Very Interesting

Colleges and Universities A-Z Princeton University
1

<p>In 1997 UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law
did a ranking of the toughest schools to get an "A".</p>

<p>Are they still ranking the schools accordingly?</p>

<p>The L.A. Times ran an article 7/16/97 "Grading
the Grades: All A's Are Not Created Equal "on
how the admissions dept. from UC Berkeley's
Boalt Hall re-formulated the law school's
applicant's G.P.A. The formula ranked each college
according to how its students perform on the
standardized law board exam, the LSAT, and how
common a certain G.P.A. is at that school.</p>

<p>The following is UC Berkeley's rankings of
the toughest schools to get an "A"</p>

<p>Swarthmore 89.5
Williams 89.0
Duke 88.5
Carleton 88.0
Colgate 88.0
J. Hopkins 87.5
Chicago 87.0
Dartmouth 87.0
Wesleyan 87.0
Cornell 86.5
Harvard 86.5
Middlebury 86.0
Princeton 86.0
Bates 85.5
MIT 85.5
Haverford 85.0
Pomona 85.0
Virginia 85.0
Amherst 84.5
Reed 84.5
Vanderbilt 84.5
Wm & Mary 84.5
Bowdoin 83.5
Tufts 83.5
Vassar 83.5
Bryn Mawr 83.0
Hamilton 83.0
Oberlin 83.0
Rice 83.0
U. Pennsylvania 83.0
Clrmt. McK. 82.5
Yale 82.5
Brandeis 82.0
Northwestern 82.0
Colby 81.5
Michigan 81.5
Notre Dame 81.5
Wash. U. 81.0
Barnard 80.5
Columbia 80.5
Stanford 80.5
Brown 80.0
Georgetown 80.0
Smith 80.0
Wellesley 80.0
Emory 79.5
U. North Carolina 79.5
Whitman C. 79.5
Rochester 79.0
UC Berkeley 78.5
UC San Diego 78.5
Illinois 78.0
SUNY Bing 78.0
Texas 78.0
Trinity U. 77.5
Boston College 77.0
UC S. Barbara 77.0
Wisconsin 77.0
Florida 76.5
U. Washington 76.5
Santa Clara 76.0
Geo. Wash. 75.5
UC Davis 75.5
UCLA 75.5
Colorado 75.0
Michigan State 75.0
Boston University 74.5
Cal Poly SLO 74.5
Massachusetts 74.0
Penn State 74.0
Iowa 73.5
Purdue 73.5
SMU 73.5
SUNY Albany 73.5
BYU 73.0
Minnesota 73.0
Ohio State 73.0
Oregon 73.0
UC Irvine 73.0
Indiana 72.5
NYU 72.0
SUNY Buff 72.0
SUNY Stony 72.0
Mills 71.5
American 71.0
Arizona 71.0
Loyola Mary. 71.0
Maryland 71.0
Fordham 70.5
Kansas 70.0
Syracuse 70.0
USC 70.0
Arizona St. 69.5
CS San Diego 69.5
Catholic U. 69.5
Oklahoma 69.5
Pacific 69.5
Hofstra 69.0
UC Riverside 68.5
Utah 68.5
CS Chico 68.5
Miami 68.0
New Mexico 68.0
San Diego 68.0
CS Northridge 67.0
Pepperdine 67.0
CS San Fran. 66.0
CS Sacramento 65.0
Hawaii 64.5
Denver 63.5
CS Fullerton 63.0
CS Hayward 63.0
CS Long Beach 63.0
CS San Jose 63.0
CS Fresno 62.5
St. Mary's 61.5
CCNY 59.0
CS LA 58.5
Howard 57.5
San Francisco 57.5</p>

<p>I thought it was a lot tougher to get an A in MIT than Harvard/Princeton.</p>

2

<p>this is from a different post, by the way</p>

3

<p>am not even surprised with the position MIT is. Wot am surprised at is that 57.5 can give an "A" in a college. LOL.</p>

4

<p>I dunno...some things make sense, like swarthmore being #1, but i would imagine harvard being a lot easier, cornell and especially berkeley being WAY harder, and a few other things. Don't know the exact formula they used. It may have catered to certain aspects and not others.</p>

5

<p>Well, let me try to interpret this. What this ranking suggests is people with certain GPA, say, 3.3 at Stanford would on average score higher on LSAT than those with 3.3 GPA at Berkeley. It doesn't mean Stanford gives out less A to its students than Berkeley. The implicit assumption is performance in LSAT correlates strongly with GPA--if you get a high LSAT score, you should have a pretty good GPA at, say, USC but not necessarily at places like Swarthmore.</p>

6

<p>this shouldnt be taken literally. the scores like "89.5" is just a score given out of 100 to give a sense of how hard it is to get an A in that school. 100=extremely hard, and 0=too easy.</p>

<p>lol its not like at San Fran you can get an A with a 57.5%!</p>

7

<p>oh thanks for clearing that up...! I was dumbfounded when i saw it....</p>

8

<p>sam, so basically let me explain how these results were made. They used the scores on the LSAT, which as most of you know are required for people interested in law (ex. lawyers, judges,etc). So this test is very demanding and most of these test-takers are very intelligent. So they basically looked at how these people performed on the LSAT. </p>

<p>Let's say, for example that at San.Fran(which is ranked easiest to get A's), all the law students received A's in law classes(like political science,etc.). Then they took the LSAT, and all failed. This shows that it is easier to get A's from San.Fran. than at other schools where kids get B's then ace the LSATs.</p>

<p>get it?</p>

9

<p>Yep, you got it.</p>

<p>However, it's not clear how representative their data are because:
1. they seem to be taken from applicants for just one law school
2. they may be based on one-year result
3. the law applicants don't have the same major and at some schools, GPA varies widely among different departments (Northwestern is one example with its school of music having average of 3.7 while the art&sci college has 3.2+).</p>