LSDAS GPA = BS? Forum

[DreamShake]

I don't have any argument against CC classes in HS counting. You earned those grades; own them. If you were too dumb at 15/16/17 years old to realize that college credits might actually count for something later on, you deserve your bad LSDAS.

Um...in most cases I doubt that it's "dumb" so much as it's "ignorant." And with good reason. Not many people know that they're headed to grad school while they're still in high school and that those grades will matter long-term; many people take CC classes in HS simply to expedite attaining a bachelor's. It's also problematic that the demographic you're speaking of is trying to gain admission to UG institutions...which actually care about the difficulty of your courses as much as your grades in them. Do you really expect a 16 year-old to recognize "Oh, law school--not grad schools, just law schools--don't care about difficulty; they just care about my GPA"? Not everybody has the luxury of planning life out and accounting for contingencies eight to ten years down the road.

So you think a high schooler taking CC classes is thinking "they won't care if I get a D in this class by not trying, just the fact that it's a hard class will set me up for lifelong success!"?

Maybe I was a freak but I was fairly sure that all grades mattered, even at the tender age of 16. And I had no thoughts of attending law school or grad school of any kind yet. I didn't assume that half-assing it through UG with straight Cs would get me a great job (my last name isn't Bush). I figured that since your GPA goes on your resume, it probably kinda matters, and I should do my best to not screw it up.

If I'd had any thoughts of law school at the time and if I'd known that GPA>everything except the LSAT, I certainly wouldn't have majored in engineering. I lost more GPA via hard math and science classes than most people lose via the LSDAS calculation. But you don't hear me bitching about the fact that GPA is so important to law schools or that you don't get enough boost for a hard major. No one forced me to major in it.

Don't take a class you're not prepared to try in. And if you don't try, well, it was your choice and now you get to live with the consequences.

Well...that's one way to throw oneself down a slippery slope. Nowhere did I say that the average HS-cum-CC enrollee would take the line of, "Hey, CC D=acceptable." Especially since I stated that many do it to get a headstart on UG...and D's typically aren't sufficient for receiving credit that counts toward degree reqs.

Look, I applaud you for being a hardworker, having great foresight, and blah blah blah. But not everybody is you. Not everybody has the resources and input you had. You are not the standard by which all others are or should be judged. LSAC should be using the standard of the average or reasonable student, and it's perfectly reasonable to think, "Hey, it's okay if I get a B in these classes because that's still a decent grade and people are going to recognize that I did it while going above and beyond what was needed." The same line of thinking leads many students to take AP classes they know they'll land a "B" in rather than signing up for easy A's in regular classes. UG's take those things into account. LSAC punishes kids for not knowing that LSAC's method for calculating GPA, and the weight given to it, is anomalous in higher education. It's like an NFL coach questioning the Heisman winner's heart because the kid lettered in two sports during high school. It's dumb, and if the coach was really interested in projecting performance, he wouldn't even consider it.

[Sandro]

The anti splitter people are hilarious. So hurt that their GPA isnt as cool as LSAT!

[DallasCowboy]

Almost everyone has a strong upward trend because grading in the higher level courses is almost always uncurved AND most people major in an area that they have some affinity in. In my higher level polisci courses, if you turn in the work, there's literally no way to get lower than a B+ unless you publicly slept with the teacher's spouse.

Must be a liberal arts thing. In business/engineering/accounting at my state school, the upper-level courses had law school-like curves, and even the lower levels were curved.

[coldshoulder]

Yeah, I'm a poli-sci major and my classes have been the opposite. 5000 upper-levels very hard, almost impossible to get above a B. 3000 and below almost impossible to not get at least an A-...

[zonto]

You can't do anything about it so just do what you need to now to keep your GPA up and write a short addendum explaining it.

[prezidentv8]

"Hey, it's okay if I get a B in these classes because that's still a decent grade and people are going to recognize that I did it while going above and beyond what was needed."

Hmm...pretty sure I had that exact thought at some point...

[billjames22]

I didn't realize that CC classes from High School should be included in my application. as the credits acquired did not go towards my undergrad degree. Am I required to get updated transcripts? (FWIW, I got 3 As in those courses)

[tng11]

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[Sandro]

Because of the LSDAS (and the 4.0 system) calculations in general, I should have made an effort to be more consistent during UG. My UG had a 9-point grading system that has no minus grades, if you got 1 B+ it could be cancelled out by an A+ and you would still have the same GPA as someone who got 2 As.

The LSAC scale is also quite harsh on this scenario, I have a near-even split between A+/B+ grades with very few As, resulting in a 3.8~ GPA, whereas if I had diverted my attention away from getting A+ grades to the B+ courses I would have close to a 4.0.

so LSAC drops your GPA by .1 and its "quite harsh" ? Hmm.

[tng11]

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[Cade McNown]

Yes LSDAS is BS, but so is any system that attempts to equalize UG grades.

One point that I don't see getting attention are semester abroad grades. LSDAS does not count these (unless the applicant's UG institution has factored them into GPA), but in certain cases I think they should. I understand the reasoning behind excluding classes taught in foreign language, or classes that are experiential in nature. But several abroad programs have legitimate classloads taught in English and I don't understand how these can be exempt from LSDAS calculation. Under the current system, it is possible for two students from different UGs to be classmates for a semester, and for one student these grades count while for the other they don't. For example:

Student A from School X takes 4 classes at London School of Economics. School X's policy is never to count study abroad grades towards UG GPA, so LSDAS does not count these grades.

Student B from School Y takes the same 4 classes at LSE. School Y's policy is to count study abroad grades towards UG GPA, so LSDAS counts these grades.

To me this is a much more egregious error than counting community college grades, not factoring in whether schools award A+s, etc. etc.

[Sandro]

Because of the LSDAS (and the 4.0 system) calculations in general, I should have made an effort to be more consistent during UG. My UG had a 9-point grading system that has no minus grades, if you got 1 B+ it could be cancelled out by an A+ and you would still have the same GPA as someone who got 2 As.

The LSAC scale is also quite harsh on this scenario, I have a near-even split between A+/B+ grades with very few As, resulting in a 3.8~ GPA, whereas if I had diverted my attention away from getting A+ grades to the B+ courses I would have close to a 4.0.

so LSAC drops your GPA by .1 and its "quite harsh" ? Hmm.

In terms of HYS, that .1 is not an insignificant amount. Looking at LSN, a 3.8 seems to be the soft GPA floor for H and seems to be a blackbox even with a 176+ LSAT, whereas the 3.9-4.0 region sees a lot of acceptances at higher than 172. 3.8 will also be close to a death sentence for Y and S.

I'm just saying, a lot of people see their LSAC gpa drop .2 or more because of LSAC's guidlines.

GPA is BS. The fact that GPA is displayed next to LSAT score as some reliable metric is baloney. But what can ya do.

[tng11]

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[Cade McNown]

The simple problem is that the grade equivalencies are much harder to factor in as an actual number, because of the hundreds of different grading systems around the world. Letter grades aren't common in Europe for example, but some countries still give out letter grades.

In Germany/Austria the grades go from 1-5, but a 1 or "excellent" grade is almost impossible to obtain, while a 2 or "good" is pretty hard to get. Even the dean of YLS admissions mentioned this example in one of her blog posts about LLM applicants where a grade of "good" would be looked as superior. Some exchange students from the U.S. had their 2s converted to Bs at their home institution, which is an understatement of the quality of work it takes to get that grade.

What I do think should happen though, is that like foreign applicants, foreign transcripts should be submitted and evaluated through CAS and assigned the "Superior", "Above Average", etc. ratings which add another piece to an application. I think that schools simply don't care about grades that they can't use to report GPA statistics, therefore exchange grades aren't looked at since some aren't convertible to letter grades.

Certainly there are many problems with counting abroad grades, but my gripe is that LSAC essentially passes the buck to UG institutions to make the decision for them. Also, I understand your point about different grading scales, but I am talking about American study abroad programs in foreign countries. While such programs are often affiliated with local universities, in my experience these programs commonly use their own grade scales, often the more typical A-F measure.

FWIW, my proposal would be to uniformly exclude study abroad grades from the LSDAS calculation. With this standard, perhaps there could also be a system to let applicants petition to count their study abroad grades if it could be proven that the program was rigorous enough.

[FAR262]

I didn't realize that CC classes from High School should be included in my application. as the credits acquired did not go towards my undergrad degree. Am I required to get updated transcripts? (FWIW, I got 3 As in those courses)

+1, I got an A in a community college course, which could have bumped me a tiny bit but I thought anything taken in hs didn't count.

[ldarling87]

My 3.68 from UCLA dropped to a 3.19. I almost cried when I found out. Ugh!!!!!

[Curry]

I jsut want to say that anything said by Bilsdungsroman in this thread is egregious "my gpa is as close to 4.0 as possible trolling" and I am thus not taking it seriously.

[rinkrat19]

I didn't realize that CC classes from High School should be included in my application. as the credits acquired did not go towards my undergrad degree. Am I required to get updated transcripts? (FWIW, I got 3 As in those courses)

+1, I got an A in a community college course, which could have bumped me a tiny bit but I thought anything taken in hs didn't count.

If you read the instructions on LSAC at all carefully, browsed this forum, or called LSAC to clarify, you would have figured out that you were supposed to send ALL transcripts of ANY college-level credit earned ANYWHERE at ANY TIME to LSAC. Since they're As (and presumably you're now mostly through the app cycle) you probably won't get bitten in the ass later, but missing transcripts are supposedly a red flag for LSAC. (So is being unable to follow instructions!)