tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post5735165908142132097..comments2024-03-26T19:10:00.791-04:00Comments on West Coast Stat Views (on Observational Epidemiology and more): What do grades measure?Josephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10760453165301871031noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6976144462093297473.post-82322364281752313862014-04-22T10:33:34.296-04:002014-04-22T10:33:34.296-04:00If they rely on grades, they will simply rank the ...If they rely on grades, they will simply rank the schools, as law schools do now with colleges. <br /><br />Grades reflect the school, not an objective standard. A poor performing school still has kids with good grades, but that doesn't mean those kids are as well prepared for college - or as bright or some other measure - as kids from a better school with the same or worse grades. It's simplistic to speak about aggregates because the system has to admit individuals and those individuals are spread across a large number of institutions, which means the individual decisions by individual institutions matter to those institutions. (That is, there are millions of kids but the admitting decisions are at the institutional level in the hundreds or low thousands - and if in the low thousands, usually broken into hundreds by groupings like colleges within a university.)<br /><br />It is, in fact, the high LSAT scoring by kids from schools like Harvard that are used to justify the extremely high average GPA: the kids score high so if you backed into a GPA using the score, that average might even be higher. That reflects the reality that Harvard accepts high scoring kids - or at least those are the ones who mostly apply to law school. (Lots of weird data issues in the material.)<br /><br />jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01372999828751252978noreply@blogger.com