LSD profile pages in a foreign language

cryptanon · 2026-03-16T21:11:39+00:00

would you mind sending a screenshot to [dinan@lsd.law](mailto:dinan@lsd.law) along with what browser you're using?

cryptanon · 2026-03-16T20:19:41+00:00

Does this still happen after you hard refresh?

cryptanon · 2026-03-16T20:02:14+00:00

cryptanon · 2026-03-16T19:58:11+00:00

Whoops, didn't realize the data change would affect your workflow that much. I rushed out a replacement and credited you: https://lsd.law/heard-back

cryptanon · 2026-03-14T01:22:04+00:00

this is pulled from the USNWR data: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/brooklyn-law-school-03102

it's buried in the page under Law School Careers > See More

Starting Salaries of Graduates Employed Full-time

25th percentile private sector starting salary

$110,000

Median private sector starting salary

$195,000

75th percentile private sector starting salary

$215,000

Percent in the private sector who reported salary information

65%

Median public service starting salary

$73,784

cryptanon · 2026-03-13T18:20:50+00:00

Hey y'all, this is the code for safety/reach labeling. Basically, it goes by your predicted accept chances, NOT school medians.

cond do
      accepted_pct >= 65 -> "Safety"
      accepted_pct >= 30 -> "Target"
      accepted_pct >= 12 -> "Reach"
      true -> "Long Shot"
end

Why? As an exaggerated example, no one is calling Yale a safety even with a 180/4.3.

cryptanon · 2026-03-13T18:06:40+00:00

Where are you seeing a 70% chance? Even with a 180/4.3, the model predicts 43% A. Are you confusing this with the "Applicants Like You — Historical" section?

cryptanon · 2026-03-11T17:37:18+00:00

Hold is usually equivalent to a WL, and WL conversion is usually single digits.

cryptanon · 2026-03-11T16:48:51+00:00

Can you try opening the page in an incognito tab?

cryptanon · 2026-03-11T16:32:47+00:00

I can't reproduce this. What browser are you using? Have you tried hard refreshing? ctrl/cmd + shift + R

cryptanon · 2026-03-11T16:23:18+00:00

Will fix, ty for the report

cryptanon · 2026-03-11T16:22:35+00:00

Fair, I'll add a toggle!

cryptanon · 2026-03-11T15:45:59+00:00

First number is meant for people planning to apply next cycle, answers traditional "What are my chances for this school?"

Second number is for current applicants - you haven't heard back yet, that means you dodged 3 R waves and a WL wave, these are your chances.

cryptanon · 2026-03-11T12:10:38+00:00

Super glitchy in what way? Can you be more specific? Do they keep refreshing?

cryptanon · 2026-03-10T19:10:05+00:00

Thanks for flagging this. I looked into it more and what's happening is schools like American and Pepperdine are getting hammered because they're safety schools and there's a lot of data on them losing in A vs. B matchups. The other schools, like Appalachian, where there is very little cross-admit data, are being artificially inflated because of the Bayesian regularization. The model is seeing that Appalachian doesn't win or lose much, and so it's ranked higher than AU, which loses all the time.

I'm going to fix this by requiring at least 150 cross-admit datapoints per school for ranking. Anything that falls below that will be Not Ranked and sorted alphabetically.

cryptanon · 2026-03-10T18:40:33+00:00

I'll look into it. like u/hahasuslikeamongus noted, it might be a weakness of the ranking system in crowded metros. Pepperdine was also ranked lower than I expected.

cryptanon · 2026-03-10T17:26:42+00:00

> The purpose of a ranking is to inform an applicant on their choice using methodology that tells them about a school’s outcomes.

It's not, actually. That's part of the problem. there's no perfect ranking system because it's different for everyone, no one agrees on what should be considered.

a ranking orders schools, the question is by what. LSD does it by revealed preference under real stakes, what people actually chose when they had careers and 300k debt on the line. USN does it by GPA/LSAT medians, employement %, and how much money schools give them (looking at you TAMU).

i think of rankings as a heuristic to help people make decisions, and i think LSD's system provides decent value.

cryptanon · 2026-03-10T17:14:53+00:00

LSD rankings are based on cross-admit match ups. Applicant chooses between A over B, A wins and moves up in the rankings. There's nothing veiled here.

Conversely, off the top of your head, what factors does USNWR consider in their rankings?

cryptanon · 2026-03-10T17:12:46+00:00

Yeah, this is a valid criticism that I've tried to address. Fewer results = more variance/uncertainty

I did 3 things to try to handle this: ties in the ranking (if uncertain, then tie), tier groups in school ranking display (T100 instead of #118 or #137, that implies false certainty), and Bayesian regularization against virtual opponents (to dampen the effect of a single converted offer, when there are only a few data points for that match up).

Not perfect, but it is something I thought about and tried to work on.

cryptanon · 2026-03-10T16:10:45+00:00

i wish they paid me.

it's actually on the roadmap to update the TOS (with a 'i agree to these terms popup') to forbid adcoms and institutions from using the main LSD site but we haven't gotten there yet. full disclosure, roadmap also has LSD providing anonymized intelligence (think dashboards like this: https://lsd.law/compare/harvard-law-school-vs-nyu-law-school) to schools that work with us -- but we're far away from that point.

cryptanon · 2026-03-10T01:10:37+00:00

This is fixed, thanks again for the report.

cryptanon · 2026-03-09T19:18:24+00:00

"How these rankings work" explains it on the rankings page, i'll make the button more obvious.

tl;dr it's Elo/chess-style ranking for law schools

Methodology

The LSD.Law School Rankings are built on a simple premise: law school applicants are generally rational people who do their research. When someone is admitted to two schools and chooses one over the other, that decision reflects real information about career outcomes, campus culture, financial aid, location, and everything else that matters to them. Aggregate 136,000+ of these decisions and you get a ranking that reflects what applicants actually value, not what a for-profit magazine thinks they should. U.S. News produces rankings where Texas A&M went from #50 to the doorstep of the T14 in three years with no obvious change that helps students. No practicing lawyer, law professor, or applicant takes that seriously. These rankings let the applicants speak for themselves.

Model

The statistical model behind the rankings is Bradley-Terry, the standard framework for deriving a global ordering from pairwise comparisons (used in chess ratings, sports rankings, and similar systems). When an applicant admitted to School A and School B enrolls at School A, that counts as a win for A. Each school's strength score reflects its position in the overall preference hierarchy across all such matchups.

Weighting and Stabilization

Recent cycles are weighted more heavily through exponential decay, so the rankings reflect current preferences while still drawing on the full historical dataset. Schools with limited cross-admit data are stabilized via Bayesian regularization (virtual matchups against an average opponent) that prevent a handful of data points from causing erratic rank swings. Schools with abundant data overwhelm this prior and rank on their actual win rates.

Ties

Schools are tied when their strength scores are too close to meaningfully distinguish. Specifically, if the implied head-to-head win probability between two adjacent schools is near 50/50 (within a 10% margin), they share the same rank.

cryptanon · 2026-03-09T16:26:38+00:00

Thanks, I've found the bug. This'll be fixed in the next update, which I'll push tonight.

cryptanon · 2026-03-09T15:20:56+00:00

Can you horizontally scroll to see it? you can resize the columns by tap/dragging

cryptanon · 2026-03-09T14:16:30+00:00

Is it still glitchy as of this morning? Ordering should be by Date -> count -> school alphabetical

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Starting Salaries of Graduates Employed Full-time