bottom 25% at T14

[luckyboy]

So I was just curious.  What does the bottom of the class look like at northwestern, duke, and the like.  Do they not try?  Are they just the ones that barely made it in off the waitlist?  And furthermore, do they get good jobs as lawyers or nonlaw jobs? Also, same questions with say bottom 10%.  Just looking for rough guesses.

[eli250]

25% of the class has to be in the bottom 25%.  You could have a school full of geniuses who are excellent exam takers.  But the curve forces some people to come out looking worse than the others.  I'm sure those in the bottom 25% at t14s are working pretty hard. 

[luckyboy]

well i assumed they were smart, but there are lazy smart people out there, and i suppose my main question wasn't as much as who they are but what are their career prospects. 

[J D]

Their career prospects are just fine, since employers usually won't be able to tell whether they were bottom 25% or top 1/3; these schools are notoriously stingy when it comes to making distinctions among their students or reporting class rank cutoffs to employers.  Many will simply report who was at the very top, and say everyone else didn't do quite that well.  The theory is that such distinctions would be unhelpful since someone at the bottom of the class is still a great candidate for most any position.

[jacy85]

Why?  Are you planning on being one of them?

And you can be smart and work your tail off, and still not do well.  From a T14, they'll still get legal jobs if they want them, but they likely won't find them through on campus recruiting/interviewing.  They'll have to target firms and do more of the work themselves.

[luckyboy]

nope, im at a T2, and work hard and doing pretty well.  Just seeing my classmates and seeing their career prospects being less than stellar I just wondered how other schools compared.  That and there are people at my school that definitely give less than 100% and just seeing how that compares with better schools. 

[Budlaw]

I'd like to be the bottom 25% at a T14.

[John Galt]

It really doesn't matter what your rank is job prospect-wise once your out of the top third or so because most people wouldn't list anything below top third on a resume, so one would be bunched in with everyone else with no rank listed. Its everything else on the resume that is going to help out. If an employer has a class rank cut off its probably somewhere within the top third or above, their not going to make the cut off top 65%. 

[Felsen]

Their career prospects are just fine, since employers usually won't be able to tell whether they were bottom 25% or top 1/3; these schools are notoriously stingy when it comes to making distinctions among their students or reporting class rank cutoffs to employers.

They may be a bit stingy, but if you supply a GPA, employers can figure out approximately where you fall.  The grading curve doesn't have that much variance from year to year.  Taking previous years and the various Laude designations for certain GPAs and people have published the approximate cut-off points for top 1/3rd of the class, with a few more gradiations as well.

http://www.bcgsearch.com/crc/book2005/bcg_guide_2005.pdf

That site has the information.  It only has the top 50 schools.  But T14 is within that group.

[J D]

They might be able to get a rough idea, but certainly it's won't be too exact.  The reporting (or non-reporting) of rank, and the fact that schools like Harvard develop very weird grading scales certainly makes the task a lot harder. 

I actually have the print version of that guide; it's what I based my information on.