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Perhaps possible, but not likely the norm. You're saying that a PHD program in Chemistry would take a person from No Name Local State University who did two summers of minor research for a professor (who are way too busy with their grad students and classes to give undergrad students meaningful structured research assignments) with a 3.0 and mediocre test scores over somebody who has a 4.0 from Harvard and perfect GRE scores with zero research experience because they were busy getting a 4.0 at Harvard.
You're right. I don't believe you.
Undergraduate research is usually trivial stuff. I've done it.
it depends on the school. at top 10 ranked PhD programs, research is the only thing that matters, simply because all of the applicants have extremely high GPAs/GREs. in your example, neither of the applicants is getting into such a program. but don't take my word for it, take a CMU professor's
at top 100 PhD programs, i think the harvard student has a large advantage in your example, but it depends on the quality of the essays and rec letters, as well as how trivial or not the research was
i went to a top 10 ugrad school and am teaching at a good, but regional public school. i am fully convinced a 3.5 GPA from a top school means a lot more than a 3.5 from a place like WPU, and feel admissions offices probably agree with me
master's programs are sometimes treated as cash cows so i feel admission to them is harder to predict
Undergraduate research is far from trivial. It's where you learn to research, create arguments, write up grant proposals and publish papers. All of this does quite a bit to prepare you for graduate studies.
However, I'm not certain it has an impact on admissions as much as it does in terms of your success in graduate studies.
I am not so certain that is the case for law school though. Law school tends to want you to do things their way so you have to unlearn a lot of what you learned in ug.
I am not so certain that is the case for law school though. Law school tends to want you to do things their way so you have to unlearn a lot of what you learned in ug.
Law school admissions are notoriously un-holistic compared to other fields of graduate study. I'd argue that only four of the top 100 schools admit on a truly holistic basis. It's really just grades and LSAT. It's rather ironic, considering that the legal profession itself is notoriously obsessed with prestige.
For most fields of study, your UG doesn't make a huge impact in and of itself, but the law school admissions process is probably the only one where it isn't even taken into account 95% of the time
Law school admissions are notoriously un-holistic compared to other fields of graduate study. I'd argue that only four of the top 100 schools admit on a truly holistic basis. It's really just grades and LSAT. It's rather ironic, considering that the legal profession itself is notoriously obsessed with prestige.
For most fields of study, your UG doesn't make a huge impact in and of itself, but the law school admissions process is probably the only one where it isn't even taken into account 95% of the time
That is interesting I would think UVA and UNC would be on there because of the high instate preferences lessening the numbers game aspect.
While they may have to relax their standards somewhat to fill in-state quotas (UNC probably not as much, since they are not as selective), they still want the most numbers-impressive in-state candidates they can get.
Of course, this isn't to say that numbers are the absolute only thing taken into account, and in fact, soft factors are usually used as tiebreakers between candidates of near-equal numbers. But other than those candidates "at the margins," it's pretty strictly a numbers game.
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