Chicago changes rules for Dean's list and will now also award Latin Honors

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
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^ Wouldn’t law schools consider the source of the grades? For instance, an MIT grad applying to law school (yes, there are some) might be viewed differently from a graduate of a lesser known or lesser reputable college, even if the latter has a higher GPA. Also, what you major in might be taken into account; STEM GPA’s are very likely to be lower than those with a large concentration of humanities courses. But STEM-trained attorneys might be more inclined to pursue the really tough subjects like intellectual property. Wouldn’t they be shut out of this opportunity at the best schools if it’s just about GPA?

Med school might be a different story because the pre-med curriculum has become so standardized now. But even so, I’d think that someone who gets A-/B+ in a ton of honors and other advanced-track courses might be demonstrating something different in comparison to a straight-A student who never strayed off the regular track. The latter may not have been willing to take any risks or perhaps was more more interested in the grade than the subject. Who might be the more engaging, inquisitive med student?

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Yes, and no. For the unhooked applicants, ~90% of LS admissions is two numbers: GPA+LSAT. So, to the extent that the grades are equal, the clear advantage goes to the HYP undergrad. But no way is any LS gonna say, 'a 3.6 from (grade deflated) Pton or Chicago is equivalent to a 3.8 from (grade-inflated) Yale. The latter wins 99.9% of the time (assuming similar LSAT). The reason for that is that USNews uses GPA & LSAT in its rankings. OTOH, USNews does not use undergrad rigor, however defined.

STEM undergrads do get some boost, particularly in the physical sciences, but that is bcos they are readily employable at IP law firms. (And employed after graduation is also a rankings factor.) But still, a higher GPA from say, at state public engineering program such as UTexas, will beat lower GPA from MIT/Caltech.

So yeah, schools like Chicago and Hopkins who held out of the grade inflation train were hurting their students chances at top law schools.

Med school admissions are different bcos the GPA is a much lower factor than LS (where it’s close to half).

23

@bluebayou Where does this conventional wisdom come from? Is there some data source of each law school’s accepted GPA and LSAT broken out by undergrad school?

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^^check out the law school thread on cc, or there are plenty of other public sources.

Or, just look at Harvard or Yale’s admission numbers:

Yale law’s 75th percentile is a 3.99, i.e., quarter of their entering class had straight A’s in undergrad. Yale’s bottom quartile is 3.85. ~220 students from 77 undergrads. (sure, most of those undergrads only have one student represented, but it’s the Val from Regional State U along with a handful of the tippy top of HYP grads).

HLS’s interquartile is slightly lower: 3.96/3.79. 560 students from 185 undergrads.

https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/undergraduate-colleges/

Just no room for grade deflated schools in these numbers.

25

^ Not sure you are doing the causation correctly. H and Y both accept a large number of their own undergraduates and both schools tend to grade-inflate. THAT might be what’s causing the higher GPA range. And graduates from lesser-known schools would pretty much have to be getting all A’s in order to attend one of the top law schools so that’s no surprise. The question might be what is the average GPA and LSAT of those admitted from UChicago, not what does a UChicago student have to achieve in GPA in order to be competitive with Regional State U :smiley:

High GPA’s are going to be crucial in order to get into a T15 law school, but context is important as well. Also, the T15 include more schools than just H or Y.

26

“But still, a higher GPA from say, at state public engineering program such as UTexas, will beat lower GPA from MIT/Caltech.”

  • Top state engineering programs are seriously rigorous so that's no surprise either since the curriculum is comparable. You'd need to go down the pecking order a bit: say, an engineering degree from Utah State (alma mater of Nobel Laureate Lars Peter Hansen, by the way) or perhaps IIT. The more competitive the undergraduate program, the better the law applicant's chances, holding grades constant. The more likely phenomenon is that LSAT scores are highly correlated with quality of the institution - so UT or MIT graduates will in general have higher LSAT scores than USU or IIT graduates. My best guess is that your undergraduate program doesn't explain admissions as well as just looking at the LSAT score :wink:
27

“For the unhooked applicants, ~90% of LS admissions is two numbers: GPA+LSAT.”

  • Are those numbers added together? If so, a +.3 change in GPA simply doesn't compare to, say a +3 change in LSAT. Or even a +1 change in LSAT.
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  1. marlowe1 is dead on in describing the attitude of my kids and most of their friends towards grades. There was absolute disdain for anyone who actively sought out easy-grading courses or who avoided good courses with tough grading. There was pretty much disdain for anyone who paid any attention to GPA at all. This was true for people who were Student Marshals in Phi Beta Kappa and people who weren't. (My daughter-in-law was probably an exception. I have a feeling she cared a lot about her GPA, and she was laser-focused on medical school. But also very social-justice driven -- she's all about public health and poverty.) No one grade grubbed, and being overtly competitive about grades would have turned you into a pariah. I'm not sure that was true in every social circle, though.

A close friend of my daughter’s got her PhD from an Ivy (non-HYP) and was dismayed at the constant pressure of grade-grubbing from the students she taught there. It was 180 degrees different from Chicago.

  1. People on CC were always confidently asserting that Chicago and Princeton were hurt in law school and medical school admissions by grade deflation, but I never really bought it. Anyone who thinks Yale Law School admits by a simple formula of grades and LSAT knows nothing about Yale Law School. If anything hurt Chicago, it was (a) the University of Chicago law school takes a lot fewer Chicago undergraduates than other top law schools take from their undergraduate colleges, (b) fewer people thinking law school was a great thing, and therefore fewer applications, and (c) more tendency to stay in the Midwest, meaning fewer applications to the highest prestige coastal law schools. Princeton was hurt (if it was hurt at all) by not having "in-house" professional schools to admit a bunch of its top graduates.

I friend, who was on the admissions committee at the medical school where he taught, assured me that they paid attention to quality of GPA, not just the raw number, and that Chicago’s brand really meant something.

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“If anything hurt Chicago, it was (a) the University of Chicago law school takes a lot fewer Chicago undergraduates than other top law schools take from their undergraduate colleges,”

I wonder why this is? The law school’s admitted class is pretty small compared to other top schools so maybe that’s a factor. Also, I wonder if it’s still the case. At my son’s April Overnight the law guy there was talking up the College because he claimed the law school really liked those applicants and that being at the College would provide an edge. I believe someone asked him about this directly during the Q&A. Perhaps he was pitching an ad or delivering the talking points. But he was pretty enthusiastic. I think he was the liaison from Career Advancement. I did get the idea that of the three big professional schools: Booth, Law, and Med, Booth was the school that took in the highest proportion of College grads, measured as % of admitted class.

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By large number, do you mean a handful or so? Yale Law does not accept 50 of its own students every year. (again, 77 undergrad represented for 220 students; 34 states, 11 countries.) Neither does HLS.

Of course, with their small classes, YLS (and SLS) are the two that afford to take EC’s into account; GPA & LSAT are just the first threshold to be considered worthy. HLS is so big that it’s more of a numbers game like most other law schools. btw: Chicago Law appears to have been become more GPA-focused in the past decade or so. (Stanford is similar.)

Sorry, that’s a nonsensical argument, bcos if true, how would students from a LAC get admitted to a professional school? (Grads from AWSP do extremely well in professional school admissions; it just so happens that all four have high GPA means too.) If anything, applicants from HYP get an extra look, but still a 3.6 just ain’t gonna cut it for YLS, unless one has a 176 LSAT is is say, an Olympic Champion (excellent EC, btw).

That’s correct. Med school is much more holistic than law school. Law schools became much numerically-inclined with the publishing of USNews’ rankings. GPA+test scores matter, a LOT.

Negative; USNews counts them separately, so the law schools do too. What mostly matters is the law school’s means. If an applicant is over both means, the chances of admissions are really good. For example, being at or slightly above Harvard’s means, results in a better than 50% chance of admission to HLS. (Chicago Law is similar.) Raise your LSAT a few points to clear Harvard’s 75th % (keeping the GPA constant), and the admissions chances jumps to 90+%. If an applicant is at or below both of Harvard’s 25th, better bring a big hook, otherwise admission chances are zero.

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“By large number, do you mean a handful or so? Yale Law does not accept 50 of its own students every year. (again, 77 undergrad represented for 220 students; 34 states, 11 countries.) Neither does HLS.”

  • Taking a look at the YLS 2029/20 Report, it appears that out of a total of 164 institutions represented as of Fall 2018, only 13 had a representation of 10 or greater. They are, unsurprisingly, Yale (90), Harvard (59), Columbia (34), Princeton (31), Stanford (22), Dartmouth (21), Cornell (19), UChicago (18), Brown (17), Penn (16) Georgetown (13), Berkeley (13) and Duke (10). That's 363 enrollees - about 57% of total JD candidates at Yale. What I'd take from this is that attending a top school seems crucial to your admission chances at YLS, and it helps to be on the East Coast (unless you are applying from Stanford). A good number of the Ivy's and Stanford likely grade similarly to one another (though there may be a couple of exceptions). Cal and UChicago seem to be outliers here. Cal doesn't strike me as a school infused with "grade inflation" - it was known as the GPA Killer when I went to school in the 80's - and UChicago is specifically famous (still) for "grade deflation."

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

“What mostly matters is the law school’s means. If an applicant is over both means, the chances of admissions are really good. For example, being at or slightly above Harvard’s means, results in a better than 50% chance of admission to HLS. (Chicago Law is similar.) Raise your LSAT a few points to clear Harvard’s 75th % (keeping the GPA constant), and the admissions chances jumps to 90+%. If an applicant is at or below both of Harvard’s 25th, better bring a big hook, otherwise admission chances are zero.”

  • Interesting. What happens if you raise your GPA by 0.3 to clear H's 75th, but keep LSAT constant - does the chance still jump to 90% or to a lesser number? Which has bigger impact, holding the other constant: GPA or LSAT?

Edit to add: my hunch is that at UChicago (undergrad) you see more law school applicants who might be below the mean/median on GPA but higher on LSAT, than you do the reverse. But my hunch is also that not many UChicago College grads end up at HLS specifically.

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Don’t forget that Yale Law also has the highest LSAT scores, so by definition, it will attract students from undergrads that purposely only select for high test-takers. Harvard and Yale undergrads have the highest LSAT scores, so it should be no surprise that they are over-represented at top law schools, like Yale.

re: HLS…it looks like holding the LSAT constant at mean and raising the GPA to the 75th % increases acceptance chances to ~75%. Not much of a surprise, since most law schools tend to weight the LSAT a little heavier than GPA. And for Harvard to hold its 173 median, it has to accept most of those applicants. (Just not enuf 173+ to go around.)

Cal is the clear outlier in the T14 as it weighs GPA much heavier than the test score. (Obvious reason for that choice.) Stanford also appears to be somewhat GPA-heavy, relative to LSAT. Ditto Chicago Law. It’s GPA is essentially the same as Harvard’s, but its LSAT is 3 points lower in each quartile.

fwiw: Cal (and UCLA) are no longer grade deficient. In addition to being several times larger than the privates, the UC system accepts a lot of transfers, so many of the transferees to Cal start out with a 4.0 for law school purposes. The surprise to me in that Yale list is the absence of UMichigan, which is a similar size to Cal. But perhaps they just won’t leave Ann Arbor, a quintessential college town. lol

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For Yale Law, Michigan is at 8 so just under my cutoff. UCLA is at 5.

Not sure if the above detail is published for #2 Stanford or #3 Harvard, but we can get data for #4 UChicago from its 2019/20 LS report (providing information for the prior year), as well as the 2018/19 published “admissions profile card.” I counted up 255 undergraduate institutions represented. Of those, 15 had a representation of 10 or greater, and they are a more varied lot compared to Yale Law, although most of the names are similar: UChicago (42), UCLA (20), Penn (17), Cal Berkeley (17), G-Town (16), Duke (16), Cornell (14), BYU (13), Northwestern (13), UFlorida (13), Harvard (12), Princeton (11), Columbia (10), UWisc. (10). Also, Yale is (probably) erroneously reported to be 0 when it should be something like 11 - 13. That’s a total of about 235 students, or just under 40% of total JD enrollment, so notably less “concentrated” than Yale Law but still showing a significant representation of top uni’s. What’s interesting here is additional inclusion of decent-to-top state universities along with BYU (which, frankly, is about as large and as inexpensive to attend if you, like 95% of the rest of the campus, are LDS). Both law schools, by the way, are roughly equal in size.

Brown’s representation at Chicago Law is 8, Dartmouth’s is 6, and Stanford’s is 5.

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Going back upthread, @marlowe1 and @JHS capture a sentiment I remember in my day - a general lack of grade grubbing or focus on grades (outside of small pockets of intense pre-meds/pre-professional students).

This focus on learning as a process, rather than academics as performance, however, hurt Chicago back in the day re professional school placement. As law/med school is more of a numbers game, Chicago students’ less-focused approach on grades (and, typically, standardized tests) hurt the placement rates.

Case in point, in 2008 (when Chicago’s classes were still quite strong), the avg. LSAT for Chicago undergrad was 162. Not bad, but below virtually all its peers. This is a little surprising because, especially by 2008, Chicago’s classes had a lot of intellectual horsepower. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1190895-mean-lsat-score-by-undergraduate-college.html

Zoom forward just 8 years, and Chicago’s avg. LSAT ballooned to 166-167, one of the highest of its peers. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1190895-mean-lsat-score-by-undergraduate-college.html

During a similar span, while the number of Chicago undergrad applicants to law school has actually gone down, placement numbers are higher than ever - 42 at Chicago Law, nearly 20 at Yale Law, etc.

Is this because the undergrad is vastly more respected now than 8-9 years ago? No. Especially at tippy-top places, the value of a Chicago degree has always been respected highly.

Rather, nowadays, there are just more high scoring/high GPA Chicago students walking around, and they are much more “acceptable” at top professional schools. Part of this, I think, is because students (even at Chicago) are more aware of the numbers-based, performance element to professional school admissions, and they have adjusted accordingly. They are probably advised better about this, too.

To me, this change is more of a shift in mentality, rather than some incredible boost to the raw talent of the Chicago classes. The change in latin honors will probably just boost this system even more - there will be even more high GPA Chicago students walking around than ever before.

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I didn’t realize Chicago’s law school was as small as Yale’s or Stanford’s; for some reason I thought it was more Michigan/Columbia-sized (i.e., 300+ per JD class). Still, it’s pretty noticeable that, at the same size, Yale has 90 Yale alumni, and Chicago has 42 Chicago alumni. Now, that could reflect applications, or enrollment choices – a lot more of my Yale friends went to law school than my kids’ Chicago friends, and it’s probably easier for a Yale grad to choose Yale Law over competitive admissions than it is for a Chicago grad to choose Chicago Law over Yale or Harvard – but it still seems to have a noticeable effect on the number of Chicago alumni who go to top law schools.

Maybe the world has completely changed, but I doubt it. I don’t think anyone at Yale Law School is sitting around saying, “We have to admit everyone with an LSAT over 17x to maintain our ranking.” In the past, at least, they were way more interested in which college you were affiliated with at Oxford or Cambridge, and what you did there, and how good your PhD dissertation was, than they were in your LSAT. It just so happened that the kinds of people who get Rhodes Scholarships and take first-class PPE degrees tend to do well on the LSAT, too. Yale does take some people directly out of college, but they tend to be very, very intellectual types, not test-gaming grade grubbers.

Harvard is roughly three times as large as Yale or Chicago. It has to accept a lot more people to fill its classes, so it is almost certainly more numbers-focused. (While the hierarchy of top law schools is more clear than the hierarchy of top colleges, no law school is anywhere near as dominant in terms of enrolling admitted students as Harvard College is for undergraduates. Anyone admitted to any top law school probably has lots of options, and lots of valid reasons for picking a slightly less prestigious school over another one.)

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@JHS - I am confused - per Yale Law’s admissions statistics (https://law.yale.edu/admissions/profiles-statistics), it made 263 offers, which yielded 227 matrics. That’s a yield of 86%. That’s pretty close to Harvard College’s yield, no? It might even be a little higher.

Also, Yale Law is a bit of an anomaly in filling so much of its class with its own undergrad. 15% of Yale Law students went to Yale undergrad! I’d think most law schools are a bit closer to Chicago in their pull of the home undergrad. About 7% of Chicago Law students went to Chicago undergrad. On rough glance, that seems similar to numbers from UVA: https://www.law.virginia.edu/admissions/class-2022-profile (26 of 335 UVA 1Ls went to UVA undergrad - about 7%), Michigan seems similar as well: https://www.law.umich.edu/prospectivestudents/admissions/Pages/faq-charts.aspx

(A bit more vague, but 50+ michigan undergrad students go on to Michigan Law, which has a total JD size of about 950. Probably something like 6% of michigan law students went to michigan undergrad.)

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Here are the links to the Chicago Law School information from above (forgot to include them earlier).
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/2019-08/announcements_2019-20_-_final.pdf
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/Admissions%20Profile%20Card%202018%20FINAL.pdf

As of now, it appears that there are 600 JD enrollees and 197 1L’s; the average age is 24 which suggests a couple years of work experience or graduate work somewhere (see following link). Yale has around 200 every year, per the YLS report I linked earlier, and JHS’s post suggests that a good number of matriculants similarly are not straight out of college.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/class-profile

That list I posted earlier showed that Chicago LS at least enrolls from a wider variety of undergraduate institutions than does Yale, even (seemingly) at the expense of its own undergraduate program. However, a couple of observations:

  1. the law school does, indeed, have a significantly lower yield than other top schools, according to the following website and from what I’ve heard from other parents, so it’s possible that College grads admitted to the law school are opting for elsewhere. https://7sage.com/top-law-school-admissions/

  2. However, we know from the latest College Career Placement report that the “2017 admission cycle” saw 16 acceptances to the law school. Those guys were 2L’s presumably at some law school in 2018/19 - the same time period that saw 42 College grads enrolled at the Law School. That’s around 14 College enrollees per year, on average so very close to the 16 admitted. Am I off base to think that it appears the Law School only accepts College grads who they predict will actually attend? Perhaps the yield of College grads accepted to Law is near 100%.

Another (anecdotal) observation: a friend’s kid is currently a 1L at Chicago, straight out of (another) undergrad, so on the youngish side but with excellent “softs”. She was also admitted to NYU and I think Penn. Chicago gave her the best financial aid deal. She was a reverse split: 75th on GPA, 25th for LSAT. This year is the first year at Chicago with a majority female 1L class so perhaps being a female has been a “hook” there. It also happened to be the best fit, in her view, based on her research and her interview with the adcom.

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We now have an accumulation of testimony from various eras as to the non-marks-focussed culture of the College - W.H. McNeill (writing about the Hutchins era); me (the sixties); Cue (the nineties); and JHS (the early 2000’s). We are admittedly dealing here with something impressionistic and unmeasurable - general culture, with all it anomalies and exceptions duly acknowledged. But let’s suppose that the unanimity of our observations means something, that we who were there got an important part of it right over a period of some seventy years during which many things changed in the country and the world but not in the culture of the College. Is it probable that Chicago students stood their ground for so long, weathered all those worldly changes without flinching, and then, within the space of a decade, completely capitulated, giving it all up for a laser-like focus on grades, preparing for LSATs and the like?

To know the answers to these questions we need the testimony of current or recent students, either directly or via parents. Snark and Dun would be invaluable resources.

39

Or, did the Law school start to play the rankings game (like the College did)? Chicago Law was generally #4 when USNews started ranking in the late 80’s…C-Law then dropped to #6 in the early oughts (behind Columbia and NYU). The way to get back to #4 is to raise LSAT and GPA scores by aggressively recruiting such students (with merit money?). Is that what Admissions did?

40

^ The College went though wilder swings than going from #4 - #6 and then back to #4.

More likely what you are seeing is a larger share of College kids interested in attending professional school. Professional school hopefuls were always worried about their grades.

If the current 1st year class entered UChicago with a “grade-grubbing” mindset, they have likely been rendered speechless with disappointment only a few weeks into the fall quarter. I know of at least one Hum sequence where the modal grade on the first paper was a C+/B-. No A’s were given out (although 6% were apparently handed an A-).