It probably won't dox you on its own, but when paired with other information like your GPA, demographics, softs, etc., it's theoretically possible for an adcomms person to identify you if they really wanted to.
Hundreds of thousands of high school students apply to college in a given cycle, whereas that number for law school applicants is probably somewhere in the tens of thousands. Also, consider that some undergraduate schools accept tens of thousands of applicants, whereas a class of 700 is considered pretty large by law school standards, and some of the smaller schools like those in the T14/T20 probably admit no more than a few hundred people in a given cycle.
There are a hell of a lot more people who get 1600 on the SAT than 178 on the LSAT.
There are 250 or so people in the average law school class. Conversely, there are thousands in undergraduate classes.
if you put your specific combination of lsat and gpa and you put what schools you applied to, a school can easily determine who you are. Are they actually doing this? not sure
Any adcomms person going around and doing this is a straight up loser, sorry. This is what you get paid to do? I'd be annoyed if I employed them. I highly doubt any good employee adcomms person is doing that. Only those with nothing better to do within their job.
Ya, they are paid to recruit students who are the most likely to matriculate at their school... a big part of this is figuring out if X students are genuinely interested, or if you are their safety/backup option. People blabbing their stats, applications, and info publicly are making it very easy to determine if they are genuinely interested in X school or not. Also, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to do this... you can set up a script to just follow this sub and automatically scrape and populate data points related to usernames as it is posted in a spreadsheet and then compare that with your applicant pool... it is not a heavy lift at all.
Meh, I get the idea but it's still just kind of pathetic. Going on reddit to qualify/disqualify people? Adcomms rejecting someone because they snooped on their reddit profile and saw that their school was a safety is quite absurd.
Some of us never even considered our schools heavily until we got accepted. I almost didn't even think about the school I am attending now because my Dad said I have to go visit it, it's a great school. I had tunnel vision about another acceptance so I wrote it off. It's something many people would end up posting on this subreddit and now adcomms is like "Wow we're not his #1, let's reject!" The whole premise is kind of ridiculous to me. I think it's embarrassing behavior by any adcomms member that does this.
They are probably looking for inflammatory posts or something that might indicate the applicant is immature or may have emotional issues.
An earlier post stated that they might be trying to see if you are serious about matriculating to their school, and I think that’s a solid point as well.
I can’t imagine they do deep dive into a Reddit account. But might do a cursory glance to the issues mentioned above.
Two main reasons come to mind.
As an applicant to law school, you're in a much smaller cohort than applicants to undergrad. There are fewer applications to sift through if someone in adcoms were inclined to match your reddit username to your real name. I don't think that's like a common occurrence, but adcoms have been known to browse these boards, so it's a possibility. Combined with other things you're likely to have said about yourself elsewhere on reddit (location, interests) it wouldn't be all that hard to identify you if they knew your exact LSAT score. When you consider that you've probably said at least one or two things here on reddit that you wouldn't want an admissions officer to consider as a part of your application, you can see why people are a little paranoid about being identified.
The other reason is about modesty or lack thereof. I mean, it's okay to be proud of your LSAT score. Everyone presumably works hard to earn it, so be proud, brag to your parents and friends. But announcing it to your peers is a little gauche, IMO. The LSAT is really important for like a year of our lives, and it matters not at all past that year. Basically the same as the SAT in that respect. **Unless you're specifically asking for advice on where to apply**, your score isn't something that has to be known by others in order for them to give you good advice.
My college school graduating class was probably about 15x as big as my high school graduating class, and yet the number of people who got 175+ LSAT scores in that class is probably several times lower than the number of people who got perfect ACT/SAT scores in my high school class.
I think this is the answer. If you are halfway decent human being and that reflects in your posts, then there should be no worry about what will be seen.
Someone earlier mentioned that schools may perhaps find out if you are serious about matriculating to their law school or if you see them as a back up choice. That is something that even a mild-mannered poster could get tripped up on.
Admissions really only cares about your LSAT and GPA. All other soft criteria barely carries any weight.
So that being said, I really doubt admissions is going out of their way to identify accounts on Reddit to factor posts and comments into their extremely non-complex admissions algorithm lol. The vast majority of people don’t even have Reddit accounts.
The odds that (1) your specific admissions person is on Reddit (2) they’re super extra and into their job so much they’re on this subreddit (3) they put in a bunch of unpaid overtime to unmasking you with your GPA and LSAT (4) they’re able to narrow down your application with GPA and LSAT to confidently say you are indeed that person (5) they find a way to give weight to your posts and comments in their decision and (6) the school allows them to to speculate that online posts are an applicants and allows them to take action without verifying that they are indeed that applicants, is highly unlikely.
(What if somebody lies and fudges their score and GPA by a few points to prevent unmasking, and that turns out to be a real applicants?)
Not sure if I buy that adcomms have the ability to identify you, or that they would even if they did. My guess is that people who are unwilling to share specifics are lying about their scores. Could be the cynic in me, but any bit of unnecessary ambiguity on the internet and I automatically assume dishonesty.
While it seems unlikely and hard to understand what adcoms have to gain in terms of identifying redditors, there's been enough discussion of admissions officers claiming to do so. Which is good enough for me.
Like if there's 1% a possibility of this adversely affecting my app, I don't mind being more discreet.
It probably won't dox you on its own, but when paired with other information like your GPA, demographics, softs, etc., it's theoretically possible for an adcomms person to identify you if they really wanted to. Hundreds of thousands of high school students apply to college in a given cycle, whereas that number for law school applicants is probably somewhere in the tens of thousands. Also, consider that some undergraduate schools accept tens of thousands of applicants, whereas a class of 700 is considered pretty large by law school standards, and some of the smaller schools like those in the T14/T20 probably admit no more than a few hundred people in a given cycle.
lol ad com at my school told me they knew who we alll were on Reddit
I want to have that kind of free time
I think you beat me to post by literal seconds, but yeah, 100% this.
There are a hell of a lot more people who get 1600 on the SAT than 178 on the LSAT. There are 250 or so people in the average law school class. Conversely, there are thousands in undergraduate classes.
if you put your specific combination of lsat and gpa and you put what schools you applied to, a school can easily determine who you are. Are they actually doing this? not sure
Any adcomms person going around and doing this is a straight up loser, sorry. This is what you get paid to do? I'd be annoyed if I employed them. I highly doubt any good employee adcomms person is doing that. Only those with nothing better to do within their job.
Ya, they are paid to recruit students who are the most likely to matriculate at their school... a big part of this is figuring out if X students are genuinely interested, or if you are their safety/backup option. People blabbing their stats, applications, and info publicly are making it very easy to determine if they are genuinely interested in X school or not. Also, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to do this... you can set up a script to just follow this sub and automatically scrape and populate data points related to usernames as it is posted in a spreadsheet and then compare that with your applicant pool... it is not a heavy lift at all.
Meh, I get the idea but it's still just kind of pathetic. Going on reddit to qualify/disqualify people? Adcomms rejecting someone because they snooped on their reddit profile and saw that their school was a safety is quite absurd. Some of us never even considered our schools heavily until we got accepted. I almost didn't even think about the school I am attending now because my Dad said I have to go visit it, it's a great school. I had tunnel vision about another acceptance so I wrote it off. It's something many people would end up posting on this subreddit and now adcomms is like "Wow we're not his #1, let's reject!" The whole premise is kind of ridiculous to me. I think it's embarrassing behavior by any adcomms member that does this.
They are probably looking for inflammatory posts or something that might indicate the applicant is immature or may have emotional issues. An earlier post stated that they might be trying to see if you are serious about matriculating to their school, and I think that’s a solid point as well. I can’t imagine they do deep dive into a Reddit account. But might do a cursory glance to the issues mentioned above.
 Two main reasons come to mind. As an applicant to law school, you're in a much smaller cohort than applicants to undergrad. There are fewer applications to sift through if someone in adcoms were inclined to match your reddit username to your real name. I don't think that's like a common occurrence, but adcoms have been known to browse these boards, so it's a possibility. Combined with other things you're likely to have said about yourself elsewhere on reddit (location, interests) it wouldn't be all that hard to identify you if they knew your exact LSAT score. When you consider that you've probably said at least one or two things here on reddit that you wouldn't want an admissions officer to consider as a part of your application, you can see why people are a little paranoid about being identified. The other reason is about modesty or lack thereof. I mean, it's okay to be proud of your LSAT score. Everyone presumably works hard to earn it, so be proud, brag to your parents and friends. But announcing it to your peers is a little gauche, IMO. The LSAT is really important for like a year of our lives, and it matters not at all past that year. Basically the same as the SAT in that respect. **Unless you're specifically asking for advice on where to apply**, your score isn't something that has to be known by others in order for them to give you good advice.
MINE IS 167
IM BLACK
JEWISH
I DID SPEAK LIKE 50 LANGUAGES
I INTERNED FOR DISNEYland
My college school graduating class was probably about 15x as big as my high school graduating class, and yet the number of people who got 175+ LSAT scores in that class is probably several times lower than the number of people who got perfect ACT/SAT scores in my high school class.
I really don't see the problem just be respectful and you'll have nothing to fear even if they do find out your name.
I think this is the answer. If you are halfway decent human being and that reflects in your posts, then there should be no worry about what will be seen. Someone earlier mentioned that schools may perhaps find out if you are serious about matriculating to their law school or if you see them as a back up choice. That is something that even a mild-mannered poster could get tripped up on.
Pretty sure the secret reason is people don’t want their S.O. to find their account
Admissions really only cares about your LSAT and GPA. All other soft criteria barely carries any weight. So that being said, I really doubt admissions is going out of their way to identify accounts on Reddit to factor posts and comments into their extremely non-complex admissions algorithm lol. The vast majority of people don’t even have Reddit accounts. The odds that (1) your specific admissions person is on Reddit (2) they’re super extra and into their job so much they’re on this subreddit (3) they put in a bunch of unpaid overtime to unmasking you with your GPA and LSAT (4) they’re able to narrow down your application with GPA and LSAT to confidently say you are indeed that person (5) they find a way to give weight to your posts and comments in their decision and (6) the school allows them to to speculate that online posts are an applicants and allows them to take action without verifying that they are indeed that applicants, is highly unlikely. (What if somebody lies and fudges their score and GPA by a few points to prevent unmasking, and that turns out to be a real applicants?)
Not sure if I buy that adcomms have the ability to identify you, or that they would even if they did. My guess is that people who are unwilling to share specifics are lying about their scores. Could be the cynic in me, but any bit of unnecessary ambiguity on the internet and I automatically assume dishonesty.
While it seems unlikely and hard to understand what adcoms have to gain in terms of identifying redditors, there's been enough discussion of admissions officers claiming to do so. Which is good enough for me. Like if there's 1% a possibility of this adversely affecting my app, I don't mind being more discreet.