GRE general decades ago was like the SAT (one mostly vocabulary section and one high school level algebra and geometry section), but with an added logic puzzle section (“analytical”). There were also GRE subject tests on college level material in various common majors. Presumably, it is different now.
Last post on this subject for me.
There is an assumption that the hypothetical MIT student with a B average in STEM is way below mean for MIT students applying to law school (in 2011) and the hypothetical NYU student majoring in english with a 3.7-3.8 gpa is way above mean, neither of which I think is warranted.
I point out again that the article was written in 2011. For academic year 2010, 67 applicants applied to law school from MIT, and 79% were admitted. The average GPA for all accepted MIT applicants to law school was 3.25 /4.0, and the average law school admission test score was 162. (from http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/pres10/2010.01.02.pdf). This suggests, compared to my hypothetical MIT student with a GPA of 3.3 (with a science/math GPA of 3.0), that my hypothetical student is actually at mean or just above for all applicants since the mean GPA of 3.25 was for admitted students not applicants.
Various resources suggest that english majors have a GPA that is approximately 0.2 higher than the average. If the average NYU GPA in 2011 was 3.50 then it is possible that an AVERAGE english major at NYU may have a GPA of 3.7. My hypothetical NYU student is not much above this average.
I wrote “a cohort of 100 consecutive” students to emphasize that the conversation is regarding average trends for cohorts since many posters seemed fixated on reductive arguments regarding the lack of details given for one specific case. The number 100 wasn’t meant to suggest that this is the number of MIT students that apply for any one given year, and there is no reason to assume a sample must occur from 1 single year.
I think no one is astonished that law schools value a high GPA with little regard to major or school difficulty. Whether they should discount major and school difficulty as much as they do is a separate question. My point was that ON AVERAGE a STEM grad from MIT with a 3.3 GPA may be just as capable as an english major with a 3.8 from NYU.
What does “capable” mean? Lets say academic performance in law school, which is probably correlated with LSAT score (which might be primarily a logic test as one poster has stated). Why do I believe the AVERAGE MIT grad with lower GPA might do as well or better? Simply 2 factors. First, there is clearly higher grade inflation in english compared with science (and I’d bet that there is more grade inflation over all at NYU compared with MIT for similar courses), and second, while NYU is a very good institution and there could be a number of outstanding students with remarkable CVs (the right-hand tail of the bell curve), on AVERAGE, MIT students will have great academic credentials, even for nonSTEM metrics.
I wouldn’t hire a history/literature/english major to handle my legal affairs either. But given a choice between two candidates applying to law school and with similar LSATS, I would easily accept a ~0.3-0.4 lower gpa for the engineer, especially if it was from MIT.
Maybe because those folks know how to think about complex problems in a systematic and logical manner? Quoting the author of the article (https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/why-more-americans-dont-major-in-the-math-and-science/), “In math and science, you’re either right or wrong and there’s very little room for subjectivity. Sure, there’s partial credit for getting the concepts right and making calculation error but the student either fundamentally grasps the concept or not. By contrast, the humanities and social sciences are “softer,” with the ability to score points for a half-assed understanding of the material and with the difference between an A, B, and C answers being a matter of nuance, detail, and construction.”
I think you have the wrong impression of what scientific analysis comprises. Almost always (except for in very elementary cases) scientific analysis deals with understanding if and how parameters/variables are associated with each other. Many math/physics problems don’t even use numbers, because they are interested in the abstract concept, not the numerical answer for a specific case. Regardless, it’s easy to make analytical models for which outputs and inputs are linearly or non-linearly related, or the relationship could even be described by a lookup table. For example I could have a scientific model, for say a real estate investment strategy for which the cost function could be dependent on idiosyncratic real estate laws that are STATE specific. Want to allow for random variation in one or more inputs over time? … make a stochastic model.
Unless the process by which [legal] laws are interpreted and applied are entirely random, one can probably make [scientific] analytic models (or even AI machines) of the process, the performance of which could be quite interesting.
That’s exactly why math & science is poor preparation for law school – and why social sciences & humanities provide a better foundation.
In law, it is NEVER “right or wrong” and there is ALWAY room for subjectivity. In law, understanding “nuance, detail, and construction” is everything. So the people who have been trained in “either right or wrong” are going to have difficulty meeting the expectations of law school class work and exams, trouble with writing the bar exam, and huge difficulty with the practice of law unless something breaks them of that mindset. (As a note, they tend not to make good trial jurors either – again, in law, binary black-and-white or either-or thinking is a bad thing)
And students coming from majors like history, poli sci, philosophy, classics are going to hit the ground running. Precisely because they are able to function much better with ambiguity.
And while I don’t agree with the use of the pejorative “half-assed” (acknowledging that it is something you are quoting from elsewhere) — law students and lawyers do need to be able to function well in settings where there is often incomplete and contradictory information – so the ability to work with a superficial or marginal understanding of a particular subject area is also an occupational requirement. So “scoring points” for making the better argument is or more compelling inference is exactly what lawyers and jurists do for a living.
(I think the problem with your assertions is that you clearly do not have a very good understanding of what law school teaches or what lawyers & judges do. That’s fine if you don’t have a legal background – I’m sure I’d come off as looking rather silly if I tried to engage in a debate over quantum physics. But your arguments are having the opposite effect of what you intend – your underlying premise is faulty).
In 2012, the mean fraternity, sorority, and independent living GPA at MIT was ~4.4 (https://thetech.com/2014/02/28/fsilg-v134-n8 ). I’d expect the fraternity… GPA to be slightly lower than the overall MIT average. If law school applicants averaged a lower GPA than fraternity members, then that suggests the rare subgroup of MIT students that apply to law school may have lower average GPAs than typical MIT students. This is consistent with the 162 LSAT score you listed. A comparison of how that 162 fits in with the law school LSAT averages I listed earlier is below. Note that NYU CAS ABA applicants had the same average LSAT as did MIT law school admits.
Average LSAT among ABA applicants
- Yale – 167.5
- Harvard – 167.4
- Princeton – 166.1
… - Tufts – 164.5
…
~25 MIT – ~162
~26. NYU CAS – 161.8
According to the previously posted NYU Latin honors cut-offs, fewer than 10% of current NYU CAS students get a 3.8+ GPA. It’s not common today, and it wasn’t common in 2011. Maybe English majors are more likely to be among the rare few with a 3.8+ than science majors, but I see no reason to assume it is a near average GPA for English majors.
Regardless of specific numbers, grade inflation cause grades to increase over time at MIT, NYU, and nearly any other college. If you choose an older year than the 3.x GPA at MIT is not as relatively low at is is today; and the near 4.0 GPA at NYU is rarer at the high end than it is today… The same principle applies in 2011 as it does in 2019
The LSAT score you listed suggests MIT law school admits do not have a significantly higher average LSAT than do NYU CAS admits. As I touched on above, this may relate to MIT law school applicants not being typical MIT students. Only 0.6% of MIT grads in the current post-grad survey mentioned law school applications or intentions. That small of a subgroup is likely to have different average characteristics than the MIT overall averages. The numbers above suggests those different average characteristics of MIT law school admits include lower GPA and scores than average for MIT grads .
Steering the conversation back to thread topic, the percent MIT grads by race is below. MIT favors URM in admissions (unlike Caltech), so this might suggest a higher rate of MIT among fields associated with lower stats, like MIT law school applicants or lighter STEM majors. Specific numbers from the latest NCES year are below. The majors are ordered in terms of popularity at MIT. This is a different pattern than most selective colleges, perhaps because of the lack of the fewer non-STEM options at MIT. Black students are overrepresented in engineering, while Asian students are overrepresented in CS and underrepresented in engineering. 72% of students at MIT choose engineering or CS, and few students of any race choose non-STEM fields.
% of Race Choosing Major at MIT
Engineering - 29% Asian, 57% Black, 46% White
Computer Science – 35% Asian, 28% Black, 23% White
Biology - 7% Asian, 7% Black, 7% White
Mathematics - 6% Asian, 2% Black, 7% White
Physical Sciences - 6% Asian, 0% Black, 5% White
Economics – 2% Asian, 2% Black, 2% White
Interdisciplinary Studies- 2% Asian, 0% Black, 2% White
Quick question. For instance. A quick total of the popular majors at MIT shows your list accounts for say 90 percent of the Caucasian students at MIT. Do you have the list for the remaining 10 percent and all the other profiles too . I find it very interesting. Thank you in advance.
Totals are below, as listed in IPEDS – https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data . IPEDS also divides down majors further beyond this groupingl… for example subfield of engineering or physics vs chemistry. IPEDS has multiple available racial definitions. I believe I selected a different Asian racial definition this time, so the Asian numbers are slightly different from my previous post.
% of Race Choosing Major at MIT
Engineering - 33% Asian, 57% Black, 46% White
Computer Science – 40% Asian, 28% Black, 23% White
Biology - 7.9% Asian, 7.4% Black, 6.9% White
Mathematics - 6.5% Asian, 1.9% Black, 6.7% White
Physical Sciences - 5.4% Asian, 0% Black, 6.5% White
Interdisciplinary Studies – 1.8% Asian, 0% Black, 2.2% White
Business Management/Marketing – 2.2% Asian, 0% Black, 1.7% White
Social Sciences – 1.4% Asian, 1.9% Black, 2.4% White
Architecture – 1.1% Asian, 0% Black, 1.4% White
Communication-- 0.4% Asian, 1.9% Black, 0.7% White
General Humanities – 0% Asian, 0% Black, 0.7% White
English Lang/Lit – 0% Asian, 0% Black, 0.5% White
Foreign Languages-- 0% Asian, 0% Black, 0.2% White
Religious Studies – 0% Asian, 0% Black, 0.2% White
Science is not “black or white” either. Our physical universe is quantum in nature. There’s uncertainty in everything. No absoluteness. We can only describe events in probabilistic terms. Anything is possible and nothing is absolutely certain.
I have a lawyer friend who has clerked for Supreme Court Justice and have also dealt with many lawyers who charge 4-figures-per-hour fees. They’re obviously highly intelligent, but they could never become even a mediocre physicist, even if they wanted to. On the other hand, there’re physicists that I know who could become some of the best lawyers if they wanted to. Granted, not all physicists are suitable to be lawyers.
I think the part that is being missed is that if your physicist friends had decided to become lawyers and had become great ones instead of physicists, would that have meant that they could not have been great physicists because they chose to be a lawyers instead? Or are you saying that someone who can become a physicist would not chose to become a lawyer? We have all met people who have the capacity to do many things and some of those people may have chosen to be lawyers instead of physicists. “Softer” majors get beat up on CC, but not everyone can be an STEM major. At the same time, everyone can’t be a lawyer either… I don’t understand the whose smarter argument on this one.
@Data10 That is some great data from MIT. 85% of black students are Engineering or CS majors? Nice. But it is kind of scary to me that there are only 5 major disciplines (Engineering, CS, Biology, Math, and the Physical Sciences) and they look like they make up to 90% of the student body, and I didn’t expect that, even at MIT. I don’t know why, but I would have thought that the business/finance major might have been a little bigger. The good news is that no one can say that black students are running away from being STEM majors at MIT.
@ChangeTheGame I was responding to @Calmom 's assertion that scientists wouldn’t be good lawyers or jurists. What I have observed is very different. The best scientists have the intellectual capacity to be the best lawyers if they so choose while the converse isn’t true. Now, I wouldn’t call the legal profession a softer field, however. It’s certainly intellectually challenging and rigorous.
@calmom do you have a link to the research that proves that engineers make bad jurors? I have a jury duty coming this Wednesday and happen to be an engineer and very busy at work currently.
The point is, not everyone WANTS to be a STEM major – including many who would be quite capable if they chose.
I am the daughter of a lawyer and I started college with more of a STEM interest, but I think I gravitated fairly quickly toward social sciences because those classes were more intriguing and stimulating to me and offered a greater level of intellectual freedom early on. A huge draw for me for law was one of empowerment - I perceived law and lawyers as having the ability to make a difference in the world, through the courts – and I could see how many political leaders were lawyers. So in my eyes, law was the best pathway to becoming important, to being an influencer. That’s just the way I looked at things as an 18-year-old - I’m not here to debate whether that was true - but basically that’s what I perceived as the best use of my intellect.
Nor does everyone WANT to be a lawyer. I don’t understand the “who’s smarter” argument either – I do think that there might be socio-cultural factors at play that influence both our choices and our perceptions.
To me, the inability of people to see value outside of the STEM world simply represents an overall narrowness of perspective, which I also see essentially the opposite of intellectualism or intellectual achievement. There certainly is an odd level of cognitive dissonance when someone starts a long debate because they can’t fathom why a law school would prefer an A student /English major from NYU over a B student from MIT.
@Tanbiko – I didn’t say that engineers made bad jurors. I said that people with a binary, right/wrong mindset make bad jurors. So if you want to get kicked off of a jury, just show up and project an air of superiority about who smart you are and how much better you are than others at doing things the right way… and good chance they’ll want you off the case.
I knew they would do something like this eventually. Remember my comments about instrumentation? They p-hacked the GRE until political science students outscore physics majors? That means these instruments are no longer highly correlated with the Wechsler. I am betting the next step is to try to eliminate standardized testing all together because they are not “reliable”, ignoring the fact that they deliberately make them unreliable. As collateral damage, this would make all education research using standardized test results questionable as well.
Looking quickly at some of those studies again, another problem I see is range restriction. (It was mentioned by some posters as well). This is like doing a study on the importance of height to basketball by studying NBA players. One can very easily come to the conclusion that height is not that important to basketball because the correlation is low, deliberately leaving out the fact that correlation is low because NBA players have previously being selected on the basis of height.
Another problem is the use of variance. I understand variance makes sense for math manipulation, but reporting the results in variance is dishonest. The natural unit is standard deviation and the results should be reported as such. Why else would you want to report in variance except to bamboozle the uninitiated? (For those who do not know, the square root of variance is the standard deviation. So a variance of .25 is actually a standard deviation of .5).
I can go on, but I will stop here.
Totally agree with that statement. I do see parents of all races in my area trying to “guide” their kids towards certain STEM majors, but I don’t see that same push towards those “softer” majors. I only asked my kids to make sure they can "monetize"their future aspirations which meant going to grad school if they chose majors that end up with lower starting and mid-career salaries. The truth is that some of us can not chose what we want even if we have the ability (parents control the college purse strings or future circumstances such as coming out of school with a ton of debt) which leads some to choose the financially prudent course instead of what we may want to do.
Yep. I guess from the perspective of guy raised in a hard-scrabbled upbringing, those are just 1st world problems that I will never understand. My own perspective is probably pretty narrow, but I continue to try and widen it:)
Unless… the would-be scientist chose to become a lawyer somewhere along the way. They aren’t the majority, but they aren’t that uncommon either. In particular, engineering to law isn’t that rare.
It’s an issue both ways, I agree. More of an issue if they are actively discouraged from choosing that than if they simply prefer something else, IMO.
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I was once called for jury duty. The defense attorney asked the prospective jurors their occupations and educational backgrounds. I stated that I am a principal systems engineer for a major aerospace manufacturer designing airborne and spaceborne navigation and flight control systems and that I have bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. They picked me for the jury.
@Engineer80, your post has nothing to do with the thead topic. Please refer to the above moderators posts.