<p>I don’t understand that comment. I don’t read that forum but I took a quick look and saw this:</p>
<p>"Mostly they look at your cumulative GPA (that’s what they have to report for US news rankings and such so they care a lot about it). What level the class is makes less of a difference than when you take them…a 3.5 all the way through college is probably SLIGHTLY less preferable than 3.0 freshman year, 3.25 sophomore year, 3.75 junior year, 4.0 senior year (for example). </p>
<p>But it’s a fairly slight difference, especially if you don’t have an addendum to your application explaining why your grades at first don’t reflect your ability (illness, family crisis, changed major, etc.). If it’s just that it took you a while to settle into college-level work, then there’s not much of a reason for them to expect that it wouldn’t take you a similarly long time to settle into law-school-level work." </p>
<p>That’s exactly what I said.</p>
<p>Other comments offer contradictory comments about adjustments for the relative “prestige” of undergrad but the general tenor agrees with my comment, that it happens, especially for the very top “prestige” schools and that for most schools “prestige” adjustments aren’t very important. </p>
<p>Other comments talk about the “soft factors” which I discussed. And like my comments, the points are that schools look at these other factors when kids are in a pool. Some schools have explicitly been driven by Court decisions to a points system that mandates looking at these factors.</p>
<p>I would also note that while many people talk about the hard score requirements of gpa and LSAT many posters speak about top law schools taking applicants with relatively lower gpa’s and higher LSAT’s if they come from a decent school (and likely if they have material “soft factors”). So, as I’ve said, yes it’s a numbers game but it’s not strictly a numbers game and the various schools make their own efforts to distinguish themselves. (There’s a reason: law schools believe that legal aptitude is somewhat specific - it is, btw - and that a high LSAT is a reasonable specific predictor while a high gpa is a general predictor of success but not one that’s specific to law.)</p>
<p>On that point a final note. My impression was that we cared less about rankings than an undergrad program. The reason was that prestige at the graduate law level is based on a pretty small number of graduates per year - maybe 500 for a large program and much less for many. Prestige was history based, professor based (who wrote the book on Torts? on Criminal Law? who is quoted by the Supreme Court?), resource based and on the alumni need to maintain prestige. Each high-ranked school did have a somewhat different profile of the kind of applicant they preferred because each school has an image of itself and fits into a larger university that has an image of itself. </p>
<p>My answers may be somewhat different but not “very different.”</p>