<p>Sorry, Cosmos. I didn’t mean to insult you. I do get exasperated sometimes reading posts by high school juniors who are scheming about their law school admissions.</p>
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<li> There is actually a lot of conflicting evidence out there. In the Math Majors thread, a recent graduate states it as gospel that math majors have trouble getting jobs and grad school placements because of their low GPAs, and I have to trust that he’s not completely off base. On the other hand, my rising fourth-year kid knows plenty of people with unsensational GPAs that are heading off to medical school or graduate school.</li>
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<p>When she was in 12th grade and hesitating a few days before committing to Chicago, our next-door neighbor – who at the time was a key faculty member for the MD/PhD program at a mid-level medical school – told her, “Don’t you realize that when it comes time to apply to graduate school, the University of Chicago really means something?” Now, how much it means is open to question, but that was an honest response from the horse’s mouth, as it were.</p>
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<li> Harvard Law School probably knows more about grades at Chicago and, say, Brown (or Harvard) than the people at those colleges do. Every year, it gets dozens, maybe hundreds of applications from students who have graduated from each college in the past 4-5 years. If people there care, they can easily track the grade distribution at each college, based on major. They can track the grade distribution based on LSAT scores. And, what’s more, they can track the correlation between undergraduate grades and law school grades for any particular LSAT level. The only people in a position to know whether an A- Economics major at Chicago is equivalent to an A Economics major at Brown would be graduate Econ programs and top law and business schools.</li>
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<p>That’s a ton of information. I don’t know how much of it they use, but I’m confident no one throws Chicago students’ applications in the wastebasket because they only have 3.7 GPAs.</p>
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<li> That said, I suspect that grades at Chicago are not as far below grades at many of its competitors as people think. Maybe there are a few places with extreme grade inflation. Maybe Chicago grades are below the mean. But I don’t think they are anything like a full half grade below, probably more like 0.1 (out of 4.3). Students complain about tough grading elsewhere, too.</li>
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