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afan, what grad program did you work for?
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<p>I don't feel comfortable saying where I am. However, I will say that I do not represent the school-that's the Dean's job. I am one of many faculty members who participates in admissions at our highly prestigious school.</p>
<p>"Cornell is like many other universities in that it has lots of students who are not interested in law school. Like many other universities, it has many majors that will seem odd choices for those interested in law. It is far from unique in this."</p>
<p>Right, but once again the point went to the use of the % going to law school.
Cornell is UNLIKE many of the schools it is compared to on these lists because it has specialized colleges that these other schools don't have, and which produce proportionately very few future lawyers. What is different about Cornell is this proportion of such students for whom law is a less probable result from the outset.</p>
<p>A student in its College of arts & Sciences will not have a harder time being admitted to law school simply because there are also an unusually high proportion of science-types- engineers & aggies- also walking around on the campus. The % law school stat may lead one to an improper conclusion if they are not informed about this.That's the point.</p>
<p>THe number of students in Cornells' College of Engineering (few lawyers)and its College of Agriculture(few lawyers), taken together, exceed the number of students in its College of Arts & Sciences. Yet it is frequently compared to schools which have only liberal arts colleges, no huge college of Agriculture at all, and either no College of engineering or a proportionally small one.</p>
<p>It is unique, or at least different than most in this comparison group, in matters material to the proportion being discussed. The size of the denominator is skewed in its particular case, moreso than the general trend.</p>
<p>It is also different than many others in that there are separate admissions processes, applicant pools, and resulting admissions profile, for students entering each of its separate colleges. And then different faculty and programs of study.A student can only apply to one of these colleges. It is not unique in this regard, (NYU, Columbia and Penn are other examples), but different from many of the others. These distinctions among colleges may be relevant where they exist.</p>
<p>So can one infer from the October 2005 issue of Academic Medicine that a 3.8 from the Cornell University College of Engineering constitutes the same level of academic achievement as a 3.8 from Pace University? Just to name two colleges I've actually taken courses at.</p>
<p>The answer to this may dictate how fast I actually seek out this issue..</p>
<p>BTW the GPA for dean's list at Cornell's engineering college was 0.25 lower than at the Arts College when I attended. IE they gave lower grades.</p>
<p>OR how about a 3.8 from MIT. vs. a 3.8 from Pace? No difference, as far as you can see? Or from what this article states?</p>
<p>Because we can all have an intuitive, or experiential, opinion about this. I certainly do.</p>
<p>In any event, when I was in college it was common knowledge that grad schools added "points" to the GPA of various colleges, differentially, based on their perceived difficulty of achieving the GPAs at the various schools. I saw the point system for Berkeley's law school, for a recent year actually posted on the internet a few years ago.</p>
<p>Employers certainly also differentiate based on schools. I've been on both sides of this process.</p>
<p>Evidently there are some differences in practices out there in this regard..</p>
<p>Do we have the profile for UC Berkeley and Stanford Law Schoos?</p>
<p>Citation: Was that your way of trying to start an affirmative action debate of some sort? -_-</p>
<p>Berkeley does not do that for law school admissions any more. They never provided a careful explanation of how they came up with the figures, whether they had proven valid for law school admissions, or whether they were applicable across all majors or only those that commonly applied.</p>
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So can one infer from the October 2005 issue of Academic Medicine that a 3.8 from the Cornell University College of Engineering constitutes the same level of academic achievement as a 3.8 from Pace University? Just to name two colleges I've actually taken courses at.</p>
<p>The answer to this may dictate how fast I actually seek out this issue..
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<p>If you want me to promise you that you will like the results of the article before you bother to read it, all I can say is the facts are the facts. </p>
<p>Not all preconceptions are correct. If you refuse to read anything that will challenge your preconceptions, then you had better hope you are right about everything now, because you will refuse to even hear any contrary information.</p>
<p>I was under the impression that the admisssion to law school bear heavy correlation with the LSAT of that candidate. Would we be better off analysing the different LSAT average of the different undergrad schools for you'd have to be interested in going to Law schools to actually take the LSAT and the average of the LSAT score would have been somewhat representative of the quality of the undergraduate at these undergrads colleges? (at least of those that harboured the thought of going to law schools)</p>
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Based on these numbers, are you much more likely to get a job at Wachtell if you go to HLS than if you go to Yale Law? Sure, unless you're looking at yield rates. Furthermore, Yale also tends to be a different kind of law school, which is much less corporate-focused than Harvard, Columbia, NYU and Penn.
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<p>Actually, no, this is not the right conclusion because you didn't scale for the number of graduates each produces. Harvard has more than twice the law students than Yale has. So it stands to reason that Harvard should have more than twice the number of associates at Wachtel. The fact that it does not (30 vs. 18) means that actually Yale is the better bet if you want to get to Wachtell, at least on a pure numerical standpoint. The same is true of undergrad - Harvard has about 50% more undergrads than Yale does, so Harvard should have 50% more former undergrads at Wachtell than Yale does. It does not (20 vs. 19). </p>
<p>Note, that doesn't mean that I have 'proved' that Yale is the better road to Wachtell. I am simply saying that you have to be careful to normalize your numbers. Raw absolute numbers means little when you're talking about schools of different sizes.</p>
<p>the_prestige, if you are making a solely per capita ranking, why bother distinguishing between the national universities and the LACs?</p>
<p>Would you do Yale?</p>
<p>I read the first 80 posts and no one mentioned the only thing that matters:</p>
<p>Feeder schools are feeder schools.</p>
<p>/end thread</p>
<p>(oh, and I go to Brown, I'm a senior, and I only know two people who wanted to go to law school and they're both from different classes. Weird to see that we're ranked so high only because I didn't think we had that many people interested in going into law. That's what I get for being a chemistry concentrator)</p>
<p>1st of all, keep in mind that these figures fluctuate from year to year, so a one year snap shot is always the best indicator.</p>
<p>2nd, what law schools care most about is LSAT scores, followed by grades. Where one went to undergrad is a consideration, but is far outweighed by the other 2 factors (particularly LSAT score).</p>
<p>3rd, maybe someone should run the figures for Stanford and UChicago law for a better picture of how much regional bias plays into the scheme of things.</p>
<p>If your only goal is to go to Harvard Law School (and it shouldn't be, a lot of things change in 4 years), then really the only thing that matters is choosing a school where you can get high grades. The quality of your school may have a tiebreaker affect, but it certainly won't overcome a difference in hard stats (and LSAT should be constant, no matter where you go).</p>
<p>Really that gives two options. You can go to a school where the competition is very weak, or you can go to a school where the grades are very high. Given the extremities of current grade inflation, the latter option is probably better. I'd say the ultimate would be a school like Brown, where the average GPA is 3.6, 3.7 in the Humanities. Unless you are a very mediocre student, you should be able to put yourself in range (3.75+), and then it will just come down to the LSAT. The other possibility would be some kind of touchy-feely liberal arts college, which has (most of ) the inflation without the tougher competition.</p>
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Really that gives two options. You can go to a school where the competition is very weak, or you can go to a school where the grades are very high. Given the extremities of current grade inflation, the latter option is probably better.
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<p>Maybe the data is merely a reflection of which schools have the greatest grade inflation? lol</p>
<p>That's probably a minor factor, but the list is probably explained by more like:
70% median LSAT score of school
25% self-selection (majors/interests or geographic)
3% grade inflation<br>
2% prestige boost (mostly to H UG)</p>
<p>Of course the top two factors are irrelevant for an individual choosing a school, and the additional factor of how strong other students are matters (since you'll have to beat them out for grades).</p>
<p>Brandeis is really underrated in the usnwr ranks if it beats many colleges in sending students to top colleges</p>
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Maybe the data is merely a reflection of which schools have the greatest grade inflation? lol
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<p>hmmm... as opposed to schools that grade "tough" and break their student's backs with an impossible grading systems so that they can hang their "B"s and "C"s around their necks like some kind of masochistic badge of honor? For what? You still get a sound education at both kinds of programs. Call me crazy but give me an environment where the focus is on actually learning and learning from one another rather than a cutthroat environment where I'm sweating whether the guy next to me is ahead of the bell curve, and then when I graduate curse under my breath that all of those "Ivy" students are taking up the premium real estate at the top grad schools because of "inflation"?</p>
<p>Would you rather be an "A" student at Harvard or a "C" student at Chicago? Call me crazy but give me my "A" thank you very much.</p>