Psychology major for prospective law school student

sakky
Wed, 27 Oct 2004 22:15:18 +0000

While I can’t comment on how the grades in psychology might be curved, I think it is unlikely that psychology as a whole is as difficult as the hard sciences at Columbia. That might be due to the caliber of the students in psychology (weaker students effectively means an easier curve), or whatnot. But the point is, you must agree, you are going to find few students at Columbia who say that they originally wanted to study psychology, but it was just too difficult, so now they’re majoring in chemistry or physics. It would be far more likely for you to find the reverse situation (Columbia students who came in wanting to study physics but found it to be too difficult, so now they’re in psychology).

I don’t really like saying this, but what I would advocate as far as law school admissions goes, your best major goes is one where you have the best chance of getting high grades. That usually boils down to what you are good at and what happens to be easily graded (without much work) at your school. The hardest part about law school is getting admitted in the first place. So you gotta do what you gotta do to maximize your chances of admission, and to do that means getting high grades, and if that means cherry-picking a whole bunch of easy classes, so be it. Does it really help you if you take classes that boost your writing and analytical skills if by doing so you end up with a bunch of bad grades that prevent you from getting admitted to law school in the first place? Your first priority should be getting admitted. It sounds sad and cynical, but that is the game of law school admissions.