<p>“I don’t think that law school admissions properly accounts for engineering GPAs. There are two things that, IMO, should happen to evaluate engineering applicants: bump up their GPAs to account for the lower mean from engin. grades, and bump up for the fact that engineers tend to work harder. An electrical engineer and an English major might both be dead at the middle of their classes - and one would have a 3.4 and the other would have a 2.9. At least at my alma mater, the engineers had better stats (SATs and class rank) coming in than the liberal arts. So there should be a bump for that. Finally, engineers just plain work harder. I was a double major - frankly, I think I’m pretty qualified to make the comparison… and there just is no contest. So, IMO, admissions might give a slight edge to engineering applicants, but I don’t think that it’s enough.”</p>
<p>I agree that schools should account for a lower mean. However, I don’t think you can give a double value to engineering, unless you have clear evidence of higher entering SAT’s, etc. You may well feel that engineering material is more difficult, but the mean adjustment would seem to control for that. </p>
<p>“Deviating slightly - the “some engineers don’t do well at liberal arts” point is kind of a red herring. Again, double major here - engin. is just plain hard. I don’t think that my brain for foreign languages is better than my brain for science (in fact, the opposite is probably true!), but the classes are just easier. Disagree at will, but take them both concurrently and you will probably change your mind.”</p>
<p>I’m not so sure. I think people are just cut out for different things. I certainly know engineers that couldn’t ace their liberal arts classes, and that would be screwed in most foreign arts classes. </p>
<p>“IMO, admissions officers at law schools aren’t wilfully ignorant about engineering, nor have they studied it extensively. Roughly 1% of l.s. applicants are engineers - honestly, do you really think that they can properly analyze how well they perform in law school and adjust accordingly? I’ve heard, anedoctally, that engineers often perform the best because of the type of thinking involved (inductive and assimilating a lot of information), but their writing skills are often rusty (not bad - just rusty - not enough of that in engineering). While l.s. admissions people are professionals, they are also liberal artists. I doubt that many (if any) of them took a single engineering or science class beyond that required for distribution courses. Do you think they can properly analyze, from experience, how hard the major is? It’s not that they are bad or ignorant people so much as a lack of exposure. Finally, there might be differences between engineering disciplines - an environmental engineer, with a more broad background and more project-type courses, may perform better than a computer engineer who spent four years writing code.”</p>
<p>I’m not sure if anyone who hasn’t studied a given major can really determine the difficulty level. But I do think that engineers overall are probably weaker in both reading and writing than most liberal arts majors. Both skills of course, are important in law school, and the law. </p>
<p>If engineering really develops the requisite thinking skills, this should give them a corresponding advantage on the LSAT, which of course is far more important than GPA. (Though I’ve known engineers who struggle with the exam, probably because they don’t do as much reading in their major.)</p>