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<li><p>Don't panic. My son is getting a B in AP Physics C, too. In part, that's because the class has 11 people in it, and the lowest class rank anyone in the class has is 17 (out of 550). He's in the middle of a very strong group. No one has suggested that it means he can't think about medical school. (He's not interested in engineering.) Have you ever looked at the physics questions on the MCAT? It doesn't require more knowledge than high school AP Physics C. She has four years to nail it. And, as for engineering, I am pretty confident that if form holds my son's high school class will produce at least 20 engineers, only one of whom is currently getting an A in AP Physics C.</p></li>
<li><p>Some schools have "pre-law" majors, but not the elites. Really, any major is adequate preparation for law school. The most common are probably economics, history, political science, but anything would work. Certainly law schools look for people with a scientific or engineering background, and math majors are prized, too. Strong writing ability is important, and most students come out of majors with a lot of writing, but even math/science kids can easily find ways to demonstrate their writing ability.</p></li>
<li><p>All accredited law schools have a 3-year, full-time curriculum. Although many kids go directly for college to law school, over the past 20-30 years it has been increasingly common for law schools to value real-world experience or graduate-level study in another field. This is especially true at the elite schools. Yale takes very few kids right out of college. To some extent, though, this has been a market-driven trend. As the academic job market got very tight in the late 70s - early 80s, lots of great grad students and junior faculty wound up switching to law, and the tech bubble collapse of 2001 made a whole lot of techies with meaningful real world experience available.</p></li>
<li><p>If your ambition is to work for a large (or elite) firm in a big city, to teach, or to do high-level federal government work, there is a fairly well-defined hierarchy of national law schools -- the prestige ladder is much stricter than with colleges or medical schools. Every particular region or urban market also has a hierarchy of regional schools whose credentials are more or less respected in that market area. And none of that matters much if you want to be a plaintiff's lawyer -- which can be the most lucrative part of the profession for those who are successful at it -- or a prosecutor or defense lawyer for run-of-the-mill criminal cases. Any ABA accredited school anywhere will qualify any student to take any state's bar exam, and some states -- notably California -- do not even require a degree from an accredited school. </p></li>
<li><p>The national-school prestige hierarchy looks something like this: Yale (but Yale hardly matters because it's so small and quirky, and comparatively few of its graduates actually practice law), Harvard, Stanford, Michigan-Virginia-Columbia-Chicago-Penn. Then there is a set of schools with very good national reputations but whose graduates tend to cluster -- Boalt (Berkeley), Georgetown-NYU, Duke -- a bunch of semi-national private schools (Cornell, Vanderbilt, Tulane, Emory, Northwestern, Notre Dame) and good state schools (Texas, UCLA, Wisconsin). I'm sure I'm forgetting some. After that it gets pretty regional. As always, within a particular market the hierarchy may look a little different: In Chicago, for example, Northwestern is probably considered the equal of any school below the top 3, and the same is true for UCLA in Los Angeles. And a college classmate of mine was devastated when he didn't get into Texas and had to go to Harvard instead, because he thought he'd never be able to be a mover-and-shaker in his home state with no UT degree (he was wrong).</p></li>
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<p>The schools are of very different sizes, by the way. Harvard and Georgetown (the largest) have classes of around 600, Yale and Stanford (the smallest) have classes of around 170. One could make the argument that Harvard is the only true national law school -- there are Harvard lawyers everywhere.</p>