<p>wow, nspeds, do you go to harvard, you seem pretty bright and articulate.</p>
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wow, nspeds, do you go to harvard, you seem pretty bright and articulate.
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<p>I am now attending Georgetown; however, Harvard is on the map... somewhere;) (Edit: I hope)</p>
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Law schools are aware of the variability among schools & I'm sure do their best to be fair.
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<p>I wish this was true, but this gets into a topic that has been heavily discussed before. I'm sure that people like ariesathena will have some rather choice words to say about this.</p>
<p>At lease some schools will give out the empty A+... that is, you get an A+ on your transcript, but it still registers in your GPA as a 4.0.</p>
<p>No, Hoosfun, an A+ doesn't register as a 4.0. It's a 4.33 to the LSDAS, which recomputes gpa's using a uniform system.(In other words, your UG gpa for law school admissions purposes may not be the same as the one that appears on your transcript.) In one recent Harvard Law School entering class, 12% had UG gpa's above 4.0. That said, don't worry about it.</p>
<p>The way law schools really judge grade inflation is to compare the median gpa of LS applicants with the median LSAT of LS applicants from that same school that year. (As Sakky said, that's been a topic of other threads in the past.) Thus, if the median LSAT at your gpa is a 150 and the median gpa of LS applicants that year from your school is a 3.1, that's actually seen as more "grade inflated" than a school with a median gpa of 3.45, but a median LSAT of 165. This may not be fair--again, debated here several times--but it's REAL data, since everyone applying to LS has to send the ACTUAL transcript to the LSDAS and the LSDAS uses a uniform system to figure out everyone's UG gpa.</p>
<p>Actually U of I does what hoosfun mentioned. It's hard to get an A+ but some CompE I know, would have a LASDAS GPA of 4.333 (if that is what the A+s are weighted as, I forgot the weight) and he was in all hard classes. I know because he bragged this at our Patent Law group meeting. Go figure. Brilliant people.</p>
<p>To expand on what Jonri said, some law schools won't use straight-up GPA and LSAT score when making their alpha-order of applicants. (Schools will rank students based on LSAT & GPA and take the best first and reject the worst first, then deal with the people in the middle.) Penn, at least a few years ago, would use percentile class rank of students from your school who apply to law school (LSAC gives out this information), your LSAT, and the median LSAT of your school. Note that other law schools will operate quite differently - you will learn that there are huge differences in how each school reviews its applicants.</p>
<p>My university offers A+ grades and as a sophomore I've already earned three. I guess I'm lucky.</p>