Something is Rotten in the State of Pennsylvania
“For never was there a story of more woe, than that of Villanova and the LSAT scores they show”
Villanova Law School has recently made headlines after their dean, John Y. Gotanda, wrote a letter to students and alumni admitting that members of the school staff had knowingly passed along bogus data about the GPAs and LSAT scores of the students they admitted “for years prior to 2010”.
In the letter, Gotanda promised that the university would deal with these deceitful acts “swiftly and thoroughly”. Apparently Gotanda went so far as to retain the legal counsel of Ropes & Gray to determine the “nature and scope” of the data fudging.
Lest we forget, the US News and World Report weighs LSAT and GPA scores quite heavily in their evaluations of the top schools in the country. Love them or hate them, these rankings are widely considered to be the authority in determining who is who among institutions of higher education.
So a law school has been inflating the GPA and LSAT statistics of their admitted classes in order to achieve a higher ranking from US News and World Report – hardly earth shattering news there! You can bet that Villanova is not the only law school out there that has “cooked the books” when it comes to the LSAT and GPA statistics of their students, and in my opinion, Gotanda deserves some credit for coming clean about these past transgressions (although this confession must have been made easier by the fact that Gotanda was not the dean of the school at the time of these forgeries).
What’s more important to glean from this article is the fact that – despite flashes of opinion that suggest otherwise – the LSAT remains as important today as it has ever been when it comes to differentiating oneself from the rest of the law school applicant pool. If a prestigious institution is willing to risk its good name through dishonest LSAT and GPA reporting, imagine how favorably they will look upon an applicant with the type of LSAT score they are pretending their students have.
Here are some interesting tidbits on this story from across the web:
//www.collegenews.com/index.php?/article/villanova_law_law_school_rankings_11777/