Low GPA from a top tier liberal arts college

Graduate School Law School
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<p>Hey guys,</p>

<p>I'm a freshmen at Grinnell College (I think ranked #14 in liberal arts by US Weekly) and I was only able to manage a 3.1 GPA last semester. Older peers tell me that it's just going to get harder and your GPA is not likely to go up. I have law/business school aspirations, but I've been repeatedly told that GPA is really crucial and that the rigor of your undergraduate institution isn't that well considered. I sincerely think that the rigor of this place matches up to some of the Ivies... but we don't have the same name recognition. I constantly hear that it is much easier to just get 4.0 at a run of the mill state school to go to a top law school. My goal is to get into Northwestern and Notre Dame for grad school... what do you guys think?</p>

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<p>Even at an Ivy you need more than a 3.1 to get into a top law school.</p>

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<p>While your older peers may be telling you its unlikely your GPA will go up, I would not make that assumption. In fact, I would assume that I could get my GPA up and make it happen. You are barely half-way through your first year. </p>

<p>Hey, your username is empowered, make it fit!</p>

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<p>You’re only a college freshman. The first semester of college is a period of adjustment. I think you have a good chance of improving your GPA, especially if you choose courses that you are really excited about. Also, don’t spend your college years grubbing for grades with an eye on law school or business school. Enjoy college for what it is, a chance to learn and expand your mind.</p>

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<p>Grinnell does not have grade inflation and law schools know that. Grinnell is in the top 1% for graduating future phd’s and I believe they have a very good acceptance rate into law school which is 46%. Don’t worry so much.</p>

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<p>That is terrible advice d’smom. he should be extremely worried if he is aiming for a top law school. </p>

<p>Harvard Law etc. want 3.9 or so, and it looks like the OP is far from on track to that GPA. It hardly matters about Grinnell’s PhD placement or law school acceptance rate. What matters is stats: GPA and LSAT. The OP’s GPA is in serious trouble, at least relative to the law school world.</p>

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<p>To the extent that law schools take the difficulty of an undergrad college into consideration, they do it by comparing the median LSDAS calculated GPA of students from that college who apply to law school vs. the median LSAT they earn. I don’t know those numbers for Grinnell. Someone who performs the function of pre-law advisor at Grinnell should. </p>

<p>No matter how you slice and dice it though, a 3.1 is low. You can bring it up–most people have their lowest gpa their first semester of college. Assuming you can up it successfullly, you may need to plan on taking at least a year off after college to make sure your senior year will be counted in your gpa when you apply to LS.</p>

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<p>BostonEng – d’smom did not give terrible advice. She gave us useful numbers as well as the information that Grinnell doesn’t have grade inflation. I also don’t see anywhere that the OP is aiming for Harvard. Obviously he or she isn’t going to get into Harvard. There are other law schools.</p>

<p>To the OP, it is not easy to get a 4.0 at a run of the mill state school, as you refer to it. Grinnell has excellent name recognition among graduate programs and if Grinnell doesn’t have grade inflation then I don’t think a 3.1 GPA is that bad. You will be able to bring up your grades because as you go through school you will become more proficient in the classes in your major.</p>

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<p>sorry, but with an average graduating gpa of 3.34, Grinnell is not of the “difficult” variety. (Contrast to Reed at 3.1.) But, regardless, your gpa is below the average for Grinnell, so it needs to go way up for a top law school like Northwestern. Law schools are stats-driven.</p>

<p>I disagree with your older classmates. Grades can be easier in upper division courses. By then you’ve adjusted your own work study habits and learned to study efficiently.</p>

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<p>“sorry, but with an average graduating gpa of 3.34, Grinnell is not of the “difficult” variety. (Contrast to Reed at 3.1.) But, regardless, your gpa is below the average for Grinnell, so it needs to go way up for a top law school like Northwestern. Law schools are stats-driven.”</p>

<p>What do you mean that Grinnell is not of the “difficult” variety? Perhaps I am missing your point, but Grinnell is known as being one of the most intellectual and difficult schools in the country. Reed is difficult too, but you can’t compare GPA’s from one school to another that way. Grinnell does not have grade inflation and grad schools know that. They do take into consideration more than your GPA. I think a better question for the OP would be to find out of the 46% of graduates from Grinnell that got into law school, what is their average Grinnell GPA and what law schools(caliber) did they get in to. Very relevant information. Grinnell has one of the top academic rankings per Princeton Review as well. I believe it was a 99 out of 100 only two or three other schools in the whole country even got a 99.</p>

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<p>OK, I googled–something the OP should have done. Grinnell has some of its law school admissions data on-line, though it leaves out what I consider the most relevant information. Still it’s helpful.</p>

<p>For the year 2007-08, 56 there were 56 Grinnell applicants to LS; 50 were admitted to at least one law school. The median GPA (site doesn’t specify if this is Grinnell’s or LSDAS) for Grinnell applicants to LS was 3.39. The median LSAT was 161.1. (See previous thread by bluedevilmike to get an idea of how this compares to other colleges.) For the three year period 05-08, the median gpa was a 3.42 and median LSAT was 161.1. </p>

<p>in the 07-08 cycle, of the 56 applicants, if my count is correct, 8 ended up at top 14 law schools.The most popular of the top 14 was UMichigan, where 3students matriculated. 2 went to Duke and 1 each to Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley. </p>

<p>The most common LS destination was U of Iowa, which is an excellent law school that usually ranks around 20-25 in USNews rankings if my memory is correct. 11 of the successful LS applicants or 22% matriculated there.
Other top 25 LS at which Grinnell applicants matriculated included UWisconsin (3), UIllinois, UMinn, and WUSTL (all 1 each.) </p>

<p>I hope that information is helpful. </p>

<p>So, there is no doubt that if the OP keeps a 3.1, (s)he’ll be in the bottom half of the Grinnell applicants applying to LS–not a good place to be. </p>

<p>The site lists the number of applicants to LS and the number admitted, but does NOT list the median GPA or LSAT of those admitted. I assume the OP can get the info from Grinnell. In any event, during one time period, there were 41 applicants to Northwestern Law, of whom 13 were admitted. There were 18 to Notre Dame; none were admitted. </p>

<p>The OP has LOTS of time to bring up the gpa, but yes, (s)he better bring it up.</p>

<p>d’smom–I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think you understand what PR’s academic rating is. It is NOT a comparison of the academic quality of different schools. It is measure of how satisfied the students who are enrolled in any given college are with the academics of their college. Grinnell students are obviously very, very satisified…but if you think comparing GPA’s is silly, well, comparing academic ratings is, IMO, even sillier.</p>

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<p>It doesn’t matter how I compare undergrad programs. At a 3.3+, Grinnell’s average gpa is well, average. At 3.6 Brown leads the collegiate universe, with Stanford and Harvard not far behind (3.5+). But many, many fine colleges – with rigor – are in the 3.3-3.4 range, as is Grinnell. Thus, it is no more difficult than its peers, which are all excellent colleges. The point is that there are lotsa colleges with this average gpa, and professional schools do not parse them that finely.</p>

<p>What matters is how professional schools compare programs. And for Law Schools specifically, it’s (almost) ALL about the numbers: gpa+lsat. They just don’t care if college xx is known to be harder. Look at it another way, MIT (which I guess we would all agree is mighty difficult) has a higher than average gpa for admission to med school. If professional schools gave MIT credit for its hard curriculum, the average gpa would be just the opposite, i.e., lower.</p>

<p>Not trying to pick issues, but I’ve been on cc a long time, and there are always folks who post that ‘I attend a tough grading school but that’s ok bcos professional schools will take that into account.’ In the first place, one has to examine the data so see if it is indeed true, that college x is ‘harder.’ (gradeinflation.com is a great source). In the second place, grad schools may give credit for difficulty, but professional schools rarely factor difficulty in.</p>

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<p>“It doesn’t matter how I compare undergrad programs.”</p>

<p>Huh? Funny, you were the one that compared Grinnell’s 3.34 to Reeds 3.1 and that is exactly why I said you can’t compare them that way. Remember, I said: " Reed is difficult too, but you can’t compare GPA’s from one school to another that way."<br>
Perhaps you did not get what I was saying.</p>

<p>“What matters is how professional schools compare programs. And for Law Schools specifically, it’s (almost) ALL about the numbers: gpa+lsat. They just don’t care if college xx is known to be harder”</p>

<p>BTW I never said that it doesn’t matter how professional schools compare them. Why you are bringing that up, I don’t know. Furthermore, law schools absolutely do care what school you come out of. You can’t tell me that a tier three or two school with the same GPA and LSAT will compared to a top 15 tier one school. </p>

<p>Not trying to pick issues but…</p>

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<p>jonri,</p>

<p>That was a lot of very good information. Thank you for posting that.<br>
Regarding the PR’s academic rating, personally I don’t care what their rating is as I don’t put much stock into those kinds of ratings/rankings anyways. My whole point is that a lot of people do not know much about Grinnell and or the rigor of the school and I was just trying to use that to help make the point. Hope that helps. =)</p>

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<p>actually they do not care that much about what institution you came out of. </p>

<p>tier two/three school GPA/LSAT is the same as a tier i GPA/LSAT. if you do research on law school admissions, you will see this is the case. you can see this on “law school numbers” (google it). every school has a green admit section in the upper right and red everywhere else. if your theory was correct, there would be a mixture of red and green everywhere on the plot (greens for top u-grads, reds for low u-grads). </p>

<p>examine Harvard’s stats:</p>

<p>[Class</a> Profile and Fact Sheet](<a href=“http://www.law.harvard.edu/prospective/jd/apply/classprofile.html]Class”>http://www.law.harvard.edu/prospective/jd/apply/classprofile.html)</p>

<p>157 undergraduate institutions within 1 class; 283 in the entire student body. that reaches into the tier II/III and even tier IV/V schools. if you have a sky-high GPA and LSAT, you have a great chance, regardless of your undergrad’s “prestige”. </p>

<p>the one exception is the truly elite undergraduate schools (HYP level); they get a slight boost in their admissions chances (ex a harvard undergrad can get into HLS with a 98th percentile LSAT instead of a 99th percentile LSAT). </p>

<p>the primary purpose of the LSAT is to provide an equal playing field for undergraduates from all institutions, so it makes sense that schools consider it far more important than the ranking of the undergraduate institution.</p>

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<p>BostonEng – I’m not going to try to refute the evidence you give but you aren’t going to convince me that law schools don’t take into account the amount of grade inflation that exists at a particular institution.</p>

<p>As an extreme example take Princeton as opposed to Yale or Harvard. Princeton is notorious for not inflating grades, Yale and Harvard are notorious for inflating grades. The grades given by these schools simply do not have the same meaning. It’s just silly to think that law schools don’t know that and don’t take that into account.</p>

<p>Obviously the LSAT is a leveler. It gives the law schools information that isn’t affected by the particular undergraduate school.</p>

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<p>they do take it into account, but as a so called “soft factor”. soft factors differentiate between candidates with nearly identical numbers (or even identical numbers), but can’t overcome a substantial numerical difference (2 LSAT points or +/- .1 GPA something like that)</p>

<p>lets say there are two candidates</p>

<p>Candidate A:
-Harvard u-grad
-GPA 3.7
-LSAT 170</p>

<p>Candidate B:
-Princeton u-grad
-GPA 3.7
-LSAT 170</p>

<p>schools will look at those and perhaps give the nod to Candidate B due to the rigor/grade deflation. but if we have this:</p>

<p>Candidate A:
-Harvard u-grad
-GPA 3.9
-LSAT 170</p>

<p>Candidate B:
-Princeton u-grad
-GPA 3.7
-LSAT 170</p>

<p>Candidate A will win out.</p>

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<p>Maybe this is just a semantics problem, but I consider URM to be a soft factor. In that case, a soft factor can overcome substantial numerical difference.</p>

<p>Also, with respect to undergraduate school, I hesitate to believe that it’s used as a tiebreaker for two applicants with similarly strong numbers. Presumably, the law school should have no trouble admitting both Candidates A and B in example 1 (assuming those numbers are well within their 25th/75th. I think school makes a difference for borderline candidates. In those situations, where the school can admit, say, only one of two borderline candidates, what’ll differentiate one or the other will be school.</p>

<p>Moreover, it’s difficult to know how law schools rank colleges, and I doubt there is a fine-grained distinction in an admissions officer’s mind between Harvard and Princeton–I don’t mean to argue that you implied this, just that this implication shouldn’t be drawn. Rather, I think admissions officers have a broad sense of which schools are excellent, good, great, terrible, and so on. And particular schools do pop in their minds for their notable rigor. UChicago is one such example. Will law schools give a GPA boost to applicants from that school? Probably not. But will it make a difference for a borderline applicant? Probably so.</p>

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<p>^^small nit: while UofC does not have the grade distribution of the Ivies (does anyone besides Stanford?), Chicago does have an average collegiate gpa (ala Grinnell), and is not much different than Northwestern, for example. Thus, it’s claims of harsh grading is long gone.</p>

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<p>i agree with all of this. URM is not the typical soft factor, and is comparable in effect to LSAT/GPA for sure. </p>

<p>you are right; the type of trade-offs i mentioned really only happen on the borderline. what i was trying to get at is how a soft factor <em>might</em> come into play. IE two otherwise equally qualified applicants, but one has a boost.</p>

<p>H v P, I was really trying to address grade-inflation instead of prestige (although prestige and grade inflation can both be viewed in the context of soft factors). someone mentioned that P is much harsher than H grade-wise, so what i was trying to say is that an admissions officer might look at those two candidates and say “well H and P are both great undergrads, but P has a much lower median GPA. therefore I think the 3.7 from P is more impressive”.</p>