who don't get into these difficult graduate programs and thus are more likely to have a low GPA.
"After MIT, Tech has the second highest LSAT to GPA ratio of any school. That's an empirical statistic that shows we don't have grade inflation like other schools."
Well, I'm glad I'm an economist,not an engineer; and a Bulldog, not a Yellow Jacket.
Whether or not a student takes the LSAT is endogenous. I can imagine that engineers are relatively more likely to go to work or get a graduate degree in business or the sciences than are those who don't attend a trade school. It's likely that engineers who go to law school are largely made up of those who don't get into these difficult graduate programs and thus are more likely to have a low GPA.
I am guessing that it is more of a preferences thing than a performance thing. That is, the conditional probability of applying to a graduate program in the sciences is probably higher for students at "[anytown] Institute of Technology" verses its non-technical-school counterpart. However, I'll bet that students at the respective state schools are more likely to go into graduate schools in business and law verses their technical school counterparts.
So what these GaTech students did find is a correlation among technical schools, suggesting to me that there is some specific type of selection going on in technical schools. If they want to compare themselves to Georgia, they need to look at the LSAT to GPA ratio of students who applied to law school and were accepted into the same tier of law school.