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Yep, that's exactly like here. Although here, the personal statement is basically an afterthought and is only taken into consideration if you're REALLY on the bubble of in / out. IE, they may make offers to 200 students a year where I went to school and for the bottom 10 students the statement may come into play. Mine was essentially a fairly cocky, disrespectful one page spiel about how there was really no doubt that they were going to accept me; I strongly doubt anyone actually read the thing. If it's anything like here, you got in on your grades.
Very interesting that they would take that model though. It essentially SHOULD mean that anyone graduating from Melbourne will be the best candidate to practice law. Ie, if I was running a firm in AU, I would look at a school like that, if it's the only one in the country, as essentially being the Harvard of Australia.
However, as I'm typing this I'm thinking, the real talent, currently, is probably not attracted to that model (yet), and a lot of the good people probably just want to fast-track it through the other programs. Consequently there may be a disproportionate number of "okay I finished my sociology undergrad, what now" people at a school like that. In order to do away with that I would think you'd need to be pretty strict with entry requirements (ie, 160 LSAT, 80% undergrad average, favour business backgrounds etc).
It would be interesting to see how successful that school is at attracting a strong faculty. If it were me I'd be marketing heavily to profs on the basis of being essentially the only real law school in the country.
