<p>I know a couple of second-year students taking classes at the law school. I also know a lot of math majors taking classes at the business school.</p>
<p>Law, Letters, and Society is kinda BS. The “Pre-Law” (with sarcastic emphasis on the quotes) classes that students think they are taking (with the exception of “Legal Reasoning”) are American Politics courses that any Political Science Major can take.</p>
<p>What difference would it make if we had more contact with the Law School? Taking “Pre-Law” courses don’t really do much for you anyway. All of the Law Professors I’ve taken classes with tell us that you really shouldn’t take classes on the law if you’re thinking of going to Law School. If you do, you end up looking like every other shmuck applying to LS.</p>
<p>I go to uchicago and I can tell you that this place is teeming with undergrad research opportunities. I have friends working in Bio Labs, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Becker Center at the Booth School of Business, the Decision Research Lab (DRL) at Booth, and for Professors in Poli Sci and Economics.</p>
<p>Oh look! There’s a website for all of this…</p>
<p><a href=“https://frogs.uchicago.edu/researchopportunities/[/url]”>https://frogs.uchicago.edu/researchopportunities/</a></p>
<p>Hegemon, you’re right about it being a little silly to take classes about law and then go to law school, but a lot of kids do it anyway, and it’s hard to make them stop. They may end up looking like every other schmuck applying to law school, but that’s because that’s what people applying to law school – successful or not – look like. I was thinking about this the other day, and realized that – notwithstanding that I swear I never thought about applying to law school until I was a senior in college, and I was basically a comp lit major throughout – I had three “law” courses in college taught by law school professors before I applied to law school.</p>
<p>Anyway, Dennis Hutchinson used to exclude people from LLS if they said they wanted to go to law school, but he couldn’t really police it, and I think in the end he just gave up. Hutchinson has a lot of cred in the academic legal world, by the way. LLS isn’t anything like law school (nor should it be), but it isn’t necessarily BS, either.</p>
<p>I had one class my last year of law school that had five undergraduates in it. That was a horrible experience for everyone. The undergraduates hated the law students, because they thought we were all too conservative and too critical of the teacher. The law students hated the undergraduates because they worshiped the teacher, went around spouting jargon-filled ideology, and never paid attention to any practical issues. The whole situation required some serious mediation (which I did, because, for various reasons, I had cred with the undergraduates, and I had known the professor since before law school). If I were teaching law school, I would be very careful about letting undergraduates into my classes, except for real non-law classes like legal history, or overviews of some foreign legal system, or pure policy.</p>
<p>from a practical matter, it would be almost foolish for a prelaw undergrad to take a class at Chicago Law. The curves are brutal – relative to other law schools – so obtaining a high grade would be difficult for the undergrad. And since admission to law school is ~95% gpa+mcat, taking a difficult undergrad course could damage the gpa…</p>
<p>Just curious, and I probably should know this, but what is the Chicago policy on taking courses P/F? It would seem this would be a way around the GPA issue (assuming one passes that is).</p>
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<p>It is certainly difficult, but not impossible. The students I mentioned are doing very well in their law school classes.</p>
<p>^OK, the BSometer goes into the red zone on that one. I have never heard of a law school class (other than first year legal writing) where you could tell how you were doing until after the course was over. It just isn’t in the culture.</p>
<p>By the way, I believe that in the course I described the teacher had set up different grading for the undergrads and the law students. They were writing papers; we took an exam. We may have had a paper option, too, but I don’t think anyone took it.</p>
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<p>What could the MCATs have ANYTHING to do with getting into law school?</p>
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<p>I won’t point out those people’s names, but they were taking a law school class last quarter where small assignments were worth 15% and a final essay was worth 85%.</p>
<p>They did perfectly fine in that class, and they’re not having any difficulties with their current classes. </p>
<p>Couldn’t people just accept the fact that undergrads at UChicago have the rights to take classes at the b-school and at the law school? Quit bickering and stop over analyzing.</p>
<p>Undergrads have been quite underestimated at Chicago forever, and even now, most people assume that the undergrads don’t even come close to the grad students. From my own experiences, however, I think it should be rather clear that the top 10-15% of undergrads often exceed the abilities of the grad students here. This should apply to law and business as well.</p>
<p>It is only fair to allow very talented undergrads (who are ready for it) to take grad courses. At the same time, I’m also in favor of having some sort of system that stops the slightly less talented who are not mature enough (yet). It should not become a fashion. If the demand for courses taught in grad school is really high, college should offer similar classes. I realize that college does not want to include ‘professional’ courses, but it should be possible to develop “theoretical” courses that are giving the undergrads a good idea about what to expect when continuing their education in a ‘professional’ school.</p>
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Ahhh, not when I was a grad student & TA at Chicago. We had the upmost respect for undergrads and the groan heard when undergrads were discovered enrolled in one’s course was not that it slowed the class down, but that the competition would be greater. This may vary by department, but a friend’s daughter who recently did her doc work at Chicago in linguistics told me the exact same thing.</p>
<p>god I hope it’s not “~95% gpa+mcat”</p>
<p>( former U of C prof ) Obama 's bigtime exposure gave a continuing message ‘chicago’ ‘chicago’. had to help that the campus is a short walk to his house, eg.</p>
<p>I’m actually a little afraid of U of C becoming so selective. I remember when I was a fresh. in high school, and the acceptance rate there was 35% - I guess that’ll be going down to 15% now. 
I feel like with all of that selectivity, it shuts out really exceptional people, ya know? My teacher who graduated class of '03 got in with a 23 ACT and 3.5 GPA. But she learned and grew so much at U of C… If Chicago becomes like Harvard, everyone will need 30-36 ACT and perfect GPAs…The group that helped evolve U of C will be completely shut out.</p>
<p>with such a dramatic jump in apps and also, from what I am reading here, a higher number of (EA) admissions, is there a problem with hosting the new students on campus - getting them residence spots?</p>
<p>No, because they admitted far fewer students RD, and barely any from the wait list. There were a few years when they would go 10-15 kids over the number of beds they had and have to make forced triples, but I think that hasn’t happened the last couple of years.</p>
<p>Has the profile of the last class that was composed been published? That wd be the incoming freshman class for 2010-11.</p>
<p>They did have plans to make a few of the rooms in my house that were singles, doubles. 3, in fact.</p>
<p>I think they are waiting till September when they have the exact kids who will show up. There are always a few who pay the deposit but don’t come in the end…</p>