<p>If your foremost aim is to get THE BEST GPA POSSIBLE (say, for like post-college law school ambitions) at college, is it okay to dumb yourself down a little and try to take the easiest classes possible? </p>
<p>Like for language requirements, I can pretend I can't speak French at all and start from the very elementary class to get A's... Or is this completely stupid? I have some friends who do this, and all they want is just good grades, bcs they wanna go to law school and all that. But I was wondering if they would be making a huge mistake for their future.</p>
<p>It depends - if you don’t want to learn French, and are just trying to get rid of the requirement, take the basic french classes - you won’t learn french, but if that’s not your goal, who cares? </p>
<p>I’m pre-Law and I’m not taking easy classes for the sake of A’s, I placed into an advanced Italian class because I want to study abroad in Italy and learn italian - but if learning a language isn’t a goal for you, then why bother with the advanced class? I do envy the kid’s majoring in Sports Management, Leisure Studies and the like who’re getting A’s, but if they’re not smart, they won’t do well on the LSAT’s - the LSAT’s count slightly more than GPA. </p>
<p>This is what’s annoying about being pre-Law or pre-Med. We can’t study what we actually want to study like others, we have to waste 4 years studying a random subject first. But I guess it’s worth it because we can explore a different interest.</p>
<p>I’m with molly4190. I think it’s totally fair to take some easy classes you don’t care about. I have been doing that myself and I am not even pre-med or pre-law. </p>
<p>It gets problematic when a student tries to take easy classes exclusively. At this point their college experience and the quality of their education suffers. Why pay $30,000 when you don’t want to gain anything from the experience?</p>
<p>that was my strategy exactly. take easy classes to bump my gpa for law school. i have used all my electives on easy A’s and it has worked great. </p>
<p>the people who say that wont get you ready for the lsats are wrong. its not like every class you take will be easy, just the elctive credits you get. i am in a hard major which requires a lot of work, so taking one or two ******** classes a year worked out really well for me. it gave me more time to focus on my major classes, and offset any bad grades i may have gotten in my harder major classes. </p>
<p>not only that, taking easy classes actually helped me do well on the lsats. there was one semester which i took a bunch of really really easy classes, and that gave me a lot of time to study for my lsats that semester. had i been taking advanced itialian and biochemistry to “broaden my horizens” there is no way I would have time to study for the lsats.</p>
<p>Whoever said the easy class won’t help you do well on the LSAT is wrong - LSAT tests 3 things - Reading Comp, Logic Games, and Logical Reasoning. Maybe a philosphy/logic class would help, but otherwise, it doesn’t test knowledge you memorize from a book. </p>
<p>the 3 majors which do best on the LSAT are (in order) Math/Physics, Philosophy, and Economics. But they don’t teach you what’s on the LSAT, the reason those people probably do better is because the students interested in them are already strong in logical reasoning to begin with. Major in whatever you want, take whatever classes you want, it won’t affect your LSAT. unless, as mitssu87 suggests, you’re taking very difficult time-consuming classes.</p>
<p>I think OP is specifically referring to foreign language…yes, I agree 100% with your strategy…if language is just a requirement you are trying to get out of the way, absolutely drop down to get the higher grade…my daughter is not even pre-law (or pre-anything) but she has a two semester language requirement; she chose to drop down 1st semester freshman year; by the third week of class, everyone else she knew who took level up, had dropped down as well…</p>
<p>you’ll still get your requirement in; unless you’re double majoring/minoring in French, completely doesn’t matter…</p>
<p>Your strategy seems pretty sound, but I’d like to point out one way it could backfire:</p>
<p>If you feel the classes are too easy for you, you might end up not trying at all and then end up with a worse grade than if you had taken a harder class and put in effort. It’s sort of why some smart K-12 slackers who don’t feel challenged in school end up getting bad grades.</p>