| Topic Name: |
Strong Undergrads...? |
| Message Name: |
subjective |
| Date Posted: |
10/21/2001 |
| In Reply To: |
How do you know if your undergraduate school is viewed as a good or strong school, especially to top law schools? We all know that the Ivies, Stanford, Duke, and some publics like Berkeley are regarded highly, but what about other schools ranked in the top 25? Are all of them viewed well, just some, or only the ones I listed? |
| Message: |
Which schools are "viewed well" is one of those questions in which different admissions officers are going to take entirely different views. After the "we all know" schools, the Princetons, Harvards, Dukes, Amhersts and Berkeleys of the world, there are wide divergences of opinion as to which are the "top schools".
The US News rankings are useless for sorting out number 14 from number 25. But if your question is related to law school admissions, then you just need to know that GPA is in general much more important than undergrad school rank, and LSAT is in general more important than GPA.
Two exceptions exist to this rule. The first takes place in the way some schools determine their admissions formula. Formulae are usually something like multiply GPA by 10 or 15, add it to LSAT, and compare it with a benchmark. A few schools "weight" GPA by increasing it or decreasing it slightly for undergrad school rank. Some years ago, one of Boalt's tables got snared by an information request, and became public.
You can find it on the internet at a number of places using the google.com search engine, sorry I don't remember the URL. What it showed was that pretty much all the "solid" schools in the top 25 got either a slight increase or no increase, and only "secondary state schools", places like CA State--LA got a decrease.
Even the decreases, though, made me question whether the
worries about undergrad rank were worth the stress. The second place in which undergrad school rank can matter is in discretionary admissions. If your GPA and LSAT do not make you clearly into a particular school, a better undergrad school may help you more than a lesser one. In general, though, I'd obsess less about undergrad school rank and more about high grades, a major that interests you (and would be a good fallback should you decide not to do law), a school that interests you, and a place where you can enjoy yourself without going haywire with parties. If you're already in undergrad, then you can limit your worries to GPA and LSAT.
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