College application season is upon us. A tip from a brilliant young litigator with whom I recently worked (as a software expert witness, not in the law mines themselves!)… “Rankings of law schools look at undergraduate GPA and median LSAT score and, therefore, law school admissions look at the applicant’s GPA and LSAT score.” What’s his practical advice? “They don’t adjust the GPA for how rigorous your undergrad school was. You’re better off going to community college or majoring in ‘studies’ at Harvard than going through an undergrad program where you’d have some chance of getting a B.”
If the undergrad program is so undemanding that straight As are guaranteed, how should the prospective lawyer spend his/her/zir/their time? Cramming for the LSATs! Imagine working with those prep books and prep classes starting the summer before freshman year of undergraduate!
Despite the young lawyer’s mention of Harvard, it turns out to be only America’s #3 college for grade inflation. The school with the highest average GPA is Brown. (source) Of course, for either school the 18-year-old should be sure to pack a keffiyeh and Queers for Palestine banner (also useful once the scholar arrives at the elite law school; see the recent Instagram post by Berkeley Law students regarding the “Palestinian Genocide” (exacerbated by one of the world’s highest rates of population growth)).
In 1987, I took the GMAT with zero prep and scored a 550 (something like 65 percentile). I took it again in 1997 after six months of 3-hour daily practice tests, and scored 720 (98th percentile). Still didn’t get me into an Ivy League program. Did get me a bunch of full-scholarship offers to top state university programs. I would have earned a lot more money had I forgone the MBA and continued grinding it out for 25 years as a code monkey.
> Imagine working with those prep books and prep classes starting the summer before freshman year of undergraduate!
I would imagine the Law of Diminishing Returns applies here like it applies elsewhere
The GMAT is ridiculously easy.
My son did it after he finished high school to make his application to Oxford stand out. With less than a week of prep, he got 780 on the GMAT. He has done the SAT a year earlier and had a perfect score.