<p>This past weekend, I attended an event at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas), and had a talk with one of the deans at the university’s engineering school. I ask her about students ‘padding’ their GPA with another minor or major to boost their profiles in law school admissions (which are mostly based strictly on numbers). I couldn’t believe how she responded.</p>
<p>First of all, I was told that engineering students typically have lower GPAs because of the difficulty of the curriculum and needed to take on another minor or major to boost their GPAs. However, she told me that SMU engineering students typically had some of the HIGHEST GPAs because of their dedication and love of their major. I walked away from that meeting feeling as though I had been given a regurgitated script developed by an admissions team.</p>
<p>What gives? Was she just lying to me as a ploy acquire another student as part of the ‘recruiting strategy’?</p>
<p>Highest GPA in what respect? To other majors at that school or to schools across the U.S.? If at SMU, how many students are studying the “easier” engineering major vs. the harder ones? With a little research you can find out the grade distributions for teachers in the major you’re interested in and figure it out to a certain degree.</p>
<p>What you thought is true, engineering students typically have lower GPAs because of the difficulty of the curriculum. I have never heard of people trying to boost their GPAs by taking a minor but it’s not surprising. I tried to boost my GPA by taking the easiest electives possible.</p>
<p>Watch out for grade inflation. If a single school had higher gpas, on average, than the rest of the colleges I would suspect that their grading was not as strict, or the curriculum was not as difficult, as it would be at comparable schools. Unless, that is, I had good reason to think otherwise…</p>
<p>^She spoke in the context of SMU’s engineering students having higher GPAs compared to the other majors in the school, including the highly ranked business and arts majors of SMU.</p>
<p>Yes, I do believe she gave me a skewed response that could be more deeply investigated to show otherwise.</p>
<p>yagottabelieve: Which GPA will graduate schools look at? The overall, the only the courses that make up the major, or both? If adcoms do look at only the courses that make up the major, how do they know specifically what they are?</p>
<p>I’ve had to report a bunch of different GPAs when applying for grad school. Science/engineering/math GPA, in-major GPA, total GPA, junior & senior level GPA, and maybe one or two others.</p>
<p>I think what the lady was talking about is possible since you’ll probably pull a decent GPA in your own major (like everyone else) but you’ll also be able to excel in your humanities classes since they’ll be considerably easier. I know my humanities GPA was actually higher than my STEM one since I got mostly Bs in my minor (physics), but got As in all but two of my humanities classes.</p>
<p>Depends on the school. It’s best to contact individual schools’ graduate departments and ask them what they are looking for. The reason why grad school adcoms are able to know what classes they need to pay attention to (when attention is paid to them) is because the adcoms study the various curricula offered at other schools. Some may even have a hand in said curricula, say, if the professor coauthors a paper or textbook with another professor at another school.</p>