Punching Above Your School's Weight Class

One of the most common questions that law school candidates ask me is some variation of:

"How are schools going to evaluate my candidacy vis-a-vis students who come from more prestigious undergraduate institutions?"

Our advice is to not understand your situation as a limiting one. There are limitations, but they can be transcended with some effort. Essentially, you will need to find creative ways to validate your strong academic performance at your undergraduate institution. Read more about getting to a top law school from the law school admissions team at InGenius Prep.

Standardized Tests as a Predictor of Success in College

The SAT and ACT are conventionally thought to be the most important components of a high school student's application to college. This is probably because of the fact that standardized tests are used by colleges as somewhat of a "great equalizer" among masses of high school students with very similar grades. The test provides a means to differentiate among some of these students and also gives admissions officers some idea of what a 4.0 GPA at a random school in Idaho means compared to what it means at an elite college preparatory school in Massachusetts. In other words, when admissions officers have such limited information about students and their schools, the SAT and ACT serve as extra sources of information from which to base their evaluation of applicants. And, as the former admissions officers at inGenius Prep have confirmed, the mantra "the more information, the better" is true with respect to standardized tests.

Although statistics about the strength of the SAT and ACT as predictors of college performance has been out there for awhile, the din of criticism of standardized tests has grown louder over the past few years. These studies citing the tests' predictive ability are all fairly methodologically flawed (a subject for another blog post) because of the inability to control for myriad variables; however, most people accept (not necessarily based on any empirical evidence) that higher standardized test scores reflect higher ability and will result in improved performance relative to lower scores on standardized tests.

A recent NPR article about "test-optional" schools calls this conventional wisdom into question and cites statistical evidence that students who apply to schools with "test-optional" admissions policies who choose to submit test scores only outrank those who choose not to by 0.05 GPA points. The NPR article cites this as evidence that the tests have a poor predictive ability when it comes to GPA. Yet, the tiny sample size, the bias from self-selection of people, and a variety of other factors make this data almost meaningless aside from its rhetorical appeal. The article goes one to discuss how high school GPA is a much better predictor of a student's academic performance in college (measured by GPA), which is certainly an intuitively appealing argument (and one that I happen to agree with). Nonetheless, the purported statistical evidence for the claim is too flimsy to hold up such a weighty proposition.

Median Grade Reporting Leads to Middling Grades...and Confusion

For three years, I’ve tried to convince myself that Dartmouth’s inclusion of median grades on our transcripts makes some sense. There must be some discernible benefit, I’ve told myself, to students, or at least to the institution as a whole; if not, why would the board have ever implemented the policy? Now that I’m applying to law schools, my latent frustration with the idea of median grades has reached a tipping point.

Obviously, the Board believed that the inclusion of median grades on transcripts would serve as an effective weapon against grade inflation at Dartmouth. In this regard, the policy can only be described as a failure; since 1994, the average overall GPA has increased from 3.25 to 3.33 as of 2001. Recording median grades on students’ transcripts is Dartmouth’s way of conveniently deflecting responsibility for grade inflation to its students. The policy is an example of the administration papering over the problem; it exacerbates grade inflation, facilitates easy class selection, and encourages a culture of academic mediocrity.

All of these problems are linked. The median grade system urges students to seek out classes with A and A- medians so that they can skate by while achieving higher GPAs than those that take classes with lower medians. Even worse, professors are given license to unilaterally implement their own grading systems, which only makes grades more meaningless. I’ve had professors tell me that if the median isn’t an A or A-, then they have failed as educators; on the other hand, I’ve had professors tell me on the first of class that only two A’s would be given out. The latter group of professors, who try to keep their median grades low, in order to stave off the ire of administrators or department heads, believe that median grade reporting solves any problems associated with their approach. Moreover, some classes (especially sciences) also have quotas for each letter grade, so students can get exactly the same grades as a student the year before me in the same class, but get a completely different grade. Because the GPA system remains unchanged, an A- in a class with a B+ median will always look better than a B+ in class with a B median. Sure, graduate schools might take notice of the median grades, but they still calculate your GPA in the same fashion. Mental asterisks can only do so much.

More importantly, median grades sustain the middling tendency whereby it becomes relatively easy for most students to reach the B+/A- mark with a reasonable amount of effort, but extremely difficult to actually make the next leap to an A. In other words, grade inflation at Dartmouth rewards the average student at the expense of the “exceptional” (most syllabi use this word to describe work meriting an A) student. At Dartmouth, largely because of median grade reporting, grade inflation is more about grade distribution then it is overall inflation. It’s grade inflation on a bell curve --- everyone is pushed toward the middle, but the middle is artificially elevated.

If I were paid as a consultant to graduate schools, I could by no means reliably distinguish between a difficult course selection and a schedule loaded with what many would call “lay-ups” based solely on the median grades reported for the class that term. And, if I can’t do it, how would an admissions officer be able to do so? For instance, according to median grades, my HIST 59 class was comparable in difficulty to ENGS 11 because both had median grades of A-. However, I did approximately eight hours of work total during the entire term exploring the various technologies used by the Department of Homeland Security, while I did maybe twenty times that amount of work studying the History of Warfare. But, the consensus on inGenius Prep’s staff of over 45 former admissions officers from elite graduate schools is that admissions committees love Dartmouth transcripts.

The fact that admissions officers seriously value those median grade statistics is really frightening. Not only do they spend very little time reviewing your file, but they also seem to think they can reliably glean information about the strength of your schedule from these median grade reports. If Dartmouth intended for median grades to serve as some indication of the strength of a student’s course selection, they should also include the cumulative median grade for all classes each term so that there is a baseline for comparison. Although I am by no means advocating this as a solution, it would undoubtedly be an improvement from the status quo.

Despite my strong bias, I believe that the only solution is no solution. Everyone should just get over the fact that grade inflation is inevitable, and not necessarily such a terrible thing. Schools across the country are always going to try to improve their reputations and put their students in the best position to attain admission into graduate programs and top jobs. Just the other day, one of my friends from a state school in Florida was lamenting the fact that the school had just changed its grade policy so that an A- no longer counted the same GPA value as an A. Oh, and my other friends there have near-perfect GPAs and haven’t been to a physical classroom in two years because they take their classes online.

These sliding grading scales are ubiquitous. Ivy League schools just tend to get more heat for it. However, their impetus for grade inflation is not quite the same. Dartmouth admits 12.6% of its applicants, and approximately 35% of all high school valedictorians. Is it really a surprise that these kids are getting good grades? If Dartmouth is admitting exceptional students, why would it not expect to see exceptional grades?

In three classes at Dartmouth, I earned a 94, a 95, and a 95, and received A-‘s in all three along with an explanation from the professor that the cut-off for an A was one point higher than I had earned. This type of lack of uniformity both within and across departmental boundaries makes GPA figures even more worthless. These seemingly inconsequential inconsistencies in grading policy add up, especially when they are on paper in front of an admissions officer who is tasked with wading through various grade-inflating perks to evaluate candidates. Certainly, these admissions officers will take into account the disparity between academic reputations when evaluating candidates, but they could never possibly keep track of all of the intricacies of grade inflation. To compound the problem, Dartmouth throws them a whole new set of median grades so that you can be judged, albeit inaccurately and unfairly, against your peers, while another candidate is not weighed down by such comparisons.

Median grades could only begin to even be partially effective if every school recorded them on transcripts, along with some kind of cumulative median grade for each term as I mentioned before and changes to the GPA system. But, it would still only chip away at the tip of the iceberg. Nothing will work because grade inflation is inevitable. The crux of the issue is that fighting too hard against grade inflation would disadvantage the student; meanwhile, not doing anything about the problem gets you a bad rap in the eyes of graduate schools, employers, and the media. In that vein, Dartmouth’s unique attempt at “fighting grade inflation” makes quite a bit of sense. They’re just spinning their wheels.