Why, god, did I go to a public institution for undergrad?! Forum

[NorCalBruin]

DOWNWARD TREND PRIDE! I went 4.0, 4.1, 4.1, 4.0, 4.0, 4.0, 4.0, 4.0, 4.0, 3.7, 3.2, 2.6 --3.8 for the win!

Potentially fucking yourself out of a better school / scholly $$$ FTL.

Obviously if I kept up that 4.0 I would be going somewhere different or be getting more $$$. But I wrote a GPA addendum and so far my cycle is playing out predictably.

[r6_philly]

I think top schools should band together and boycott USNews. It's a joke.

I think the only schools that benefit from the abolition of US News rankings are the non-T14's. What do they have to gain lose if they are guaranteed to be in the elite tier forever? The shuffling around in the T14's means nothing, I think they are all pretty happy where they are.

[glitched]

it's not the schools that need to band together - it's the students that choose their schools based on the rankings. the schools are only doing their jobs - to pick the highest talents to represent them. and if students are choosing schools based on slight differences in rank (ex: berkeley 7 vs NYU 6), then the schools are essentially forced to care about it. and then the counter someone will propose is that the standards that USNEWS chooses to rank their schools (GPA/LSAT) don't necessarily represent a more "talented" student. but even if that's true (which i don't agree with; GPA and LSAT are great indicators of talent) - it's the best indicator we got evidenced by statistics.

And lastly, a ranking system in this country is absolutely necessary in my opinion - and there could be the chance that well USNEWS is actually correct in their rankings (gasp!) or they were just the lucky ones to be the system that gained the most trust from the people that matter (schools, firms, and students). whatever.

i'm going to go the easy way out and choose exactly what USNEWS tells me to choose because well... my future employers might do the same to me. (Not really. but you get my point)

[fastforward]

Adcomms are aware of grade inflation, and LSAC provides them with a clever way to control for it. Look at your Academic Summary Report. LSAC ranks you in the GPA percentile at your school for every year you were enrolled, compared to other LSAC clients. So adcomms can tell at a glance whether you have been the victim (or the beneficiary) of grade inflation. Here's a redacted portion of an Academic Summary Report:--ImageRemoved--

Adcomms can tell at a glance where you stand with respect to other law school applicants from your school.

So if you went to a public with a crappy GPA overall, you will shine!! And, if you are from a school with a high GPA overall, you stand to be outed for grade inflation.

This is a very important and often-under-looked part of the application process.

[09042014]

I think top schools should band together and boycott USNews. It's a joke.

I think the only schools that benefit from the abolition of US News rankings are the non-T14's. What do they have to gain lose if they are guaranteed to be in the elite tier forever? The shuffling around in the T14's means nothing, I think they are all pretty happy where they are.

Because T14 are elite anyway and it stop them from having to base their admissions around a shitty magazine.

[dr123]

I think the us news rankings is for students more than anyone, most lawyers know which schools are bad and which are good. I doubt a school going from t3 in usnwr to t2, or even t1, is going to make a partner go "oh shit i better start recruiting from this school now!"

i could be wrong though

[dresden doll]

On the flip side, I would never be able to afford law school if I went to a private institution.

TCR for law school admission is going to a private school on merit scholarship.

What I did.

[r6_philly]

I know I am beating a horse after being shot 27 times... but TCR is to get a 4.0 from wherever.

[androstan]

Replace GPA with rank in major.

That is all.

You have to apply for my major, and only 14 people a year get in. We're all probably in the top 5-10% of the class in general, but 50% of us would necessarily be below average in your system.

I'm an extreme example, but it points out the stupidity of reducing as nuanced and complex a factor as ug transcript to one number, be it LSAC GPA or rank in major.

I agree it's not perfect, and there are certainly outlying cases where it breaks down (just as with GPA).

But I think that, statistically, class rank would probably end up better overall. Or maybe an aggregate of class rank and GPA would be better than either alone.

The point is, as you said, reducing an UG transcript/experience to a number necessarily involves a huge loss of information. It's just hard for USNWR to plug a person's transcript into their formula. Reducing it down to one number makes things simple, quantifiable, and of course questionable/debatable.

[r6_philly]

I agree it's not perfect, and there are certainly outlying cases where it breaks down (just as with GPA).

But I think that, statistically, class rank would probably end up better overall. Or maybe an aggregate of class rank and GPA would be better than either alone.

The point is, as you said, reducing an UG transcript/experience to a number necessarily involves a huge loss of information. It's just hard for USNWR to plug a person's transcript into their formula. Reducing it down to one number makes things simple, quantifiable, and of course questionable/debatable.

You think wrong, because you can't control the basis of class rank. It is entirely plausible that the range of student qualities at many institutions do not over lap. Even if they do, there is no way they even come close to matching, so class rank will be VERY statistically wrong. It is possible that the 1 percentile student at MIT's EE program is doing better work and has more potential than the 99% student at any of the 100% acceptance rate colleges around here.

If you draw a graph of student qualities by each school, you will probably see the layout. So GPA *may* become representative, whereas classrank without weighing the quality of school and difficulty of major will *never* become representative. But how do we rank/weigh UG qualities? By using SAT and highschool GPA?

[androstan]

I agree it's not perfect, and there are certainly outlying cases where it breaks down (just as with GPA).

But I think that, statistically, class rank would probably end up better overall. Or maybe an aggregate of class rank and GPA would be better than either alone.

The point is, as you said, reducing an UG transcript/experience to a number necessarily involves a huge loss of information. It's just hard for USNWR to plug a person's transcript into their formula. Reducing it down to one number makes things simple, quantifiable, and of course questionable/debatable.

You think wrong, because you can't control the basis of class rank. It is entirely plausible that the range of student qualities at many institutions do not over lap.

And you can't control the basis of GPA either. What class rank, at least, does is to control for more difficult majors and harsh/lenient grading. With GPA an engineer who's class had some harsh professors may get a 2.9 but still place in the top 20% of his/her class.

Class rank still fails to account for differences in the quality of the overall student pool. However, this problem is intractable because you are using a measure to assess the "quality" of individual students that itself depends on the "quality" of the pool of students.

Even if they do, there is no way they even come close to matching, so class rank will be VERY statistically wrong. It is possible that the 1 percentile student at MIT's EE program is doing better work and has more potential than the 99% student at any of the 100% acceptance rate colleges around here.

And of course it's possible that the 2.5 GPA MIT EE student is doing better work than the 3.9 underwater basketweaving from Podunk College. Or maybe students entering Podunk College almost all come from a local magnet school where the brightest local students go for high school and they all have IQs of at least 130+. Again, we're trying to use an assessment of student quality that depends on the quality of the pool of students.

One possibility. We could LSAT distributions to assess the quality of a student pool (group of students graduating a particular year in a particular major from a particular school). Correlate them statistically with their class rank and produce an LSAT/rank-normalized GPA for each student. Now students with an LSAT/rank-normalized GPA that falls below their LSAT can be seen as "smart, but didn't have it all together or was lazy etc" those with an LSAT-normalized GPA above their LSAT can be seen as hard-working, dedicated, mature, etc. Of course this assumes the underlying validity of the LSAT, and that's another issue.

This way an EE with a 167 LSAT who's top 20% with a 2.9 GPA may have something like a 3.5 LSAT/rank normalized GPA. On the other hand, an underwater basketweaver who's top 20% with a 160 LSAT and a 3.7 GPA may have something like a 3.1 LSAT/rank normalized GPA.

[r6_philly]

So we can argue about how broken the system is, but we can't come up with a better system lol I think the cop out way is to say, provide schools with all the data so they can view the application in a greater/fuller context and make decisions based on their own criteria. Wait, that's what happens now.

We as applicants are straining to draw correlations between our numerical qualities and the decisions we get. Maybe it isn't very strongly correlated and we are just seeing it because we want to?

But back on topic, I still disagree we should discount the first 1 or 2 years of failings. Schools are going to see them anyway from the transcripts and make up their minds regardless of what your GPA says. Even if LSAC do not generate a GPA, you still are going to be at a disadvantage.

[androstan]

So we can argue about how broken the system is, but we can't come up with a better system lol I think the cop out way is to say, provide schools with all the data so they can view the application in a greater/fuller context and make decisions based on their own criteria. Wait, that's what happens now.

We can all agree that students' reliance on USNWR and, to some extent, employers' reliance on the same force law schools to skew their assessment somewhat in favor of the straight numbers reported to USNWR.