Are the more "difficult" science majors given more leniency?

[blueskies6]

Well the question you are posing is stated in the title as "are the more 'difficult' majors given more leniency?"

[CTL]

Also, isn't the point of using quotes to express something that is NOT generally agreed upon?  If most people agreed that science programs were necessarily more difficult, you wouldn't have had to qualify science majors with 'difficult' at all.

But at any rate, I think you've gotten your answer.  No.

[Live Free or Die]

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to know what your opinions were on whether or not certain majors are given more leniency GPA-wise in the application process.  Notice that this is different from the age-old question "are certain majors (political science, etc) given preference?"

For example, do some/most schools look more favorably upon a 3.5 engineering gpa as compared to a 3.5 humanities gpa?

I am a biology major myself and I am simply curious, as I have no idea one way or the other...though from an objective point of view it would seem only logical to me to weight some majors differently.

Thanks

It seems a bit suspect to me to weigh majors based on "difficulty" simply because different people are good at different things. A person who is really good at math will have a relatively easy time in a math major and a person who isn't great at English probably won't get as high of a GPA. I'm a math major at my school and I can say for certain that I spend less time working on math problem sets than I do on more reading intensive classes, simply because I can do a problem set and be done with it and get my grade, while I can never really feel like I can be "done" with reading because there's always more information to glean from a reading. I can also say for certain that math majors represent a significant portion of the highest GPAs at my school because the people who are really good at math are able to do it right every time. My GPA might have been a little bit higher if I had been a humanities major, but probably not much higher, so I don't expect any leniency in the admissions process beyond the fact that math and science majors represent a minority of law school applicants, so that the major makes me somewhat "different" from the median applicant.

I have heard, though, that admissions officers can tell by looking at a transcript if a major was really the right "fit" for you, and that they do take this into account somewhat. I can't actually verify this because I'm not an admissions officer, though. I wouldn't expect the effect to be that great though, and I certainly wouldn't rely on it to get a boost in admissions.

[RokoMotion]

I think this threat sums up why this year's LSD is a lot less useful/fun to be a part of than last year's. 

Just saying...

[techpers0n]

I think it made a bit of a difference in my cycle last year. Just because something can't be quantified does not mean it makes 0 difference. A personal statement can't be quantified, but it does matter a bit -- an awful one will sink you. And when people talk about tiebreakers I think they understand that applications aren't identical. Instead, your major is one of those things that differentiates you from another person with similar numbers. Its just one more thing considered in evaluating your soft factors. Of course, that means that its impact is fairly limited. But I think there is not enough evidence to categorically dismiss any possible effect.