<p>I am interested in Bryn Mawr. I am also planning on going to a top tier law school after graduation, hopefully, Harvard Law. I was wondering if Bryn Mawr’s “no-grade discussion” policies, like the absence of a dean’s list, and the very few Rhodes Scholars, have a negative effect on acceptance to great law schools? I also heard BMC deflates student’s gpa… is this true, and again, will it have an effect on law school? Thanks!</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr’s tradition not to talk about grades will not have a negative impact on your law school application (a spot on the dean’s list would not tell law schools anything besides your GPA anyway). You also don’t need to be concerned about grade deflation at Bryn Mawr. Last year 2/3 of the seniors graduated with a GPA of 3.4 or above, and 1/3 of the seniors had a 3.6 or above. That is well above the national average GPA of 3.1. </p>
<p>Have you seen the Wall Street ranking of top feeder schools to prestigious programs? They looked at the percentage of graduates of selective colleges which attended the following professional schools: Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, and Yale for law; Columbia, Harvard Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, Yale for medicine; and Chicago, Darmouth’s Tuck School, Harvard, MIT’s Sloan School, and Penn’s Wharton School for business. Bryn Mawr ranks #26. </p>
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<p>Our low percentage of Rhodes scholars is probably explained by the relative insignificance of athletics at Bryn Mawr. One of the main criteria for the Rhodes fellowship is athletic success.</p>
<p>Attending Bryn Mawr would not jeopardize your chances of attending a top law program. However, I would say that Bryn Mawr does not attract many students who aspire to attend top professional schools. The stereotypical Bryn Mawr student is either very intellectual (and aspires a PhD) or a social activist who may pay more attention to her community service commitment than their GPA. Of course we have a pre-professional group of students, but it is noticeably smaller than at many other colleges.</p>
<p>I am not sure of how many students from BMC enter Medical school, law schools etc but there was a large group of students in the pre professional students meeting during parents day last fall.<br>
Average LSAT score for BMC in 2008 was reportedly 159 which is the same for Berkeley, Colby, Emory, Vanderbilt, NYU and Johns Hopkins. Better than UCLA, Michigan, WUSTL, Brandeis USC etc. This is fairly good as women reportedly score several points less than their male counterparts on this test. Boalt Law school ranked the most difficult colleges in the country about 10 years ago and BMC was around 25th with an identical score to Penn, Rice and Oberlin. Colleges ranked below included Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Wellesley, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Brown, Georgetown, Smith…
I suspect that BMC students do fairly well in their graduate professional choices. The writing emphasis at BMC should be an additional value for law school.</p>