<p>This thread is ridiculous. Student got into two spectacular law schools with a relatively low grade point average. It is a credit to Chicago that these schools accepted him with that grade point average. Personally, Chicago has been fantastic with guidance for my graduating child, having gotten her prestigious internships during her college years and now a prestigious fellowship in her desired field and in chicago, her first choice.</p>
<p>why is everyone so misunderstanding…maybe not all of you have felt it but getting rejected from your dream school ******* sucks. It’s perfectly understandable for the OP to be disappointed and kind of “pessimistic” because that’s a common reaction towards rejection.The search for self-justification.</p>
<p>How would you respond if your dream school rejects you even though you’ve worked so hard for years?</p>
<p>^^ I almost forgot why I stopped coming to this site. Whiny, ungrateful students.</p>
<p>At the risk of giving the appearance of ‘piling on’ (which is not my intent), I must join the majority in suggesting that the OP is being unrealistic. With an average GPA from any school, one cannot expect entry into top-tier law school. IMO, the OP is indeed fortunate to have gained entry into Michigan and Cornell. They are great schools, period. This is cause for celebration, not disappointment.</p>
<p>I feel sorry for OP as his/her chance of getting nominated to the Supreme Court will be forever dashed. No Supreme Court justice ever come from Cornell or Michigan. Dont worry you will make tons of monies. Who care to be in the Supreme Court anyway.</p>
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<p>The problem is not that the OP is disappointed about not getting into his “dream school.” The problem is that he falsely blames Chicago for his failure.</p>
<p>Having admittedly not read the full spread of responses, I would have to strongly agree with the OP.</p>
<p>The pre-law office aside, many advisors in the College simply are not frank about the LS numbers game. Some are occasionally willing to pan the LSAT because Chicago students often do well (but really, anyone with a 140+ IQ should be able to bring their game face to the preparation process and walk out with a 170+, Chicago education or not). Yet, advisors are not willing to admit that one is better off gaming the system for grades rather than choosing a challenging major or courses. </p>
<p>I believe to a large extent this is because, truth be told, the initial (grade) arbitrage opportunity for students has already been lost. For pre-law, they should have gone somewhere else, since applicants from schools that grade hard (Chicago, JHU, Swarthmore are a few) simply do not get compensated vis-à-vis inflated institutions. Decry Brown, Harvard, et al. as you will, yet their administrators are consciously playing and winning the JD / MD placement game better than anyone else. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, back in Hyde Park, LS admissions is (often) portrayed as very similar in spirit to arts & sciences MA / MS / PhD programs or business / policy schools, where a nuanced reading of ones application is par for the course. Note that in these domains, Chicago does tremendously well to its (much deserved) merit. Unfortunately, however, the bottom line is that USN&WR simply eliminates LS admission committees ability to take a large number of deserving, low GPA, high LSAT splitters into their classes, which is equivalent to saying that they cannot offer Chicago students an appropriate boost given the rigor of their transcript. </p>
<p>Consider a hypothetical: two students apply to a lower ranked T14 LS. For analytical clarity, both present a 171 on the LSAT, putting them in the middle of last years matriculating class. Presume further that a one is hard science major from a decent, but not outstanding, household name school (Texas, Illinois, George Washington, so on), with a 3.7 GPA. Clearly, this student did well, but did not max out the grading scale (i.e. no right censoring here). Meanwhile, the second candidate comes from Chicago, and presents a similar major (soft factors are a wash). </p>
<p>The important question then is: at what GPA cutoff (for the Chicago student) is the application reader equally favorable to both candidates? If LSN and other applications sites are to be trusted, the spread is at best a partial letter grade (e.g. B+ to A-) or at worst a meager decimal (i.e. .1) which is (with due respect to all the Longhorns, Illini, and hatchi? out there) positively ridiculous. This aberration only gets more grotesque when one considers the same USN&WR pressures that diminish between college considerations also diminish between major considerations (i.e. LS are not awarded for having more chemistry majors than communications majors). </p>
<p>Hence the broken system type cases that are all too common (and all too predictable). The cum laude math major from MIT who ends up at Minnesota, while a criminal justice major from CUNY walks into Columbia. A counterfactual can also be helpful in taking stock of the situation if one is not initially sold. Presume the MIT math major attended CUNY for personal or financial reasons that did not otherwise have an academic impact. How likely would it have been that she walked out with a 3.7 or greater (bearing in mind her known performance at MIT)? If you answer is almost certainly so, then you have to admit the system is horrifically flawed in addition to being quite unjust. In short, we are penalizing some of the brightest minds in the country for taking on meaningful intellectual challenges, rather than accepting A for effort mediocrity. </p>
<p>And for those who balk at the idea that schools would let their admissions system merely be hijacked by a single publication, think about it this way in a largely opaque system, where rankings were based on reputation scores and in turn the quality of a schools graduates, would classes really look anything like they do now at top institutions? I wholeheartedly doubt it. Harvard, whose inflated UG GPAs in effect align perfectly with the incentives engendered by USN&WRs graduate rakings, serves as a case in point. HLS - in effect immune from the rankings wrath of USN&WR - choose not to take a diversity of high performing candidates from a variety of schools, but rather digs deep into Harvard Colleges class knowing full well that it is home to some of the brightest mind in the country. Elitist? Perhaps. But Empirically defensible? Very likely.</p>
<p>The premise of uchicagoalum’s post is that, with the possible exceptions of Harvard and maybe Yale, the classes at all the top law schools are full of graduates of second- or third-tier state schools with high GPAs. Guess what? I don’t think that’s true. I think they all have a smattering of students like that, but many, many more graduates of elite colleges. And whine all you like about grade inflation at Harvard or Brown, I’m not convinced that Chicago grades in general are more than .1-.2 lower.</p>
<p>To repeat a theme in this thread: The OP is a case in point. Does anyone really think that Michigan didn’t have ANY more candidates left with 170+ LSATs and GPAs much higher than 3.3? The OP got a nice Chicago bump, no two ways about it. The OP probably got that bump at a bunch of the other schools, too, where he got waitlisted rather than rejected.</p>
<p>JHS, I don’t think uchicagoalum is contesting that tippy top law schools are filled w kids from second/third-tier undergrads. Rather, I think he’s merely saying that undergrads benefit from grade inflation, and that law schools may not account for the “rigor” of a school as much as they once did (e.g. before US News gained so much traction). So, this would go to the point that, amongst similarly situated peers, the undergrads that grade inflate will do better than the undergrads that do not. </p>
<p>There is some evidence for this, although I’ve only done a cursory search:</p>
<p>[Image</a> - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/widgets/expand/images/graphic/994/]Image”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/widgets/expand/images/graphic/994/)</p>
<p>There is a bit of controversy at Princeton now, because graduates have not done quite as well in the law school admissions game as they did before Pton instituted the “anti-grade inflation” policies at the school. Interestingly, MIT, is also featured in this daily princetonian article, and its performance lags behind the other schools in the article.</p>
<p>Now, of course, the argument could be that it’s not about grade deflation, at schools like brown and yale, the very top kids want to go to law school, so of course they fare better than their counterparts at princeton and MIT, where maybe the weaker kids apply. </p>
<p>I think, though, that grade inflation explains some of the growing discrepancy in performance between a school like Yale and an MIT (or to a lesser degree, Princeton). </p>
<p>On another note, I love Chicago, but I think some of the posters are giving the U of C a bit too much credit here. From what I know, after a certain range, each LSAT point can make up for as much as 0.1 in GPA. </p>
<p>So, lets look at the OP again, who has a 3.3 and a 174 LSAT. Michigan’s median LSAT is a 169 ([Faq](<a href=“Admissions | University of Michigan Law School”>Admissions | University of Michigan Law School)</a>).</p>
<p>So the OP is 5 full points above Michigan’s LSAT. If you lowered his LSAT 5 points down toward the Michigan median, and then bumped his GPA 0.5, he would be a 3.8/169 applicant to Michigan. That’s certainly a competitive pair of numbers. </p>
<p>Disregarding the OP’s Chicago background, a 3.3/174 LSAT is a compelling applicant at many top law schools - especially because since US News weights the LSAT so heavily (more than GPA). Would OP’s outcome really be so different if he applied from another good, reputable school with a GPA of around 3.3? </p>
<p>Finally, I wholeheartedly agree with uchicagoalum’s analysis of the way Chicago presents law school to its undergrads. When I was at Chicago, even the law adviser presented law school as kind of a humanities based, MA/PhD grad-school like environment. </p>
<p>With the excess of info available online about grad school, OP surely carries the brunt of the blame for his ignorance on how this process works. Chicago certainly certainly does NOT make this process any easier though. My biggest frustration, as I’ve said many times before, is that the U of C is just NOT transparent with the data it has. I went to all the pre-law meetings as an undergrad, learned how law schools love chicago candidates because we “know how to think,” and it was only during winter quarter of my senior year when I specifically asked that the pre-law advisor said, “oh yeah, here’s our law school placement data for the past 5 years.” I remember seeing the data and thinking, “if they’d just told me the ‘Chicago rigor’ is worth about a 0.1 boost,” I’d have a much more realistic view of the entire process.</p>
<p>So, again, the OP bears the brunt of the blame, but I don’t think Chicago informs its undergrads in a particularly useful way at all.</p>
<p>Wow, people are really chewing you up, now aren’t they?</p>
<p>JHS: You paint my contention correctly. Outside of HYS, but still within elite law schools, between 40-60% of a matriculating class is not entering from a top 25 or so college. That is hard to defend in my book. </p>
<p>All: However, I should emphasize that much of the blame lies not with Chicago (or Hopkins, or MIT, or any other college that sticks to its traditions) but with LS deans who year-after-year refuse to collectively take on USN&WR in more than just opinion pieces in the CHR. </p>
<p>At the same time, it is worth noting that if Chicago adopted more lenient grading across the board, it would run the risk of diminshing its percieved sense of standards, to the deteriment of graduate admissions decisions in other fields. That could be equally short sighted.</p>
<p>uchicagoalum - wait, so you contend that having ~50% of a top 10 law school’s class does NOT come from the top 25 or so college is hard to defend? Seeing that colleges NOT in the top25 make up, say, 90% of all colleges/univs out there, it doesn’t seem like that bad a trend. </p>
<p>I mean right now, even at top law schools, I’d estimate that about 40% of the class comes from the top 5-10% of of american undergrad schools. It doesn’t seem terrible if the remaining ~50% of the class come from the remaining 90% of US colleges/universities. Having 40-50% of the class hail from the top 5-10% of schools seems like enough to me.</p>
<p>Also, as I’ve stated before, I have no problem w the difficulty of the Chicago undergrad environment. My key issue, however, is the lack of transparency shown by the administration. Let the students make informed judgments on the paths they want to take, rather than being more opaque about the law school admissions game and where Chicago places in it.</p>
<p>cue7</p>
<p>in this age of overwhelming information available on the web, all it takes is a couple of google searches on law school admission to know that GPA is very important. the OP completely lost credibility when it became clear that he had not bothered early on during his four year of undergrad education to find out what it took to be accepted into a top low school, and still did not know that when he started this thread (hence the blame he heaped on the school). If anything, he has U Chicago reputation to thank for the fact that he got into some top schools in spite of his low (for the top law schools) GPA. </p>
<p>When so much information available everywhere, why does it matter how much U Chicago is transparent on this front? If a student knows what’s important to get into the top law school, why does it matter SO MUCH how the other Chicago kids did in the law school admission game? It’s hard to compare stats from one school to the next, because it could very well be the case that more law-leaning students or pre profesisonal students are choosing to go to Brown as opposed to Chicago. There is a selection bias to begin with. </p>
<p>Granted, it would be best if the school proactively reaches out to students with pre emptive information sharing. However, more than anything else, the students themselves should take charge.</p>
<p>RotCherewego - as I mentioned multiple times in my previous posts (and this is a direct quote): “I believe the OP deserves the brunt of the blame.” There’s no question about that, especially given all the resources that are available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. </p>
<p>Having said that, school-specific information (which Chicago does NOT release publicly) can be very, very useful to any chicago undergrad applicant. I remember looking at the chicago-specific data myself, and it was revealing. As I recall, in my day, Chicago got around a 0.1-0.15 boost in GPA (as long as the LSAT was up to snuff), and the data sheet had a break down of how many chicago undergrads were accepted and matriculated at each law school.</p>
<p>All of the general info is useful, but the school-specific info serves Chicago students even better. Given that I’ve heard that meeting with Chicago’s pre-law advisor can take months (her schedule fills up quickly), and she’s the only one with access to this data sheet, the situation at U of C is certainly not ideal.</p>
<p>To reiterate, the OP bears the brunt of the blame, but it’s disappointing that the admin doesn’t strive to inform their students as well as possible on the law school front. Given how much many students sacrifice (monetarily, etc) to go to U of C, I certainly think it’s not unreasonable to call for more transparency and better value for the undergrad body.</p>
<p>To the OP:</p>
<p>I understand that you’re upset and disappointed. We’ve all been there. I know from personal experience that it’s pretty much impossible to take rejection graciously. However, I have to say that what you may view as a completely rational opinion sounds more or less like this to other people:</p>
<p>“The University of Chicago has failed me. I came here expecting my university to satisfy my intellectual needs and get me into Harvard Law. The time I spent here was indeed unforgettable; however, I did not get into Harvard Law. Nobody ever told me that a 3.3 GPA would not be good enough for Harvard. Nobody fought to get me into Harvard. My dreams are now shattered. I will have to settle for the ninth-best law school in the country, unless UPenn takes mercy on me. I blame all of this on the University of Chicago, which deliberately sabotaged my career by not forcing me to study harder.”</p>
<p>Now, is this really what you want to say?</p>
<p>After all this debate, words after words, paragraph after paragraph, my simple words posted earlier should be underscored:</p>
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<p>As a rising first year, let me add my two cents for what it’s worth. </p>
<p>I’ve talked to multiple UChi undergrads the past few months since enrolling, and ALL of them said UChi’s average GPA was well below 3.3… some even daring to dip as low as 2.8.</p>
<p>Secondly, most of those students have given me this advice: when you’re enrolling for classes, only take one, maybe two, HARD classes. Like, really ridiculously work-your-butt-off hard. If you take three, or four, you’re not going to succeed. You’re going to spend all of your time working, worrying about work. You’ll never de-stress, and you won’t be able to glean as much meaningful learning out of each class as you want. </p>
<p>Perhaps the OP didn’t do this? Perhaps he decided to take Honors Analysis, Probability, Intermediate Latin, and Econometrics all in the same quarter. As a rising first year and an aspiring graduate from a top law school, I have to say I really buy into the “life-of-the-mind” mantra. I really LOVE learning… though some subjects more than others. But that being said, I fully understand taking some “easy” classes, and I plan to do it. It will allow me to really focus on some other classes that I really really really enjoy, and it will help with my GPA. I realize going in that I need a good GPA if I want to fulfill my dream of going to Yale Law, and I’m not ashamed to say that I want high grades… but I won’t do it at the expense of mindless work. </p>
<p>For example, here is what I’m planning on taking Autumn Quarter 2010:
Honors Calc (HARD… at least for me) (B)
Power, Identity, and Resistance (Difficult, but not overly cumbersome). (A-)
Philosophical Perspectives in the Humanities (Difficult, but not overly cumbersome). (A-)
Politics in the U.S. Congress (Large, lecture class). (A)</p>
<p>I think the last one will be excruciatingly interesting since I love Poli Sci and since it will be midterms in November, but I realize it’ll be a relatively easy class :)) I added the grades I expect to receive next to each course. Granted, I may be overestimating by a lot; but I think if I want Yale Law, that’s what I’m going to need to scrape. That’s a 3.6. I think it should be manageable given the courseload. But most importantly, they’re all classes I WANT to take.</p>
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<p>According to [University</a> of Chicago GPA Trends](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/chicago.html]University”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/chicago.html), UChicago’s average GPA in 2006 was 3.35.</p>
<p>Grade deflation is way exaggerated at Chicago. Average GPA is almost certainly around 3.3-3.4.</p>
<p>The last couple of graduations, newmassdad and I counted the number of graduates receiving general honors, the main prerequisite for which is a cumulative GPA of 3.25 or higher. At least the last two years, about 60% of graduates have received general honors. I think that pretty definitively establishes that the median GPA for Chicago graduates is somewhere north of 3.25 – probably around 3.3, maybe even a little on the high side of that. Which is completely consistent with what the gradeinflation guy reports for a few years before that.</p>