Data Integrity & Methodology

Every figure on exhibit509.com traces to a law school's official ABA Standard 509 Information Report. Here's exactly where the data comes from, how it's verified, and every correction we've made.

Read the data-validation white paper →

What you're looking at

How we count. The dataset tracks 210 law schools across 2011–2025: 197 currently accredited J.D. programs plus 13 closed, merged, or teach-out schools (including Golden Gate University) that we keep for the historical record. Of these, 208 carry map geocoordinates and appear on the map by default. That yields roughly 3,000 school-year records, a school contributes a record only for the years it actually reported, so the count is below a flat 210 × 15. Full derivation is in the data-validation white paper.

How the data is validated

We don't just re-key the ABA's spreadsheets. The dataset is checked two independent ways:

1. Clean-room rebuild. The published numbers are independently rebuilt from the raw ABA compilation spreadsheets and diffed against the dataset. The 2025 admissions check (LSAT & GPA, 25/50/75 percentiles) matched all 197 reporting schools with zero discrepancies.
2. PDF audit. Every school-year is then compared field-by-field against the authoritative 509 PDFs, across every year since 2011 and the core fields (LSAT, GPA, applications, offers, acceptance, enrollment). When the dataset and the PDF disagree, the PDF wins.

Result: the admissions dataset is validated clean for 2011–2025. The audit surfaced a small set of genuine errors, every one now corrected and listed below.

Corrections log

29 definite corrections + 12 where the dataset held a non-final data vintage (the PDF is the final, authoritative version) + 10 current-year snapshot fields realigned to the verified trend & master.

Definite errors

Reconciled to final ABA PDF

Current-year snapshot realigned to verified trend & master (2026-06-26)

Ten current-year fields whose displayed value disagreed with both the field's own year-by-year series and the re-verified master (the two agree on the corrected figure). The trend charts were already right; only the headline snapshot was stale.

Things that look odd but are correct

In the interest of transparency, a few values look like errors but faithfully reflect the source, we leave them as reported:

Coverage notes

Admissions, enrollment, scholarship, tuition, fee, and bar-passage fields all come from the ABA Standard 509 PDFs and are validated against them, 2011–2025, by a PDF-controlled audit (the control is the PDFs themselves; the school identity is keyed independently of our name crosswalk). Employment outcomes are not carried in the 509 PDF at all, their only authoritative source is the ABA's separate employment-disclosure workbook, which is what we reconcile them against, so they sit outside that PDF audit by construction. The full per-field accounting, the audit table, every class of correction, and which year each field describes, is in the data-validation white paper.