<p>In a world where admissions officers completely ignored UG school, you'd get a chart that looked the same, dominated by the top schools. The smartest students with the highest LSATs cluster at the top schools, since they were selected for those schools on very correlated criteria. </p>
<p>I am not saying the world is actually like this (although I would say it is not far, outside of Y/S), but Jonri's "evidence" is pretty meaningless.</p>
<p>Anyway, boring subject that has been done a million times before. As to the OP, I would say GPA definitely trumps soft factors in general, and graduating early is actually a negative soft factor. I graduated in 5 semesters at <20 y.o. and I would say it's probably hurt my cycle, along with the correspondingly weaker soft factors I could accumulate in a shorter time: [url=<a href="http://www.lawschoolnumbers.com/display.php?user=LuckyAC%5DLuckyAC">http://www.lawschoolnumbers.com/display.php?user=LuckyAC]LuckyAC</a> | LawSchoolNumbers.com<a href="although%20some%20would%20no%20doubt%20claim%20it's%20my%20lousy%20public%20UG">/url</a></p>
<p>But MW's proof above (post #12) is also not evidence. He just shows that undergraduate prestige can be overcome, not that it doesn't matter. He might just as well show that a 177 got into Yale while a 180 was rejected and conclude that LSAT doesn't matter.</p>
<p>The truth is we'd need much more data to reach a conclusion, and in any case YLS is clearly not a good "test" school for this argument more broadly.</p>
<p>No doubt. What is required is a comparison of acceptance rates by people having the same stats at different schools. Of course, the results would be pretty irrelevant, since you can't change your school anyway. </p>
<p>A hearty congrats to Cherrokee and bdm- you guys did real good.</p>
<p>I am beginning to think that graduating early may not have a positive effect on law school admission. I'll assume many kids can graduate in 6 or 7 semesters using AP-IB or summer school credits if they choose to.</p>
<p>Law schools may want to see an array of real college level courses taken as opposed to someone who is graduating early due to 15 or so AP credits that they earned in high school. </p>
<p>Also spending a bit more time on campus may give you the opportunity to get more involved with campus life and obtain a leadership role in some campus activity.
again- a good EC is not going to knock em dead with law school admission, but it certainly doesn't hurt when you are vying for a spot at a T-14 school with all those other kids that have a 3.7 and a 170 LSAT.</p>
<p>IMO- the higher your LSAT, the less all these other factor matter. A 178 LSAT trumps everything.</p>
<p>But for the 98% of you who get an LSAT of 170 or less, I do not think graduating early is necessarily a good thing, unless you plan to get a year or 2 work experience before you apply to law school. It's just my opinion.</p>
<p>I think a lot of people in this thread are overlooking one major thing...the type of students getting into the undergrad schools in the first place. </p>
<p>The fact that 40 kids from Stanford graduated from Yale Law School while only 1 from the University of VT is utterly irrelevent. That statistic doesn't consider the fact that Stanford is likely going to have more qualified applicants than UVM, simply because the quality of student at Stanford is higher. It doesn't mean Yale "prefers" Stanford kids to kids from UVM, it just means that more qualified applicants are coming from Stanford than UVM. </p>
<p>Until someone shows a statistic where people from HYPS are getting into law schools with lower stats than other kids, everything else is just speculation.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I think a lot of people in this thread are overlooking
[/quote]
... several people have pointed this out (see posts #12, #20, #21).</p>
<p>I believe such statistics have been posted on this board before -- and that they actually do confirm some *small *effect of undergraduate school -- but I haven't had much luck searching for them.</p>