Here it is kiddies, a table of every move in the ranks from 2011 to 2012 from all schools. Also included is a comparison of every school's 2011 and 2012 LSAT and GPA 25th and 75th percentiles.
Click on the image to open up the full version, or you can click here to download the pdf version. [Click here for corrections.]
Scroll down for our oh-so-in-depth analysis.
First, a couple caveats. The cohort quality numbers we're looking at are the 25th and 75th percentiles. US News considers the 50th percentile for its rankings. While a change in the 25 and 75 numbers tends to be correlated with a change to the median, this isn't always the case.
Also remember that the further down you go, the more a point change in the LSAT means. Stanford's LSAT 75 dropping from 173 to 172 is only really going from about the 99th percentile to the 98.5th. Catholic's LSAT 75 drop from 161 to 160 is slightly more meaningful, going from the 83rd percentile to the 80th. As you get closer to the middle, 1 point on the LSAT gets to be about 4 percentile points.
So, what have we learned?
It's nice to be in Missouri, which climbed from 107 to 79.
It sucks to be in Mississippi, which dropped from 107 to 135. Equal sized move as Missouri, just in the opposite direction.
Neither Missouri nor Mississippi saw a change in its cohort quality.
University of Illinois saw its LSAT 25 drop 7 points from 163 to 156. That's a change from the 88th to the 68th percentile.
Toledo and Suffolk climbed out of the unranked second tier (what used to be the fourth tier), achieving ranks of 129 and 135 respectively.
Ohio Northern, previously 135, dropped into the land of the unranked, as did Memphis (previously 140) and Campbell (previously 143).
The average LSAT 25 dropped from 154.98 to 154.86.
The average LSAT 75 dropped from 160.45 to 160.36.
The average GPA 25 dropped from 3.1614 to 3.1609.
The average GPA 75 dropped from 3.6377 to 3.6318.
42 schools saw their LSATs drop, while only 23 posted LSAT gains. (Schools with equal sized gains and losses weren't counted.)
The best LSAT gain was Indiana - Bloomington, with a 2/3 jump, only to be met with a drop in ranking from 23 to 26. Despite LSATs and GPAs making up more than 20% of a school's score for the rankings, there seems to be little correlation between changes in cohort quality and changes to ranks. (Again, this may be from looking at the 25/75 numbers, rather than the median.)
68 schools saw their 25/75 GPAs stay exactly the same.
The following errors are not corrected in the above document. We will post a corrected version in a few days.
Albany's 2011 GPA 25 is 3.04, incorrectly listed as 3.64. It had a gain of 0.01.
Wayne State's 2011 GPA 75 is missing. It was 3.64. It had a gain of 0.01.
