<p>I was reading some of the past posts.</p>
<p>Will Berkeley accept you, if all you have are high numbers (4.0 GPA) (165+ LSAT)?</p>
<p>No guarantees. Your chances are obviously improved the better your numbers. But there is no way to absolutely 100% guarantee your admission to Boalt. For example, if you present perfect numbers but submit unintelligible essays, you probably won't get in.</p>
<p>I'm not so sure about that, Sakky.</p>
<p>Back in my day, Boalt admitted a significant percentage of its applicants based purely on numbers, without reading the essays at all. Likewise, it rejected a significant number of applicants who hadn't reached a certain threshhold, without reading their essays. The essays that were scrutinized were those written by the 'tweeners.</p>
<p>Judging from Boalt's web site, it looks like that's still the case:</p>
<p>"Once each file is complete, it is evaluated on the basis of the admissions criteria. The director of admissions is instructed by faculty policy to admit a certain number of applicants who, under the governing criteria and on the basis of the directors experience, would have a high likelihood of admission if referred to the admissions committee. Similarly, applicants who would have a high likelihood of being denied if referred to the committee are denied by the director of admissions. The remaining applicants are given more extended consideration by the admissions committee, which is composed of faculty and students."</p>
<p>Huh! Do you think this affects the quality/diversity of the pool each year at Boalt?</p>
<p>I've heard that some law schools will use a weighed GPA/LSAT thing to evaluate applications. Some throw in class rank and average LSAT of your college. Here is how each method works:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Let's say they count the LSAT for 65% and the GPA for 35%. They will normalize the GPA and LSAT (so you're not comparing 4.0 and 180, but rather 180 and 180), then multiply that number by the weighing factor (either .65 or .35), and add the two numbers together. You can see how this works on the LSAC website; schools can request LSDAS to send them each student's weighing. Often, schools will have really weird numbers to multiply by; the final number will approximate your law school GPA. </p></li>
<li><p>Same thing as above with a twist. They take your LSAT score, your class rank, the average LSAT score of your college's l.s. applicants, and run the process. This basically gives a boost to kids from good schools.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Now, the law school takes each student's file and puts them all in order based on the LSAT/GPA number. They read from the top down and the bottom up, spending at most about 10 minutes per file. Many are quick decisions (at the top and bottom). The ones in the middle are farmed out to faculty or whomever reads applications. </p>
<p>Soo... what this means for you. If your LSAT is decent enough to put you somewhere in the middle pile, you'll get a read. You'll probably be in there with the 3.5/160-ish kids, and your application will get the same attention. But, as always, be forewarned: the LSAT is huge in the application process. Really, really huge. It's going to be a liability for you at the top schools if it's anything under 165.</p>
<p>Ericmng,</p>
<p>Given how long the policy's been in place, it would be hard to guess how it's affected the quality of applicants. Boalt's always gotten a large number of applications, for a variety of reasons (chief among them when I started there was probably the $850 annual tuition for California residents). There were about 4,500 applicants when I applied in the fall of 1980, and 6-7,000 a year now. Diversity has gone up and down for political reasons; right after California's Prop. 209 was enacted, they had only one African American student in a class of 280. (They're recovered somewhat from that disaster.)</p>
<p>Let me give you the counterexample, Greybeard. If I present perfect numbers, but I write in my essays about how much I admire Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, do you think I will get in? Or in my Boalt essays, mistakenly submitting some essays about how I would really love to attend Stanford Law. What do you think is going to happen?</p>
<p>Now obviously those are extreme cases, but it serves to illustrate the point that no numbers will absolutely 100% guarantee your chances of admission. Your essays will obviously not need to be great, but they will at least have to be marginal. </p>
<p>You're right, the director will indeed admit a small number of applicants after review of their application without need to refer them to the formal adcom. Yet that review is going to include at least a perfunctory look at the essay to make sure that, well, you didn't praise Hitler or mistakenly submit your essays for some other law school, or something like that.</p>
<p>Sakky,</p>
<p>That depends on whether they read the essays. The policy used to be that there were some automatic admits based purely on numbers; I received a letter from the dean saying as much. It appears from the web site that it may still be the case.</p>
<p>It takes a lot of time to read 7,000 applications and decide which 800 to admit to fill a class of 280. Law schools don't have the large full-time admissions staffs that universities employ for undergraduates. It makes sense to me that they would admit two or three hundred based purely on numbers, reject 4-5,000 on the same basis, and hunker down to read the essays and letters of recommendation of the remainder.</p>
<p>I'm also not too sure that expressing admiration for Mao or Stalin would actually raise that many eyebrows in Berkeley.</p>
<p>I think it's fairly certain that they will at least glance at the essays of the automatic admits to at least see if they are halfway intelligible. I am not talking about reading all 7000 app's. You said it yourself - the vast majority of them are rejected automatically. We are really talking about whittling it down to a few hundred who are good enough to merit 'automatic' admittance, presuming everything else is in order. How long does it really take to lightly skim a few hundred essays? Again, I'm not talking about carefully reading them, I'm just talking about lightly skimming them. What might also help is to run them through a computerized keyword-search for such winning words as "Stanford" or "Yale" to see if somebody stupidly mixed up their essays.</p>
<p>I love reading your posts, Sakky. There are times, though, that you remind me of the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail.</p>
<p>Look the point is simple. Short of, I suppose, bribing an admissions officer, there is nothing you can do to absolutely 100% perfectly guarantee your admission to a top-tier law school like Boalt. You can come pretty close, but nothing will absolutely 100% guarantee it.</p>
<p>Black Knight: "Oh. Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow b**tards! Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite your legs off!"</p>