<p>Is anyone a shoe-in for a top 5 law school?</p>
<p>For example, I’m a 4.0 engineering major from the University of Texas (which is sort of a feat). I expect a 172+ on the LSAT (probably more like a 175+).</p>
<p>But, my impression is that no one’s a shoe-in for top law schools. Is that right?</p>
<p>Stats are public info. You are an engineer so easily capable of looking at 10 out of 100 accepted. The fact that you don’t have your LSAT score means you are taking it in Dec?</p>
<p>If you scroll to the bottom of the page at the following link, you’ll find the LSAT/GPA grid for admission to Yale Law, which is probably the most selective in the country:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/howweevaluateapplications.htm[/url]”>http://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/howweevaluateapplications.htm</a></p>
<p>For the 175+/3.75 box, the admit rate is about 42%. For 170-174/3.75+ it’s about 20%. 175+/3.5-3.74 is 9% and 165-169/3.75+ is 8%. It falls off markedly after that.</p>
<p>What you really want to see, however, and what your prelaw office should have, are the grids for various law schools for graduates of your school over the last five or ten years. (Not that I want to reprise the debate I had in another thread, but the grids do vary by undergraduate institution.) Having seen the grids for Harvard undergrads, I can tell you that a Harvard undergrad in the top box (175+/3.75+) is about as close to guaranteed a spot in a top 5 law school as you can get. I don’t know whether the same can be said for University of Texas undergrads, but you should be able to find out.</p>
<p>I’ve always wondered how one gets a 4.0 in engineering. That’s about 30x more impressive than a 180 LSAT.</p>
<p>Not really. A 180 LSAT is earned by around 15 people each year. There are certainly at least several thousand times that many engineering gpa’s across the nation. Engineering classes are also curved so that the top 15% (at harshest) get A’s, even if that means giving people who get 20% on a test an A. 85th percentile versus 99.99 percentile. Which is tougher to get?</p>
<p>Ya, top 15% of class gets a 4.0 at your average engineering school, Im sure of it.</p>
<p>Flawed logic, Shiboing. It’s one thing to get an A in one engineering class (and I don’t know that 15% of students get As at all schools…surely the curve varies among universities) and quite another to get As in EVERY engineering class, and every elective too.</p>
<p>
That is false. At the harshest engineering classes there can be 0 As. At the harshest classes 2/3 of the class can fail. I’ve seen it.</p>
<p>Perhaps I should rephrase. Getting a perfect on a 101 question test like the LSAT is less impressive than a sustained impressive performance over a 4 year period like a 4.0 in Engineering. The engineering GPA is certainly a better indicator of intelligence.</p>
<p>Ah, online chats, where people often fail to listen.</p>
<p>Sure, there are univerities and classes where 2/3 of the people fail. Those instances are rare. Most universities have easy grade distributions. Most universities have grade inflation, even in engineering. Sure, a 4.0 in engineering in MIT might be impressive, and getting a 4.0 in engineering likely requires more work at most universities. But only 15 people in the US get 180’s each year. And thousands upon thousands of students likely get 4.0’s in engineering if you account for all the schools out there. Numbers don’t lie. </p>
<p>And grades are only an index where intelligence comes into play in concert with other factors. If anything, grades are more a function of work ethic, picking the right classes, and brown-nosing the right people than they are of intelligence; some professors will fail certain students no matter what.</p>
<p>Numbers don’t lie. The rarer the feat, the more impressive it is, and the 180 is up there.</p>
<p>
Source? A cursory look at the numbers shows that is idiotic.</p>
<p>I don’t know about other schools, but in the history of Harvard College (as in 370 years), there have been five students who graduated with a perfect 4.0.</p>
<p>what are the top 10 best law schools? can someone post it here? thanks</p>
<p>To the OP – there are no guarantees in admissions to top law schools. Sure, excellent grades, a strong LSAT score, thoughtful and enthusiastic recommendations, a well written personal statement and a host of other factors make it more likely that you will get into the top law school of your dreams, but there is no such thing as a sure thing is law school admissions.</p>
<p>I’d ay not one is a shoe in for top 3 law schools - then it get a bit easier to predict with grades and predicted LSATs like your’s. don’t ake thatr LSAT score for granted, however. Take a lot of practice tests if you have not. They should give you a preety reliable idea. But LSAT taker I am most familiar with scored 168-178 in many practice tests and then 173 on test day; so there can be a fairly wide range of expected results.</p>
<p>ha, texas. seriously stupid question. if you want to get into a top 5 law school you better have graduated from a top 5 school. </p>
<p>try to transfer to yale or harvard. then they might look at you application.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I hope you are being sarcastic.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.law.harvard.edu/admissions/jd/colleges.php[/url]”>http://www.law.harvard.edu/admissions/jd/colleges.php</a></p>
<p><em>so close to going ballistic</em></p>
<p>yeah, just being sarcastic/highlighting my perspective from a different thread relating to UG prestige and law school admissions. </p>
<p>texas is a great school.</p>
<p>Hmm, interesting thread.</p>
<p>One question came out of it for me: do law schools look at your major? I mean, they must to a certain extent, but is it an important factor?</p>
<p>
Very marginally. If all else is equal, they might take the harder major (or perhaps the more rare major).</p>
<p>To the OP – I also have a 4.0 in Engineering from Texas and an LSAT of 170. All t14 schools except for HYS have sent me letters, fee waivers, blah blah blah. However, this is no guarantee of admission. As it stands I am waiting on the next cycle due to career reasons and will apply for '08. You need to get top notch LORs if possible and a good solid PS. Work experience of some sort would probably not hurt either.</p>
<p>As for the realtive ease of a 4.0 in engineering at UT, here I can speak with absolutely more authority than the rest of the folks responding. My grad year (1989) there were right at 10 of us out of the entire college of engineering graduating class of over 1500. (2/3 of 1 percent) Most of these, if not all, were spared the horrendous weed out courses of the first year through enrollment in the Honors Engineering program. I would suspect the OP falls into this category as well. Engineers can also protect their 4.0 by taking required Gov and History classes at the Community College while interning somewhere and transfer them as credit/no-credit which is a total blow off. (Caveat – LSDAS will actually COUNT these grades in the GPA.) Additionally, UT has seen a reasonable amount of grade inflation in the past nearly 15 years or so. Nevertheless, I am guessing the OP was still in the top 1-2% of the class of close to 2000 which is a hell of an accomplishment.</p>
<p>To younghov1983 – you probably mis interpreted the relative ranking of the Texas College of Engineering (12) versus Engineering at Harvard (21) or Yale(39).</p>