Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Anderson: College Majors That Produce The Highest (And Lowest) LSATs And UGPAs
Following up on my previous posts (links below): Robert Anderson (Pepperdine), Law School Admissions and College Majors:
For US News purposes, a GPA is a GPA, whether the GPA comes from a B.A. in French or a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Conventional wisdom suggests that GPAs in humanities disciplines may not be equivalent to GPAs in STEM fields, but there is little data that compares the two.
In looking at this question, I recently came across this Law School Admission Council resource that provides admissions data by college majors for 2014-2015 and 2015-2016. The report contains the mean GPA and LSAT score for over 100 college majors, along with acceptance rates and "yield" rates. I collected this data and made the following chart that shows the relationship of undergraduate GPA and LSAT for dozens of college majors. Undergraduate GPAs are along the left axis and LSAT scores are along the bottom axis. The size of the circles represent the number of applicants. ...
The chart makes a strong case supporting the conventional wisdom that the GPAs from different college majors are not equivalent. ...
Law schools can easily adjust for the differences in GPAs by scaling applicants' GPAs to their LSAT scores and then normalizing by undergraduate major. US News could easily adjust its formula to take into account the grading differences of different majors (as well as different undergraduate institutions). Either or both of these changes would go a long way toward diversifying the pool of law students and reducing the incentives for law schools to manipulate GPA medians in unproductive ways.
Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:
- Physics/Math, Economics Majors Ace the LSAT; Criminal Justice, Prelaw Majors Bomb the Test (Sept. 1, 2009)
- College Majors That Produce the Highest (and Lowest) LSATs and UGPAs (April 8, 2014)
- LSAT Is Poor Predictor Of Law School Grades: 6 LSAT Points = 0.1 LGPA (July 14, 2015)
- The Value Of A Law Degree By College Major: $29k/Year For STEM Majors, $45k/Year For Humanities Majors (Mar. 6, 2016)
- UGPA And College Reputation Are Better Than LSAT In Predicting Law School Success (June 20, 2016)
- Using College Completion Data To Assess The Law School Pipeline (Feb. 1, 2017)
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/07/andersoncollege-majors-that-produce-the-highest-and-lowest-lsats-and-ugpas.html
Comments
My wife is a Harvard alum and likes to tell the story of her commencement speaker (not yet-Senator Al Franken) who opened with something like, "To all of you graduating today with honors, congratulations! To the rest of you, what happened?"
Posted by: Matthew Bruckner | Jul 19, 2017 12:56:39 PM
Harvard is the actual poster child for grade inflation. Longtime Crimson professors have written op-eds about it in the likes of the Chronicle of Higher Education,* the Boston Globe noted way back in like 2001 that 91% of Harvard seniors graduated with honors, and according to the wonderful website gradeinflation.com, Harvard is one of the four biggest grade inflators over time of the hundreds of institutions the website tracks. Those other three schools? Yale, Dartmouth, and Duke. It's historically ironic that of the HYPS schools, Princeton is currently the hard grader, given that for most of the 20th century it was the least academically selective of the group, and in certain years had freshmen classes wherein 1 in 3 students graduated from Lawrenceville alone.
*Some profs give two grades now: an official grade for the transcript - rarely below an A minus - and an unofficial grade that they tell their students is actually how they did. But between the official and unspoken GPA cutoffs everywhere from Wall Street to elite graduate schools to Teach For America, they can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Jul 18, 2017 3:10:36 PM
UN, a friend who was an adjunct professor at Harvard for many years (foreign language instructor) told me that she was required to meet with the department chair before giving any of her students a final grade less than B.
Posted by: PaulB | Jul 18, 2017 1:18:12 PM
Worth noting that not all GPAs are created equal on an inter-school level. The average GPA at Virginia Tech is a 3.1, at Princeton, it is just under a 3.4, and at Harvard it is a rather amusing 3.65. Different institutions, different grading standards and levels of inflation.
Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Jul 18, 2017 7:43:25 AM
I found a link to the actual text:
And to those of you who are graduating with honors–congratulations on doing some of the reading and on going to many of your classes, and getting notes from friends on the classes you didn’t go to, and on handing in most of your papers on time. Way to go! Good work!
To those of you who did not graduate with honors–“Wow! Whoa!”
Posted by: Matthew Bruckner | Jul 19, 2017 12:58:38 PM