Is there anything I can do to get into HYS? Forum

[unknown666]

I've been getting over 175 on my LSAT scores, but I graduated last year from ugrad with a 3.2 GPA. I know that LSAC GPA is set after undergrad, so is there nothing I can do at all, and my only option is to forget about HYS?

I've been doing some reading around, and it doesn't seem that any law school other than HYS seems to be worth attending while paying the whole thing. No schools outside of top 8 seem to be worth attending without a significant scholarship, and I think I may be able to get into some of them, but the GPA would probably disqualify me from getting any money.

[MistakenGenius]

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[carmensandiego]

Yeah, you're probably not getting money from the T8 (weird distinction btw), although Columbia has given tiny ones out before (only enough to equal sticker COA at other T14s). I feel like people have gotten okay scholarships in the past from Northwestern and Michigan with GPAs that low if they had high LSATs. You can potentially get good money at good regional schools (especially WUSTL) if you really want to practice law. Of course, all of that is just speculation until you have a real LSAT score, since many people score a few points lower on the real thing.

Now, for your main question, should you give up on HYS? Well, Yale is the only holistic school out there as far as admissions are concerned. If you really, really want to apply and have money to burn, you could always throw an app at the three. That said, I would be absolutely shocked if you were accepted at any of them. There are just way too many people with numbers better than you for those schools to choose from. Yale didn't accept anyone with a GPA that low in at least the last three years (though it was close two years ago). For the class of 2018, only 25% of them had below a 3.86, and the lowest GPA accepted was a 3.35, and that's including anyone who may have been famous or super rich, URMs, and super softs. Again, you can try, but know it's almost certainly not going to happen.

@MistakenGenuis - this is completely off topic, but how'd you get your picture? The elephant (without the gorilla head/chest) is a picture I took when I was in Kenya for a study abroad trip...

[Jchance]

ehh you can transfer into HYS (more like just H) but I wouldnt bank on transferring if I was you

[MistakenGenius]

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[CanadianWolf]

Assuming that you score in the mid-to-high 170s, maybe getting an academic article published may help with T-6 admissions.

[MistakenGenius]

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[bpolley0]

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[NoLieAbility]

I still don't understand how such a prestigious institution can put any sort of weight on GPA given what goes on in academia

USNWR, breh.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Assuming that you score in the mid-to-high 170s, maybe getting an academic article published may help with T-6 admissions.

A published article can definitely help with admissions, and I think he might be able to slide into NYU or Columbia right now (at sticker of course) with a 175+. However, with a 3.2 and not being a URM, he'd basically have to become the next JK Rowling or George RR Martin to get HYS.

Well aren't you currently attending Yale? I still don't understand how such a prestigious institution can put any sort of weight on GPA given what goes on in academia- let alone some of the absolute garbage that is still being taught in certain fields (see Economics).

Lol

[bpolley0]

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[bpolley0]

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[A. Nony Mouse]

Nah. There are caveats to GPAs, of course, but they're not meaningless. Also, those prestigious institutions you're talking about are a part of academia, so whatever "goes on" in academia, they're fully immersed in it.

[bpolley0]

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[NoLieAbility]

It's absolutely hysterical and ridiculous.

So is law school. No less true, though.

[MistakenGenius]

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[A. Nony Mouse]

Nah. There are caveats to GPAs, of course, but they're not meaningless. Also, those prestigious institutions you're talking about are a part of academia, so whatever "goes on" in academia, they're fully immersed in it.

I am fully aware of that, unfortunately. I guess I should have been more specific- GPAS are not meaningless; however, when evaluating someone and making some sort of judgement about that individual basing it strictly on their GPA is an atrocious way of thinking- the way of thinking it seems a lot of the admissions committees and people on TLS think. Let's say Ken Griffin of Citadel Capital had a 2.5 GPA. Maybe at some point, in this hypothetical situation, he realized that what was being taught was theoretical nonsense laced with all sorts of ridiculous assumptions and instead of sitting around caring what other people thought of him he spent his time starting his own hedge fund instead.

People on here would imply some lady/ guy in Yale admissions is honestly thinking oh well he had a 2.5 GPA, not getting into Yale because I don't want it to put a blemish on our Us News Rankings!!It's absolutely hysterical and ridiculous.

This is just silly. To say that a low GPA doesn't necessarily reflect someone's ability is true, as is the converse of that - a low LSAT doesn't necessarily reflect someone's ability either. But that doesn't mean a high GPA doesn't say anything about a person, either - it might not truly reflect their ability, but it might. If you're an academic institution trying to evaluate applicants' potential for academic success, it's reasonable that they'd look at students' previous academic performance. Law schools aren't accepting applicants to run a hedge fund.

More to the point, none of this has anything to do with what's taught in academia. If you can't find college courses worth taking, that's on you. (Ken Griffin was happy enough to take his BA in Econ from Harvard and give Harvard a lot of money after the fact.)

Besides, schools don't judge someone just on GPA. They also care about LSAT. (Super holistic!!)

[IAmLawSchool]

he realized that what was being taught was theoretical nonsense laced with all sorts of ridiculous assumptions

Realizing what you said he realized doesn't change the fact he continued to take those classes. He can't make that realization in every single class he took. (Having a 2.5). Additionally, I have been in that predicament, and realizing what you realize is irrelevant to the ability of you getting an A, no? You should already assume you are going to realize certain things like that. If you still want to go to grad school you better learn to like the classes you realize you don't like. (Unless you realize that before the semester starts and it drop the class without it going on your transcript.)

[abl]

Stanford and Yale are both pretty holistic. Do you have a good story? A good hook? What's your undergrad background? A 3.2 in engineering from Swarthmore is much more impressive than a 3.2 in communications from Texas Tech (which means that you'll have less ground to make up elsewhere in your application). That said, I have trouble imagining a white bread applicant with a 3.2 getting into HYS pretty much in any circumstances. If you're a Bosnian refuge or have some other similarly "woah" story, this would be different. But if not, you're probably out of luck this year.

If nothing about your application shines right now, at least relative to T14 applicants, and you are absolutely dedicated to going to HYS, spend the next ~5 years doing something extraordinary. Found an influential NGO (it doesn't have to be like NRDC, but it does have to be something that someone in the field would have heard of). Write a couple of papers that are notable in their field. Become incredibly successful in some semi-prestigious alternative career. Build a non-negligible company. Obviously none of these things are easy. But you're going to have to give the HYS admissions department a reason to accept you over hundreds if not thousands of better credentialed (and also fairly impressive) applicants--and that's going to take something pretty darn impressive.

I want to push back, though, about the idea that HYS are the only schools worth paying full sticker for. It just entirely depends on what your goals are. If your goals are public interest and you're planning on using LRAP, well, probably any T14 (or even any school with a decent LRAP) could be worth full sticker. It also entirely depends on the personal value that you assign to the marginal cost of the additional debt as compared to the marginal benefits (career-wise and experiential) of attending a top law school. The trend on this board over the past couple of years has been to downplay the benefits of going to a top school while focusing on the costs of debt. But the question isn't what the 15 or so active anti-debt posters on TLS think: it's what you think. It could be entirely rational to pay full sticker to go to Northwestern. Would you be better off taking a substantial scholarship at Cornell? Maybe. Probably. But that doesn't mean that someone without that alternative is necessarily making a bad decision to attend Northwestern at sticker. In other words, you've probably bought into the TLS "no debt" credo a bit too much. You probably are not getting into HYS, and you probably aren't getting merit aid at CCN, but that definitely doesn't mean that you shouldn't go to law school.

[bpolley0]

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[bpolley0]

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[abl]

Nah. There are caveats to GPAs, of course, but they're not meaningless. Also, those prestigious institutions you're talking about are a part of academia, so whatever "goes on" in academia, they're fully immersed in it.

I am fully aware of that, unfortunately. I guess I should have been more specific- GPAS are not meaningless; however, when evaluating someone and making some sort of judgement about that individual basing it strictly on their GPA is an atrocious way of thinking- the way of thinking it seems a lot of the admissions committees and people on TLS think. Let's say Ken Griffin of Citadel Capital had a 2.5 GPA. Maybe at some point, in this hypothetical situation, he realized that what was being taught was theoretical nonsense laced with all sorts of ridiculous assumptions and instead of sitting around caring what other people thought of him he spent his time starting his own hedge fund instead.

People on here would imply some lady/ guy in Yale admissions is honestly thinking oh well he had a 2.5 GPA, not getting into Yale because I don't want it to put a blemish on our Us News Rankings!!It's absolutely hysterical and ridiculous.

This is just silly. To say that a low GPA doesn't necessarily reflect someone's ability is true, as is the converse of that - a low LSAT doesn't necessarily reflect someone's ability either. But that doesn't mean a high GPA doesn't say anything about a person, either - it might not truly reflect their ability, but it might. If you're an academic institution trying to evaluate applicants' potential for academic success, it's reasonable that they'd look at students' previous academic performance. Law schools aren't accepting applicants to run a hedge fund.

More to the point, none of this has anything to do with what's taught in academia. If you can't find college courses worth taking, that's on you. (Ken Griffin was happy enough to take his BA in Econ from Harvard and give Harvard a lot of money after the fact.)

Besides, schools don't judge someone just on GPA. They also care about LSAT. (Super holistic!!)

It may be reasonable to look at; however, I would argue not to significantly decide someones admission on especially when comparing people with a 3.6 vs a 3.8 vs a 4.0. There is a huge difference between someone's LSAT and someone's GPA- the LSAT is standardized. There are more variables that go into someone's GPA than someone's LSAT score. In fact, I would argue, to assume that GPA is even a remotely accurate standard to evaluate someone is completely nonsense. Let's take an extreme example. Two guys go to Harvard, one has a 4.0 and the other has a 3.6 in undergrad, same LSAT scores, and they so happened to take the exact same classes with the exact same teachers- a complete anomaly when evaluating candidates going to law school. Now all things held equal, you and Yale admissions would argue without knowing anything about the 4.0 student that he is "better" than the 3.7 student. Now what if I told you the 4.0 student had the test files for all of the tests prior to taking them yet the 3.7 student actually has a thorough grasp of the material but got like two D's in some stupid marketing class. There is a huge difference between those two people in terms of quality if one actually studied and didn't have the tests. This is obviously just an example but the problem becomes larger when you start involving different schools, grade inflation, different majors, different teachers, different classes with the same major etc. etc.

Also it wasn't a matter of taking courses you like, but really the content being taught. Yeah, going to Harvard has it's perks apparently, Mr. Griffin was also provided quite a bit of capital to start out.

I don't really get what you're arguing for. Nothing you've said implies that grades aren't an important signal for law schools. You just have indicated that law schools should look at grades more holistically because there are sometimes exceptional circumstances where a candidate's aptitude is not well represented by her GPA.

But my sense is that at least HYS generally do this. Applicants with GPAs that are reasonably but not extraordinarily good (~3.6-3. get a closer look--which includes some consideration of where that applicant went to undergrad, what they studied, whether their GPAs show an upwards trend, whether their GPAs are biased downwards by one bad semester (and whether there is an external reason for that), etc. Given that admissions departments don't have the resources to do this sort of examination with every applicant, this strikes me as being a reasonable use of one of the most helpful signals -- I believe that undergrad GPA is actually the strongest predictor of law school success.

My sense also is that applicants who fall out of this GPA range can also prompt a deeper look by explaining a GPA variance in their personal statement, or having something come up in a recommendation. There's a reason why HYS reject a substantial number of the >3.8 high LSAT applicants they get each year while accepting several <3.5 GPA applicants. Candidates with undeservedly high GPAs will often be revealed by their recommendations, their personal statements, or their LSATs. Candidates with undeservedly low GPAs will often similarly be rescued by these same factors.

[abl]

he realized that what was being taught was theoretical nonsense laced with all sorts of ridiculous assumptions

Realizing what you said he realized doesn't change the fact he continued to take those classes. He can't make that realization in every single class he took. (Having a 2.5). Additionally, I have been in that predicament, and realizing what you realize is irrelevant to the ability of you getting an A, no? You should already assume you are going to realize certain things like that. If you still want to go to grad school you better learn to like the classes you realize you don't like. (Unless you realize that before the semester starts and it drop the class without it going on your transcript.)

Oh I agree, if I could go back in time I would have gotten a 4.0. However, in my case at least, the time spent not sitting around memorizing garbage I instead used to actually analyze real companies with a goal of beating the S&P 500 so that when I did graduate and applied to holding companies or investment banks, I would be able to show them a historical record of already beating a metric that 99% of money managers don't beat.

A huge part of success in law is being able to jump through the formal hoops even when reason would imply that your time would be spent doing other things. If GPAs are biased against high-aptitude candidates who are unwilling to go through the motions for the sake of going through the motions, well, that's not necessarily a bad thing for law schools. A good lawyer must always dot her "i"s and cross her "t"s. Thus, it may be that some truly brilliant folks who will make sloppy lawyers are being shut out of HYS because of their GPAs -- but why is that bad?

[A. Nony Mouse]

@bpolley - If you want to argue that GPAs are unrepresentative because someone with a high GPA could have cheated to get it, well, okay. That seems a little paranoid, honestly.

The LSAT is standardized, and certainly someone who gets a 175 is better at taking the LSAT than someone who gets a 165, but I'm not convinced it measures much besides ability to take a standardized test or tells you more than GPA does. To throw a similar example back at you, one person could get a 175 after taking a prep course, getting personal tutoring, doing every PT that exists multiple times, and studying for 18 months; another gets a 165 after reading guidebooks for 2 weeks and doing 3 PTs. What do those scores actually measure?

Personally I think schools should take GPA and LSAT with a big grain of salt and evaluate them only in light of lots of other factors and indicators of ability. But since they generally don't, I don't think GPA is any less relevant than LSAT.

[bpolley0]

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