Should but it doesn't. All these greedy pigs care about is maintaining/raising their spots on the US News Rankings. A 3.0 from Dartmouth is the same as a 3.0 from the U of Phoenix. These factors matter. Illinois was just outed for the falsity of theirs.

Some people think getting into a top UG entitles them to complacency.


I can see UG prestige being a tiebreaker if your numbers are along the margins. Otherwise, something greater is at work here, such as being a mega-legacy (ordinarily speaking, being a "run-of-the-mill" legacy is akin to a "good" soft factor).

You wish it mattered, but it doesn't. They are judged by your GPA; they are going to judge you by your GPA.

No school will disregard your gpa but some are more forgiving than others. What's your LSAT score? Work experience?

WE matters for Northwestern.

That is one school out of 220+. So clearly always relevant.

Highly relevant indeed because it's one of the best splitter schools, which is what the question originally asked.

Disprove the assertion.

Actually it matters in more places than you can imagine, to varying degrees. It also matters during OCI, to varying degrees (but that is irrelevant). Above all, it matters, if OP wants to go to Northwestern. If we were talking about 220+ schools, his 3.0 would be irrelevant, he'll get in somewhere.

Also, read the question. "What are the best splitter..."

People are always really quick to say that it's all about the raw GPA numbers.

For the most part, I will agree, it's centered on the raw number. However, I go to a T10-20 undergrad--not HYP, not Chicago, not even a T10--and when you go to the Career Services Office and look at the GPAs/LSATs of admitted students over the past several years, there are several T14 schools that have favored our GPA consistently over three to four years. At the same time, there is one T6 school that seems happy to reject even our strongest applicants!

So, I wouldn't bank on an advantage, but it's not entirely unreasonable to assume a slight edge, especially if there's evidence to support the notion.

What the fuck is a "T20" undergrad? Your undergrad is extremely unprestigious and unimpressive hth.

http://thedartmouth.com/2007/08/17/opinion/grades
At Dartmouth, however, a B can mean failure. Here, where the most recent median GPA (Spring 2007) was 3.23, a B implies that over half of your peers outperformed you. With 57 percent of course median grades in the A/A- range, a B seems terrible. In fact, no course (out of 414) last spring had a median grade lower than a B except History 32, "Asians in the Americas to 1905."

Originally, educational institutions used grades to evaluate student performance. In fact, the College's Organizations, Regulations and Courses handbook defines a B as "Good mastery of course material." But with grade inflation, professors like Dana Williams have admitted to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine that "grades now have become practically meaningless".

I'm bitter cause I went to a sTTTate school but shouldn't it be a bad thing if you get a 3.0 from Dartmouth versus a 3.0 from a state school?

No. Your competition at your sTTTate school was shit. Ergo it evens out. hth.

As a proud sTTTAter (and one who did pretty well), I agree with both of these sentiments. Dartmouth's inflation is horrifying, but they're all probably smarter than me anyway.

But it's not like you're curved against your competition at Dartmouth.

But that doesn't mean that 90% of the students did not gain a level of mastery beyond what an A- at the sTTTate school would have gotten. I know at my Ivy the 3.0 students definitely studied far more hours than my friends who got 3.7s at my state school. It's easy to look good when your competition is not trying their hardest, and likewise it is also easy to look mediocre when all of your competition is brilliant and tries very hard.

There is grade inflation everywhere, sometimes not within whole schools. The Annenburg(sp?) school of journalism at USC for instance has absurd grade inflation, I've heard tell of a guy skipping half his classes and spending all day blazed graduating with a 3.8. And, certainly, this dynamic of academic rigor at a given school factors in too. While a previous poster joked about how a Dartmouth education implies higher high school GPA and SAT scores which people 'totally care about after college admissions,' these numbers tend to imply the quality and difficulty of the undergraduate education itself. It's not a matter of rewarding ancient endeavors - it's simply about recognizing that no two schools are the same. Given how subjective it is, I'm kind of shocked that adcoms give GPA as much weight as they do, IMO, LSAT should be the only significant score they base their decisions on.

First off, why do you sound so angry?

For whatever it's worth, my undergrad afforded me the following opportunities:
A) Great professors who teach fairly small classes, and who make themselves accessible to undergrads
B) A large number of intelligent, serious peers who are dedicated to performing at a high level
C) Excellent placement into several T14s

Hope this helps.

I lol'd

http://gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf
"In response, private schools – more so than public schools – raised their grades. In the words of one late faculty member from Dartmouth, “we began systematically to inflate grades, so that our graduates would have more A's to wave around”(Perrin, 1998). The GPA gap between the private and public schools widened through the 1970s, and has stabilized since the 1980s.

Looking at finer scale variability, we find that colleges and universities have, without any collective consultation or external pressure, collectively created an ad hoc national grading scale based on school selectivity. Our database indicates that current grades at an institution can be roughly predicted by either of the following two formulae:
Average GPA = 2.8 +0.005*SEL + (if school is private add 0.2)
Average GPA = 2.8 + 0.001*(SATMV-850) + (if school is private add 0.1)
where SATMV is the combined average Math and Verbal SAT score of students and SEL is a selectivity measure that represents the average of the percentage of students with high school GPAs above 3.75, the percentage of students who graduated in the upper 10% of their high school class, and the percentage of student applicants rejected. The above two equations suggest that private schools are grading 0.1 to 0.2 higher on a 4.0 scale for a given talent level"



Even when you account for the students at private schools being "smarter" (higher SAT scores, higher high school GPAs) grades are highly inflated. A 3.0 from a public school should give you a small boost over someone with a 3.0 from an Ivy.

^and this is why we have the LSAT

Even for TLS, this is a ridiculous amount of butthurt.

BUT I WENT TO AN ELITE UNDERGRAD! I AM SPECIAL SNO FLAAAAAAKE!

the guy w/ the 3.0 from state school is probably smarter, that's about all I can take away

as far as splitter schools, Northwestern, WUSTL, Indiana at Bloomington