It was a big story last week when a survey of top law schools found that 41% of law school admissions offices surveyed did online research on applicants. Michigan Law's Sarah Zearfoss (assistant law dean and admissions director) has a very thoughtful post at her blog, A2Z, on the uses and abuses of the Internet to check out law school applicants. Unlike many (37%) of her peers at other schools, Zearfoss does not use Facebook to glean insights into applicants. But she does offer this as appropriate Internet searching:
One example: A couple of years ago, an applicant described a medical device of her own invention, designed to help her little sister, who suffered from a chronic illness. I was blown away; the applicant said she was about 12 at the time of the invention, and this achievement struck me as evidence both of an amazing degree of empathy for the age, as well as a prodigious talent. But since I’m no engineer, I wanted to get a sense of the utility of the invention and the degree to which it was being used. So I did a little research. And that’s how I discovered, entirely unexpectedly, a number of articles making it clear that the candidate had not in fact been the inventor; her identically named mother had been. That candidate did not get admitted, and I would strongly disagree with anyone who said that my use of the Web in that instance was inappropriate.
