3.9+ in EECS + Haas Double Major

sakky
Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:08:33 +0000

it’s not like boalt doesn’t recognize berkeley’s competetive and difficult academic environment. it’s just that they don’t want to admit berkeley undergrads. a current boalt law student agreed to this, and so did many other law school students that i know.



Lest you think this is just a Boalt ‘anti-incest’ rule, let’s take a look at another law school. Specifically, let’s look at what UCLA Law requires of Berkeley prelaws.

In the last 5 years, Berkeley prelaws who got admitted to UCLA Law had a LSAT of around 167 and a GPA of around 3.77. Again, this is * higher * than the stats of the average student at UCLA Law who had about a 165 and a 3.6 respectively according to USNews Graduate Edition.

http://career.berkeley.edu/Law/lawStats.stm



Why does Berkeley do this, whereas other institutions have a modest number of their undergrads moving on to their grad schools? Is this meant for diversity, or more like self-loathing?



Personally, I think it’s a rather stupid policy, because as you pointed out, we live in a competitive world, and other graduate schools, notably Harvard and (especially) MIT seem to be extraordinarily accomodating to their own undergrads. {It’s led to the rather common saying that the best way to get into MIT for graduate school is to go there for undergrad and just stay there. Incidentally, that’s also why you have such a proliferation of people who are “MIT-cubed”, meaning those who got their bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD all from MIT.} Similarly, other schools like Penn offer so-called ‘submatriculation’ programs in which undergrads can complete bachelor’s degrees and MS’s, JD’s or MBA’s at Penn in a shortened period of time.

Granted, things are changing somewhat in that Berkeley is offering some integrated bachelor’s/master’s programs, notably in EECS, which is a step in the right direction.