Or draw conclusions w/o looking up the data. How very “un-UC” of you Cue. Can you explain how YLS has similar numbers from UC (18) and Brown (17)?
@bluebayou , you say that “what law schools care about first and foremost is your numbers”. That seems indisputable inasmuch as the schools ask for your numbers, and the numbers are definitely telling them something about your academic success and aptitudes. The numbers would be valuable to them but would not prevent their making adjustments for a kid taking hard courses at a hard school, especially one known for grade deflation. They would want to do that if the objective is to identify and select the objectively highest quality applicants. You’re saying they’re not doing it, even at Chicago Law itself and even with respect to students applying from its own College, because the whole thing is being mechanically driven by the rankings methodology of USNews. That would be a scandal if it is so.
I don’t call myself naive, but I would need to see some evidence of this before I believe it. If Chicago undergrads were being shafted by their own law school in that way, someone with knowledge of the situation would pass a plain vanilla packet over the transom of the Maroon offices. If for no other reason than fear of that prospect - and not for any higher motives, if one must be cynical - I highly doubt it is happening.
Sure @JBStillFlying - yale law is just one school. Brown provides data on placement to all law schools, including the 20 or so it sends to HLS a year, the 15 to NYU, 12 to Columbia, etc. On aggregate, the school w the better numbers has the better placement.
It seems silly to even need to say that out loud w law school admissions!
Also, JB, you asked how Brown places in other fields like business, engineering, etc. At least for business, it seems to place extremely well (it’s extremely well represented at Harvard and Stanford B schools, as well as Wharton and others).
Btw, it’s med school placement is also notable: https://www.brown.edu/academics/college/advising/health-careers/medical-admission-data-snapshot
(Placing like 5 a year at UPenn Med, Columbia, etc.)
I would say, in its peer group, Brown is on the high end for elite prof/employer placement (with the very top feeders here being Harvard and Yale). Chicago is middle of the road. Cornell and Johns Hopkins are on the lower end. That’s what all the placement stats I can see bear out.
@marlowe1 - you may underestimate the importance of rankings for law schools.
The Stanford Law Dean even admitted “you distort your policies to preserve your ranking.” (p. 232 of this article: http://ilj.law.indiana.edu/articles/81/81_1_Stake.pdf)
Moreover, most law schools probably know the 3.75 168 LSAT from Brown will do as well as the 3.57 168 LSAT from Chicago. At the super-picky schools, they’ll then just take the higher numbers candidates, most of the time.
I’m not sure why this is difficult to understand. The rankings value GPA and LSAT, and law schools need to preserve their rankings. So, schools in turn value GPA and LSAT - much more than business schools or education schools or whatever.
And you then see that play out. Schools with comparable numbers of applicants but different scores have different outcomes.
Take Michigan and Ohio State. Both have around 350 law school applicants a year. Michigan’s numbers are 3.5 160, and Ohio State is 3.3 156. Michigan will place better, across the board. Same thing with Georgetown and UVA. They both have around 230 law applicants a year. Georgetown’s numbers are 3.6 164, and UVA’s are 3.4 161. Overall, Georgetown will place better.
(And, I think if you looked at placement from Yale down, that would play out - Georgetown would generally place better across the board than UVA, same for Michigan vs. Ohio State, and same for Chicago vs. Brown.)
Help me understand why that would be a scandal. Law school (and med schools) care about rankings. As much as they claim that they hate the rankings, they do/have to care about them.
Other than Yale and Stanford, law schools are numbers-driven, and have been for a long time. Even Harvard Law is not as picky as it likes to appear; exceed their medians and you have an excellent chance of an offer. (HLS has a huge class and there are just not enough 173+s to go around, so they have to accept most of them.)
And they do, particularly for STEM and engineering majors. (And that is bcos they know that physical science majors are in demand for IP jobs.)
They also make adjustments across schools. A 3.7 from rigorous Chicago is much better than a 3.7 from Podunk State. But in most cases a 4.0 from Podunk will get an offer before the rigorous 3.7 with the same LSAT.
btw: course rigor is not a rankings criteria.
The scandal would be this: the Law School of the U of C, with knowledge of grade deflation in its own College, ignored that phenomenon with the effect of punishing its own students for attending that College.
Or put it this way… The admissions committee is considering two applicants, one from the U of C and one from Brown, virtually indistinguishable except for a difference of gpa within the well-known differential between the two schools. One could imagine also a more granular analysis of the relative difficulty of the courses taken, the rigor with which they are taught, and so on, but let’s pass over that and hypothesize nothing more than that differential of gpa that, if corrected for deflation, would show the U of C kid to be objectively the superior (if only by a little bit) applicant. Too bad, says the adcom, but the Chicago kid doesn’t help our median gpa and hence our ranking as much as the Brown kid. Throw him back. That’ll show him for doing his undergrad here.
You don’t think that’s a scandal, @bluebayou ? Let’s set aside considerations of the morality of it and set aside its flouting of the ostensible aim of recruiting the objectively best applicants. Just imagine that story appearing in the Maroon. How do you think that would play with the student body? With parents thinking of paying the bill to send a kid to the College?
Is is national law school, and wants to remain in that rarefied Air. (And I have no doubt Chicago Law would love to move ahead of Columbia.)
Has Chicago Law ever said that it favors undergrads from Chicago College? Is that part of its mission, like some state law/grad schools favor their own undergrads? If not, then no, I don’t think that is a scandal at all.
Chicago sells its (monkish?) rigor. Brown sells its flexible curricular system. For those that care to look, it’s not hard to find that the mean GPA of a Brown grad is one of the highest in the nation. Right up there with Yale and Pomona College, among others.
All other college things being equal – and they certainly are not – prelaw types would be better served attending a college with a more generous grading system than less generous. (And if you have your heart set on YLS, try to EA to Yale College.)
Totally agreed with with @bluebayou - especially because there is most likely negligible difference in law performance between the 3.57 chicago grad and 3.75 brown grad. They are both likely to have a lot of success, and I doubt law schools have seen chicago students thrive in ways other students do not. If they did, you’d see a bigger market for chicago grads at law schools.
All this just points to chicago being in the pack in the law school world. I really doubt law schools have gotten to the point where they can say - man this 3.5 chicago gpa is really going to thrive more than this 3.7 brown gpa. Students with those grades and great lsat scores are probably going to do well at any law school. Why go with the lesser gpa?
My guess is if you looked at chicago law, as there arent that many 3.9s at chicago undergrad, they’ll take as many high scoring lsat takers from chicago undergrad. So, the 3.6 or 3.7 but 173 lsat types from chicago are covered by chicago law. And chicago students clearly do well on the lsat, so there are a decent number of those. Chicago law can then pick up the high gpas it needs to maintain rank from other undergrads. It truly is a numbers game for the law schools, and keeping medians high is a huge priority.
Of course brown just happens to have a population with a lot of 3.9s AND a lot of 173 lsats… it’s why they send 30-35 a year to y and h and s law schools!
No favoring of the Chicago kid going on in my example, Blue. The favoring is of the Brown kid. You don’t seem to get that. Perhaps you don’t care. A grade is a grade is a grade. And why should you go beyond this given that rankings are your only concern here?
But Chicago undergrads and their parents would not be quite as cavalier if not ethically obtuse if they knew this is how they were being treated. It would scandalize me, if I believed it, and it would scandalize them, if they knew it was happening.
@marlowe1 - read the article on law rankings i linked to above. Even deans admit they are held hostage by rankings, and it distorts their admissions policies. This isn’t scandal. This isn’t even news any more.
Also, it is silly to say the favoring is of the brown kid. It’s favoring the high gpas. And, newsflash - law schools favor high gpas.
Cue, I give up on you. You have lost any sense of the difference between what is true and what merely plays well. Did you never read Plato in your school days? Do you remember the parable of the Cave?
And are you telling me with a straight face that Chicago kids and parents would not be scandalized by a story that revealed that they were being discriminated against by their own law school in the way I described?
Are Chicago’s students not more interested in intellectualism than practicality? Some have invested a great deal of time here trying to convince others (and perhaps themselves) that is so. There’s no scandal unless UChicago hides the slightly lower GPA of its undergraduates from potential students (as it does with some of its admission statistics) and that doesn’t appear to be the case. It strikes me as demeaning to suggest they’re being ‘punished.’ I think they’re smart enough to know what they’re getting into.
@marlowe1 - there’s no scandal when schools say they favor high gpas…
If it’s known a 3.57 chicago and 3.75 brown perform the same, chicago law SHOULD take the 3.75.
If the chicago student has a track record of performing better, that would be different. But, I really dont think the chicago undergrad w the lower gpa offers some benefit to the 3.75 brown grad.
Why would the lower gpa chicago grad w the same lsat do better than the brown grad? That’s what the law school ad comm would ask. The same lsat score offers evidence they would both perform similarly, in fact.
I think, marlowe, you are forgetting the lsat piece of this.
Now, if chicago law readily took the 3.5 164 lsat brown grads over the 3.5 167 Chicago grads, that would be strange.
But that might not even be a scandal! Didn’t yale law admit to doing that with h and y undergrads?
Sorry if I was unclear. I was just using Brown as an example since the Uni has one of the highest mean GPA’s of colleges in the US (if not the highest). Moreover, it’s not me, it’s the top law schools, including Chicago Law, that are favoring a 3.9 from anywhere over a 3.6 from anywhere else (assuming similar LSAT score).
What discrimination? Chicago Law has been publishing its medians and interquartiles for years (ABA requires it). Their median GPA for matriculants is a 3.9. By definition they favor high GPA’s and discriminate against lower GPAs, as do ALL law schools. This is not news; its public info.
@bluebayou , @Cue7 , @jgladney , you must all then believe that the phenomenon of grade deflation at Chicago does not exist. If that’s what you believe, you should say so. If, however, you believe that grades are dished out in the same way at all schools, then it must follow that Brown students are more devoted to their studies, harder-working and inherently more talented than their Chicago counterparts. Do you believe that?
I assume you don’t, and I assume Chicago Law does not. If it is concerned as it should be with recruiting the best talent, shouldn’t it correct for such an obvious distortion? That is easy enough to do. The differential is well known.
Blue is honest enough to answer that question: It’s because USNews does not take these differentials between schools into account. Because US News decrees it, Law Schools must necessarily accept it, since, after all, only the rankings matter to them.
I’m not sure whether you three are simply bowing to the way of the world or whether you believe a respectable argument can be made in favor of such a willful blindness. Clearly you’re not scandalized, but neither has any of you seen fit to answer my question as to whether Chicago undergrads and their parents would be.
When you sign up for Chicago you know the place is going to be tough and that good grades are going to be hard to come by. But you also know that your own law school knows that about the place. You can expect a rational consideration of your record and that this known, obvious, and quantifiable factor about it will be taken into account. If it is not taken into account the Chicago kid incurs a penalty and the Brown kid gets a premium. That’s a scandal.
@marlowe1 - the law deans themselves have admitted this is a travesty. The admissions deans probably all secretly want more latitude to take a 3.3 from st johns or reed or wherever, but they are all locked into these rankings.
It’s not chicago law’s fault - of course they value chicago undergrad and know it’s rigorous. But they are beholden to the rankings, as are all schools. And the rankings tell schools to favor high gpas.
Why is this scandalous?
Huh? On what basis do you make this assumption/conclusion? And from what does it follow?
Come now, marlowe, your critical reading skills are much better than this. (Hint: no one has said, ‘only the rankings matter…’)
Also true at other top colleges, such as MIT and Johns Hopkins. Among the top xx colleges, whatever you consider to be Chicago’s peer group, by definition, one of them is gonna have the highest mean GPA and one is gonna have the lowest. Chicago is neither.
- Do we have UC matriculation data to those schools , HLS/NYU/Columbia, etc?
(sorry - I got sidetracked from the convo by Real Life this afternoon so just catching up)
It’s scandalous because it’s a silly sell-out for the sake of a tinhorn mag’s pitiable accolade of excellence. It’s a free country, so the mag is not to blame. I don’t really blame the Dean of the Law School for peeking at the mag. But to discriminate against the students of his own college for the sake of a few brownie points from such a source - many epithets could apply, but I’ll settle for calling it a scandal.
Get out of the Cave, Cue. You can see things more clearly when they’re not obscured by all these shadowy bits of dubious received wisdom. And answer the question, please: If an article with proof of this appeared in the Maroon, do you see students and their parents taking it lying down?