The problem with requiring faculty to rank institutional quality is that ranking colleges and universities is an even more inexact science than the psychometrics of standardized testing. Even when the committee has some indication of the prelaw experience of students at the baccalaureate institution, it is a guessing game at best. My own college, the Pontifical College Josephinum, in Worthington, Ohio, was a small and not comprehensive Catholic seminary, from which I graduated with twentyone classmates. But four years of high school seminary Latin, four more college Latin courses, and a philosophy and literature background certainly prepared me for law school just as well as more prestigious colleges would have. I am not singling myself out.
Every student is a mixture of outstanding and average traits and salient and misleading indicators.
The trick is to gather information about students in a usable and consistent fashion and have a wide array of decision makers look at the whole files and pool their readings. Unrelated to Hopwood , my own institution began to consider whole files for threequarters of the law applicants, rather than the quarter we had been reviewing. Make no mistake about it, though. It takes great effort to read threequarters of the files rather than a mere quarter of them. I would, however, defend this system to all comers.