<p>It’s not necessarily that they care about “prestige”. They do care about performance, and they know that tork that earned a B+ at a very demanding school may have earned an A or an A+ at a school where there was less competition.</p>
<p>I had a good friend at Berkeley Law who had a single grade of less than an A in four years at his undergraduate school, a non-flagship state university. His LSAT score was well above the mean for every law school in the country that reported the number. (Only Harvard didn’t report theirs at the time.) He was rejected at Harvard and Stanford.</p>
<p>As is turned out, he was capable of succeeding at Harvard, which he proved by earning excellent grades there during his last year of law school when he participated in an exchange program the two schools.</p>