Have I been lied to all this time?

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>I've been reading a few posts from this individual which seems to contradict MY understanding of law school admissions per CC and LSD. I always had thought alma mater had VERY LITTLE, if any, bearing on admissions. </p>

<p>Moreover, in my understanding of college grading, I had come to believe that a higher GPA at many public institutions could actually be more impressive than an equally high one at HYPS since I had thought these schools were infamous for grade inflation. </p>

<p>Could any of the reputable posters offer TRUE and ACCURATE light on this manner?</p>

<p>


</p>

<p>Does undergrad institution give one a "huge boost" if the alma mater is prestigious?</p>

<p>Is a 3.7 from Princeton really more impressive than a 3.9 from UC Riverside?</p>

2

<p>
[quote]
a higher GPA at many public institutions could actually be more impressive than an equally high one at HYPS since I had thought these schools were infamous for grade inflation.

[/quote]
This is definitely not true. I crunched some numbers to establish that this grade inflation discussion is actually a myth; an equivalent student will average lower grades at high-ranked private schools.</p>

<p>It doesn't matter much, but it could be an advantage in some scenarios. 0.2 GPA points is probably pushing it, however, all else being equal.</p>

<p>Be warned, though, that all else is rarely equal. Smaller schools, on balance, often make it easier to find better recommendation letters and better advising offices. The rigorous feedback associated with Ivy League writing programs helps with essays, as does the advising offices again. Extracurricular access is often higher at prestigious schools, and people tend to pick up study habits from the people around them. Watching Harvard kids study for the LSAT, with Harvard-esque expectations for performance, is very different from watching Berkeley kids study for it, which is very different yet again from watching Riverside students study for it -- and we tend to base our actions off of what we see.</p>

3

<p>Does undergrad institution give one a "huge boost" if the alma mater is prestigious? As in the name not the preparation it gives you which would be another subject entirely.</p>

<p>Is a 3.7 from Princeton really more impressive than a 3.9 from UC Riverside? I mean how much does the name weigh in?</p>

4

<p>So engineering at Berkeley is equally as inflated/deflated as engineering at an Ivy? I find that hard to believe.</p>

5

<p>Like I said, 0.2 GPA points is probably pushing it. GPA is really important. It probably varies from law school to law school.</p>

<p>And I didn't break out the data by major. But among prelaw students, an LSAT-equivalent student tended to get lower grades at more selective schools. Harvard was more deflated than Berkeley -- by a lot.</p>

6

<p>huh? screwed up post....back to coffee barn.</p>

7

<p>Somebody made a post (and then removed it) which helped make my point. The person pointed out that you might get errors if the mix of majors among pre-law students wasn't representative. That's a valid criticism, but what it means is that Harvard is even more deflated than the math would suggest, since the Harvard pool would include a lot more "soft" majors who are still getting lower grades than Berkeley engineers of equivalent test scores.</p>

<p>Somebody also mentioned that deflation could also be defined as the proportion of D's and F's rather than the mean GPA. That's probably fair, but students who get D's and F's probably aren't in the law applicant pool anyway, one way or the other.</p>

8

<p>
[quote]
Somebody also mentioned that deflation could also be defined as the proportion of D's and F's rather than the mean GPA. That's probably fair, but students who get D's and F's probably aren't in the law applicant pool anyway, one way or the other.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>And that's the way I define deflation, which is why I suspect that your analysis is flawed, because it is left-censored. Even if I accept that it is harder to get A's at Harvard than at Berkeley - which I'm not sure I do - I definitely find it hard to believe that it is harder to get D's or F's at Harvard than at Berkeley. That greatly distorts the analysis because then those Berkeley students who get those terrible grades won't even apply to law school at all, whereas if they had gone to Harvard, they wouldn't have gotten those grades and hence would still have applied. </p>

<p>As a famous historical case in point, Ted Kennedy was caught for academic misconduct not once but twice at Harvard, once for personally cheating on a test, another for paying somebody to cheat on a test for him. Yet not only did Harvard still allow him to graduate, he even got admitted to the University of Virginia Law School. Now, one might argue that he benefited from considerable family pull, but I would suspect that similar stories exist today: it is practically impossible to actually flunk out of Harvard, even if you're caught cheating. No such comparable system exists at Berkeley.</p>

9

<p>
[quote]
but I would suspect that similar stories exist today: it is practically impossible to actually flunk out of Harvard, even if you're caught cheating. No such comparable system exists at Berkeley.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Unless you have knowledge of every cheating case and its outcome at Harvard and Berkeley, you can make this assumption.</p>

10

<p>
[quote]
that's the way I define deflation

[/quote]
Fair enough as a general matter -- flunking out of school must suck -- but pre-law candidates have to keep the mean in mind as well.</p>

<p>Imagine that Princeton does in fact get a GPA boost over Riverside. that might seem unfair if Princeton were already grade inflated AND getting a boost because of the prestige. But that's not the case.</p>

<p>In fact, it might be a pretty sensible way to correct for the fact that, at the mean, Riverside is the inflated school.</p>

<p>[Quick Edit: sakky, I originally misunderstood your point about left-censored data and thus responded incorrectly. I'll get a better discussion up sometime later.]</p>

11

<p>
[quote]
Unless you have knowledge of every cheating case and its outcome at Harvard and Berkeley, you can make this assumption.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Of course, I meant to say, you CANNOT make this assumption.</p>

12

<p>
[quote]
Of course, I meant to say, you CANNOT make this assumption.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Sure, but what I can say is that practically everybody who goes to Harvard will graduate. Contrast that with a school like, say, Caltech, that has just as qualified of a student body, and arguably even more qualified, yet clearly does not graduate as many of its students as Harvard does. </p>

<p>I therefore make the assertion that, at Harvard, it is practically impossible to flunk out, compared to other schools, and cheating is one possible path for flunking out. Now, do I know this for sure? Of course not. But given my familiarity with both schools, I suspect it's probably true. More importantly, I doubt that anybody can make a convincing argument for the opposite.</p>

13

<p>
[quote]
flunking out of school must suck -- but pre-law candidates have to keep the mean in mind as well

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I think it's fair to say that both the mean and the variance should matter to a candidate. I think we can all think of cases where we, or people we know, have gotten grades that were lower than they probably deserved. {The opposite happens too: I freely admit that some of my grades were probably higher than I deserved.}</p>

<p>But in the case of Harvard or other 'low-variance' schools, even a 'low' grade isn't really going to be that low. You might not get a great grade, but you're still going to pass. But at schools like Berkeley, you really can get a D or an F. </p>

<p>As a case in point, I remember one guy who found out right before exam week that his girlfriend who he deeply loved had been cheating on him. Unsurprisingly, he was barely coherent during his exams, and the result was that he got a bunch of terrible grades that landed him on academic probation. The Berkeley profs didn't care that he was having a major personal problem. All they cared about is that he didn't do well on the exams. If he had gone to a school like Harvard and Stanford and had the same personal issues happen to him there, sure, maybe he wouldn't have gotten top grades during that semester. But at least he would have still passed, if even only with middling grades.</p>

14

<p>
[quote]
I think it's fair to say that both the mean and the variance should matter to a candidate.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Sakky, I think you're absolutely right, that these are all major concerns when selecting an undergraduate school. But in this thread, that's not what we're doing. In this thread, we're pretending to be an admissions committee, and we're trying to figure out what a GPA "means." Even more specifically, we're a top law school trying to evaluate two excellent GPAs.</p>

<p>To use the OP's example of Princeton vs. Riverside, he was asking whether the a 3.9 from Riverside is worse than a 3.7 from Princeton. This is doubly unfair, the OP suggests, because that's an inflated 3.7 against a deflated 3.9.</p>

<p>My response was that that's not true -- an equivalent GPA (in that range, I should have clarified) is actually harder to earn at Princeton.</p>

15

<p>Sakky,what does Cal Tech have to do with this ? You made the statement that it is impossible to flunk out of Harvard even if you are caught cheating but not at Berkeley. I disagree.
All you have to ask the register's office at Harvard.</p>

16

<p>
[quote]
Sakky,what does Cal Tech have to do with this ?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Caltech demonstrates that even student bodies with similar qualifications (and Harvard and Caltech's student bodies are, at least numerically, probably roughly the same) can nevertheless exhibit widely varying graduation rates. </p>

<p>
[quote]
You made the statement that it is impossible to flunk out of Harvard even if you are caught cheating but not at Berkeley. I disagree.
All you have to ask the register's office at Harvard.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I never said it was impossible to flunk out of Harvard for cheating. I just said that I suspected it was more difficult to flunk out for cheating at Harvard than at Berkeley. I don't know of any equivalent example of Ted Kennedy at Berkeley, despite the fact that Berkeley has nearly 4x the number of undergrads, and hence you would think there should be some obvious example of somebody getting caught cheating at Berkeley twice yet still not only being allowed to graduate, but also getting into a top law school. If you know of such an example, please tell us.</p>

17

<p>


</p>

<p>If you don't mind posting the numbers you've found to corroborate your claim, that would be an interesting read.</p>

<p>And for the record, I did not suggest that it was unfair because UCR has grade deflation (in fact, if you read my original post that is a separate and unrelated question all together within the context in which I put it). I merely asked two simple questions:</p>

<p>"Does undergrad institution give one a "huge boost" if the alma mater is prestigious?</p>

<p>Is a 3.7 from Princeton really more impressive than a 3.9 from UC Riverside?"</p>

<p>In other words would you, being part of the adcom, say, "Gee, though admitting the Princeton undergraduate will lower the average GPAs of our admits, I think the Princeton student will be more of an asset than the UCR student. I mean, he did get into Princeton after all."</p>

<p>I think you've misunderstood the two very simple questions asked which merely reflect my confusion as to how the prestige of one's undergraduate institution affects admissions overall. You gave a long-winded answer to a simple question going into how more prestigious universities offer better services to prepare students for better law schools. That wasn't my question.</p>

<p>Regardless, thanks everyone for your input. I think I found the appropriate answer in a thread which was actually featured on the page, on which sakky posted a very clear answer. </p>

<p>The answer would be very little if none at all, and an absolute "none at all" to the assertion that it would be a "huge boost" to have gone to Princeton.</p>

18

<p>First, notice that I answered your questions very clearly in my second paragraph. Second, the discussion of grade inflation was a response to something very clearly from your own post, and which is directly on point. Please be careful about accusing others of being non-responsive or of misunderstanding.</p>

<p>In any case, the numbers were posted in a thread here:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/law-school/266240-question-about-top-law-schools.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/law-school/266240-question-about-top-law-schools.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

19

<p>Sakky-- Ted Kennedy was expelled from Harvard for cheating--as was the student who took the test for him. Kennedy then did a stint in the army. When he finished it, he applied for reintstatement at Harvard and was granted it. UVa was aware of his disciplinary history when it admitted Ted Kennedy to its law school. Its decision to do so has nothing whatsoever to do with Harvard. </p>

<p>I just think your post makes it sound as if Teddy was never kicked out of Harvard. He was.</p>

20

<p>Jonri, I think Kennedy was suspended temporarily but not expelled. I think what sakky is trying to say is that Berkeley would have had a zero tolerance policy for cheating making it impossible to ever come back and get your degree whereas Harvard would simply suspend you for a term or two and hope you could come back and finish your degree-- and help you along the way.</p>