Harvard/Princeton (etc) UG winding up at T2 Law schools Forum

[09042014]

Most undergrad coursework is about effort for people of above average intelligence. Being super brilliant isn't really a huge advantage unless you get into courses like math, or science. And even then its still mostly effort.

I don't buy that the top elite schools are all that much harder, especially since they have a lot of grade inflation.

You ever sit in a class where your classmates regularly correct the professor? Ok, since you probably haven't, you haven't sat in on at an Ivy League college course.

Are you trying to impress me, or convey they are douche bag gunners?

[Leeroy Jenkins]

In my engineering courses they curved to a B-. So half the class was getting B- and below. That is a huge advantage you have. If the lowest I could have gotten was a B- my Gpa would be significantly higher.

Why do you think that being qualified to get into HYP that you shouldn't be doing C level work? I am more intelligent that most HYP students (I beat those school's LSAT medians out of the water), and I still did C level work at public school. And I was damn near the top of my class in high school.

The factors that get you into a top undergrad aren't are foolproof as you assume. It is incredibly easy to slack your way to straight A's in high school. That isn't even considering the number of legacies, athletes, and artists who get in.

Engineering courses at Ivy League schools curve to a B-. HTH

Are you trying to impress me, or convey they are douche bag gunners?

Except they aren't douche bag gunners, because they are right, and 4 years later when they graduate they're auto-admit into whatever grad school program they want to get into because they are fucking geniuses are on track to be the next Stephen Hawkings understudy.

[09042014]

In my engineering courses they curved to a B-. So half the class was getting B- and below. That is a huge advantage you have. If the lowest I could have gotten was a B- my Gpa would be significantly higher.

Why do you think that being qualified to get into HYP that you shouldn't be doing C level work? I am more intelligent that most HYP students (I beat those school's LSAT medians out of the water), and I still did C level work at public school. And I was damn near the top of my class in high school.

The factors that get you into a top undergrad aren't are foolproof as you assume. It is incredibly easy to slack your way to straight A's in high school. That isn't even considering the number of legacies, athletes, and artists who get in.

Engineering courses at Ivy League schools curve to a B-. HTH

They also suck, unless you are cornell, in which case they still get pwnd by public schools.

[DerrickRose]

From my experience grade inflation is more so making sure you don't get a C rather than making it easy to get an A... In my experience it was really really hard to get less than a B-... but it was just as hard to get an A. As I said even times when I legitimately tried very hard I sometimes ended up with a B+. The curve isn't about rewarding incompetence or slacking, its about recognizing that the school took extensive measures to make sure that everyone in the college was a student capable of quality work and that even if work is average of the class it probably isn't correct to assess it as an average grade of C. Because really, if you are qualified to get into these schools you shouldn't be doing C-level work.

In my engineering courses they curved to a B-. So half the class was getting B- and below. That is a huge advantage you have. If the lowest I could have gotten was a B- my Gpa would be significantly higher.

Why do you think that being qualified to get into HYP that you shouldn't be doing C level work? I am more intelligent that most HYP students (I beat those school's LSAT medians out of the water), and I still did C level work at public school. And I was damn near the top of my class in high school.

The factors that get you into a top undergrad aren't are foolproof as you assume. It is incredibly easy to slack your way to straight A's in high school. That isn't even considering the number of legacies, athletes, and artists who get in.

The problem with your logic here is that Illinois basically is HYP when it comes to engineering. Columbia at worst. (I-L-L!)

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Engineering courses at Ivy League schools curve to a B-. HTH

They also suck, unless you are cornell, in which case they still get pwnd by public schools.

Funny, because their median graduate salary pwns the shit out of public schools engineering schools' median salary

[Unemployed]

Dear Ivy Leaguer: get over your UG pedigree. Plenty of your classmates couldn't hack it on the LSAT and/or are idiots for differnet reasons. Chances are, you will get your ass kicked by a TTT grad at least once in your life - either in law school or the life beyond.

Dear State Schooler: Get over yourself. If you proved yourself by doing well on something objective (LSAT?), good for you, but don't delude yourself - You may be special, most of your classmates aren't. And no, you probably couldn't have gotten into Harvard regardless of your financial situation.

End of discussion

[09042014]

Engineering courses at Ivy League schools curve to a B-. HTH

They also suck, unless you are cornell, in which case they still get pwnd by public schools.

Funny, because their median graduate salary pwns the shit out of public schools engineering schools' median salary

How much of that is investment banks who won't hire at anything but prestigious schools?

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Engineering courses at Ivy League schools curve to a B-. HTH

They also suck, unless you are cornell, in which case they still get pwnd by public schools.

Funny, because their median graduate salary pwns the shit out of public schools engineering schools' median salary

How much of that is investment banks who won't hire at anything but prestigious schools?

investment banks don't exclusively hire at 'prestigious schools'.

hth

[belligerentfuture]

People keeping talking about HYP's average GPA as if that is one thing. In a recent ranking that was put up on the Vault blog, Princeton was ranked #2 in the east in the "Big 16 of Grade Deflation". http://www.gradeinflation.com/sweet162010.html
"For instance, approximately two-thirds of all letter grades given at Brown University were A's as of March 2009. In 2008, Princeton's average GPA was a 3.28, compared to a 3.51 at Yale in 2008 and a 3.45 at Harvard in 2005."

Having experienced this personally, I can tell you it took zero social life and 12 hour days in Firestone Library on the weekends to pull straight As for my last two years. It is not hard to pull a B or B-. It is *extremely* hard to pull As or A* (we didn't have A+ or any grade weighted above 4.0- if you got an A*, it just got noted on your transcript not factored into your GPA). I worked at least 3 times as hard in undergrad as I do in lawschool, and I have the same GPA right now.

So yes, I think smart students at some Ivies like Princeton could have done better at other schools ranked lower, but even schools down only a few rankings like Yale or Brown.

[09042014]

They also suck, unless you are cornell, in which case they still get pwnd by public schools.

Funny, because their median graduate salary pwns the shit out of public schools engineering schools' median salary

How much of that is investment banks who won't hire at anything but prestigious schools?

investment banks don't exclusively hire at 'prestigious schools'.

hth

For the most part.

Also I'm so sure the median salaries are higher. UIUC's EE mean is above Harvard's median. Of course you really can't compare, but I'm not finding anything you back your claims

[DerrickRose]

http://www.gradeinflation.com/sweet162010.html

Oh wow, something else the SEC and the Big 12 are winning at, someone tell iwakeboard.

[Na_Swatch]

So yes, I think smart students at some Ivies like Princeton could have done better at other schools ranked lower, but even schools down only a few rankings like Yale or Brown.

lol blatant Princeton > Yale trolling.

[Unemployed]

People keeping talking about HYP's average GPA as if that is one thing. In a recent ranking that was put up on the Vault blog, Princeton was ranked #2 in the east in the "Big 16 of Grade Deflation". http://www.gradeinflation.com/sweet162010.html
"For instance, approximately two-thirds of all letter grades given at Brown University were A's as of March 2009. In 2008, Princeton's average GPA was a 3.28, compared to a 3.51 at Yale in 2008 and a 3.45 at Harvard in 2005."

Having experienced this personally, I can tell you it took zero social life and 12 hour days in Firestone Library on the weekends to pull straight As for my last two years. It is not hard to pull a B or B-. It is *extremely* hard to pull As or A* (we didn't have A+ or any grade weighted above 4.0- if you got an A*, it just got noted on your transcript not factored into your GPA). I worked at least 3 times as hard in undergrad as I do in lawschool, and I have the same GPA right now.

So yes, I think smart students at some Ivies like Princeton could have done better at other schools ranked lower, but even schools down only a few rankings like Yale or Brown.

Have they fired the president and the dean yet? What a bone-headed move on Princeton's part, and what terrible timing. The only school that can get away with a unilateral move like that is Harvard.

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Have they fired the president and the dean yet? What a bone-headed move on Princeton's part, and what terrible timing. The only school that can get away with a unilateral move like that is Harvard.

I doubt Princeton really cares that much about what Harvard does.

[Drew2010]

My thoughts:

Schools are pretty similar to other similarly ranked schools regardless of whether they're public/private/ivy.

There is a huge difference in student quality between top schools and TTT ug's like the small state school I ended up going to.

GPAs, and individual course grades (in non-curved classes), especially in non-science/math classes, have almost nothing to do with intelligence or "student quality", and are almost entirely related to work ethic and discipline.

Due to the above, despite huge differences in student quality, the difference in what it takes to get certain GPA's at different schools is probably much more marginal. I would think there is obviously still some difference, but it isn't nearly as big as the general difference in student quality between schools.

I don't intent to back this up in anyway, it is just my general impression.

Also, I hate PDaddy, which is really the only important thing I have to say.

[philosoraptor]

So yes, I think smart students at some Ivies like Princeton could have done better at other schools ranked lower, but even schools down only a few rankings like Yale or Brown.

lol blatant Princeton > Yale trolling.

Wow, seriously. That's harsh.

[Unemployed]

Have they fired the president and the dean yet? What a bone-headed move on Princeton's part, and what terrible timing. The only school that can get away with a unilateral move like that is Harvard.

I doubt Princeton really cares that much about what Harvard does.

Last I checked, a whole bunch of Princeton folks were pissed off that Harvard and Yale grads were taking their I-banking jobs and HLS/YLS/SLS spots, thanks in large part to inflated GPA's.

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Last I checked, a whole bunch of Princeton folks were pissed off that Harvard and Yale grads were taking their I-banking jobs and HLS/YLS/SLS spots, thanks in large part to inflated GPA's.

What are they going to do, transfer? Dartmouth grads make the most 10 years out of all the ivy league grads, so its not like they lost their spot as top money maker.

[flcath]

Man, if I had it to do over again, I would do things so much differently.

1) Go to community college for free first 2 years. Ring up the 4.0.

2) Transfer to SIU or EIU; major in history. Ring up the 4.0. Graduate with a minimum 3.9, and very little debt.

3) Work retail a couple years; break into management for the WE; pay off all of my loans.

4) Take the LSAT earlier, before I forgot all of that 'logic' stuff. Apply to schools early.

5) Accepted at NU with $$.

All of this is to say that the UG matters NOT AT ALL. It's about the numbers for the law schools. No law school is going to care that I went to CC and then SIU when my GPA is above median, and no employer is going to care that my UG was from SIU when he hires me out of NU (or better).

This would be an okay plan for med school (except they do care about UG, just not to a degree that keeps up with the increasing difficulty of increasingly good UGs), but dude, LSs don't give a fucking shit about GPA.

Which they're correct not to; it's a TTT stat.

A 3.0 EE degree is a smarter student, by FAR, than a 3.9 poli-sci (or some other shit major) at my UG.

[Feynman]

LSs don't give a fucking shit about GPA.

Wrong.

[Unemployed]

Last I checked, a whole bunch of Princeton folks were pissed off that Harvard and Yale grads were taking their I-banking jobs and HLS/YLS/SLS spots, thanks in large part to inflated GPA's.

What are they going to do, transfer? Dartmouth grads make the most 10 years out of all the ivy league grads, so its not like they lost their spot as top money maker.

I dunno. (Rightfully) complain that the administrators should have consulted/colluded with the school's main competitors before deflating grades? Complain loudly and frequently enough that graduate schools and employers know? Some were so bitter that they discouraged prospective students from enrolling.

[Ryou]

In my engineering courses they curved to a B-. So half the class was getting B- and below. That is a huge advantage you have. If the lowest I could have gotten was a B- my Gpa would be significantly higher.

To be honest I never really paid attention to any official curve policies, and professors never talked about it or put it in the syllabus. I wouldn't know in a class by class breakdown where the median student was. It was just something everyone knew that unless you really screwed up you wouldn't get rolled a C (in a liberal arts class)... that's not to says some people didn't still manage to do it. And I'm pretty sure this rule didn't exist for the math and science courses.

But anyway I took five classes with a single professor known to be a very harsh grader because I thought it would be a good learning experience and he has the most interesting classes... but I got rolled B+'s five times. Had I taken instead five more classes with another professor who always absolutely loved my papers and said I should go to grad school I would have had a higher GPA.

My point? GPA is a contextual number. The prestige of the UG is one context, but not the only one. And unfortunately all relevant contexts can never be known and adjusted for. Which is why my main point was that the admissions process isn't perfect.

Why do you think that being qualified to get into HYP that you shouldn't be doing C level work? I am more intelligent that most HYP students (I beat those school's LSAT medians out of the water), and I still did C level work at public school. And I was damn near the top of my class in high school.

And you are the one positing that grades are all about effort not intelligence, so did you just not try?

I was merely indicating that the students at elite schools (not just HYP) are supposed to be there because they are capable of doing quality work. Such work could be "average" comparatively next to their peers but still quite good on an absolute scale. Small fish, big pond.

That's not to say students at elite schools do not slack, or that students from other schools don't do quality work. But every school's faculty has to struggle with tensions between average in an absolute sense and average relative to their student body when assigning grades.

These schools are prestigious. Now we could argue that prestige is completely baseless (and furthermore I don't think anyone here would dispute that for law school admissions UG prestige isn't important), but that prestige is supposed to indicate that on the whole they have quality students. Now that doesn't mean they are the only schools with good students, but I don't think it should be a surprise that these schools curve higher because they (believe they) have a better average student.

And I pointed out previously that the LSAT isn't even a good indicator of a certain specific subset of intelligence, but less intelligence in general.

The factors that get you into a top undergrad aren't are foolproof as you assume. It is incredibly easy to slack your way to straight A's in high school. That isn't even considering the number of legacies, athletes, and artists who get in.

Of course. Just as law admissions are faulty so is UG admissions. But we have to accept that as part of the reality of the process for now. Just like law adcoms have to work on the basis that UG GPA and LSAT indicate potential to succeed, so do UG adcoms.

But given how easy you are saying it is to get straight A's in HS, what does that say about the quality of students at schools whose average student were B or C level students in HS? If those students make up the bulk of your classes, I would guess that it's comparatively easy to place at the top of your class. (Again I realize not every class or every non-elite school is like that... which is why my argument is merely that GPA is such a highly contextual number)

[SaintClarence27]

Man, if I had it to do over again, I would do things so much differently.

1) Go to community college for free first 2 years. Ring up the 4.0.

2) Transfer to SIU or EIU; major in history. Ring up the 4.0. Graduate with a minimum 3.9, and very little debt.

3) Work retail a couple years; break into management for the WE; pay off all of my loans.

4) Take the LSAT earlier, before I forgot all of that 'logic' stuff. Apply to schools early.

5) Accepted at NU with $$.

All of this is to say that the UG matters NOT AT ALL. It's about the numbers for the law schools. No law school is going to care that I went to CC and then SIU when my GPA is above median, and no employer is going to care that my UG was from SIU when he hires me out of NU (or better).

This would be an okay plan for med school (except they do care about UG, just not to a degree that keeps up with the increasing difficulty of increasingly good UGs), but dude, LSs don't give a fucking shit about GPA.

Which they're correct not to; it's a TTT stat.

A 3.0 EE degree is a smarter student, by FAR, than a 3.9 poli-sci (or some other shit major) at my UG.

Wow. You are VERY incorrect.

[SaintClarence27]

In my engineering courses they curved to a B-. So half the class was getting B- and below. That is a huge advantage you have. If the lowest I could have gotten was a B- my Gpa would be significantly higher.

To be honest I never really paid attention to any official curve policies, and professors never talked about it or put it in the syllabus. I wouldn't know in a class by class breakdown where the median student was. It was just something everyone knew that unless you really screwed up you wouldn't get rolled a C (in a liberal arts class)... that's not to says some people didn't still manage to do it. And I'm pretty sure this rule didn't exist for the math and science courses.

But anyway I took five classes with a single professor known to be a very harsh grader because I thought it would be a good learning experience and he has the most interesting classes... but I got rolled B+'s five times. Had I taken instead five more classes with another professor who always absolutely loved my papers and said I should go to grad school I would have had a higher GPA.

My point? GPA is a contextual number. The prestige of the UG is one context, but not the only one. And unfortunately all relevant contexts can never be known and adjusted for. Which is why my main point was that the admissions process isn't perfect.

Why do you think that being qualified to get into HYP that you shouldn't be doing C level work? I am more intelligent that most HYP students (I beat those school's LSAT medians out of the water), and I still did C level work at public school. And I was damn near the top of my class in high school.

And you are the one positing that grades are all about effort not intelligence, so did you just not try?

I was merely indicating that the students at elite schools (not just HYP) are supposed to be there because they are capable of doing quality work. Such work could be "average" comparatively next to their peers but still quite good on an absolute scale. Small fish, big pond.

That's not to say students at elite schools do not slack, or that students from other schools don't do quality work. But every school's faculty has to struggle with tensions between average in an absolute sense and average relative to their student body when assigning grades.

These schools are prestigious. Now we could argue that prestige is completely baseless (and furthermore I don't think anyone here would dispute that for law school admissions UG prestige isn't important), but that prestige is supposed to indicate that on the whole they have quality students. Now that doesn't mean they are the only schools with good students, but I don't think it should be a surprise that these schools curve higher because they (believe they) have a better average student.

And I pointed out previously that the LSAT isn't even a good indicator of a certain specific subset of intelligence, but less intelligence in general.

The factors that get you into a top undergrad aren't are foolproof as you assume. It is incredibly easy to slack your way to straight A's in high school. That isn't even considering the number of legacies, athletes, and artists who get in.

Of course. Just as law admissions are faulty so is UG admissions. But we have to accept that as part of the reality of the process for now. Just like law adcoms have to work on the basis that UG GPA and LSAT indicate potential to succeed, so do UG adcoms.

But given how easy you are saying it is to get straight A's in HS, what does that say about the quality of students at schools whose average student were B or C level students in HS? If those students make up the bulk of your classes, I would guess that it's comparatively easy to place at the top of your class. (Again I realize not every class or every non-elite school is like that... which is why my argument is merely that GPA is such a highly contextual number)

What hasn't been mentioned much ITT is that the school as a whole makes little to no difference WRT difficulty. It's not your undergrad institution. It's your undergrad course of study that can make things MUCH more difficult, be it for acceptance into the college, or for the curve, or for how difficult it is to actually learn the material.

And yet, adcomms by and large *still* don't care. It's really about the numbers.

[d34d9823]

I was merely indicating that the students at elite schools (not just HYP) are supposed to be there because they are capable of doing quality work. Such work could be "average" comparatively next to their peers but still quite good on an absolute scale. Small fish, big pond.

That's not to say students at elite schools do not slack, or that students from other schools don't do quality work. But every school's faculty has to struggle with tensions between average in an absolute sense and average relative to their student body when assigning grades.

These schools are prestigious. Now we could argue that prestige is completely baseless (and furthermore I don't think anyone here would dispute that for law school admissions UG prestige isn't important), but that prestige is supposed to indicate that on the whole they have quality students. Now that doesn't mean they are the only schools with good students, but I don't think it should be a surprise that these schools curve higher because they (believe they) have a better average student.

I think we both agree that those schools have a better student overall. I just don't think the difference is really that significant. The fact that I, and many other State U students, are going to destroy the Harvard LSAT median makes me skeptical. (In before "you don't understand statistics") I think a lot of the prestige is a shell game played by the school administrators.

That said, we've gone back and forth a few times now and we're just going in circles. The only conclusive analysis I can think of is to compare the average GPA of a 165 LSAT at HYP with the average GPA of a 165 LSAT at State U and see if the difference is more or less than the inflation gap. I don't know if this data is available and in any case, I'm much too lazy to actually do the analysis.