Suggestions to incoming 2014, re: Grade Deflation

PtonGrad2000
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:58:35 +0000

Here is the full comment from the Dean as excerpted by Ramblin.

[A Tougher ‘A’ at Princeton Has Students on Edge - The Choice Blog - NYTimes.com](A Tougher 'A' at Princeton Has Students on Edge - The New York Times)

[Comment #88 from NYT article]

"I am the Dean of Admissions at Yale Law School (and also a Princeton graduate).

While I cannot speak for other professions, Princeton’s grade policy should not impact graduates’ law school admissions. The Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) — which compiles the numerical data on each law school applicant — provides, in addition to a student’s cumulative GPA, the percentile rank of that student’s GPA as compared with other applicants to law school from that same institution within the last three years. In other words, a law school admissions officer can (or should) see the difference between, say, a 3.7 at West Point (which would place that student in the upper 90th percentile) and a 3.7 at a school that is prestigious but has a lot of grade inflation (I won’t name names but a 3.7 can be as low as the 60th percentile at some very elite schools).

While it may be true that some law schools may be more interested in absolute GPAs in order to manipulate their institutions’ “rankings” according to popular publications, I would say that this is less true of the top law schools, which are more interested in getting the top students from a variety of schools. To the extent that a law school a) actually reads an entire application and b) can see how a student compares to the pool of applicants from that same school, Princeton’s grade inflation policy should not make much of a difference in its law school admission rates.

Asha Rangappa"



Perhaps we should ask the Dean to send a personal note to German_Car.