Dean of Admissions at Yale Law: Grade deflation isn't going to affect your chances

Dean of Admissions at Yale Law School Asha Rangappa '96 said in a comment on the New York Times' Choice blog today that the much-debated grade deflation policy won't affect the admission chances of Princeton grads. The comment follows the Times' Sunday article about grade deflation at Princeton.Rangappa said that admissions officers consider students' GPAs within the context of their own schools, and that the top law schools are generally less interested in absolute GPAs to inflate their rankings.For students concerned about their GPAs, Rangappa's comment might come as a relief. To Dean Malkiel, it might be a satisfying I-told-you-so.The comment in full after the jump.

I am the Dean of Admissions at Yale Law School (and also a Princeton graduate).While I cannot speak for other professions, Princeton’s grade policy should not impact graduates’ law school admissions. The Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) — which compiles the numerical data on each law school applicant — provides, in addition to a student’s cumulative GPA, the percentile rank of that student’s GPA as compared with other applicants to law school from that same institution within the last three years. In other words, a law school admissions officer can (or should) see the difference between, say, a 3.7 at West Point (which would place that student in the upper 90th percentile) and a 3.7 at a school that is prestigious but has a lot of grade inflation (I won’t name names but a 3.7 can be as low as the 60th percentile at some very elite schools).While it may be true that some law schools may be more interested in absolute GPAs in order to manipulate their institutions’ “rankings” according to popular publications, I would say that this is less true of the top law schools, which are more interested in getting the top students from a variety of schools. To the extent that a law school a) actually reads an entire application and b) can see how a student compares to the pool of applicants from that same school, Princeton’s grade inflation policy should not make much of a difference in its law school admission rates.Asha Rangappa