<p>I’ve seen a lot of blanket assertions on this topic, but little hard data to back up these assertions.</p>
<p>My law school alma mater (Berkeley) states that it takes into consideration the difficulty of the undergraduate program. There was a time when their numerical formula that guided admissions decisions assigned different multipliers to different undergraduate programs, until the Justice Department filed suit, arguing that this method had a racially disparate impact on admissions. They entered into a consent decree agreeing to stop using the formal multipliers.</p>
<p>The scarcity of publicly available hard data on this subject may relate to concerns about future litigation.</p>
<p>My guess is that most schools take into consideration, to varying degrees, the difficulty of the applicant’s undergraduate program, and that both the fields of study and the reputations of undergraduate institutions play a role.</p>