Think you may have to look at it a little differently in the ruse example. you need a brutal 99.5 to get in at usyd. Then you are bell curved. UTS with bonus points is way way less and your law cohort did not get 99.5 or above. You just can’t compare. Think law employment is consciously biased to the top Unis. anything else is copium.
i understand that, but i still think that a pass at usyd is worse than a distinction at macquarie/uts. ik that larger/more competitive law firms are quite biased when it comes to the top unis, but if you're competing for a less prestigious law firm then i dont think they would think a pass is better than a distinction simply based on the university; hence why i said
" if youre looking to go to a 'big firm' where prestige matters i dont think its the simple fact that the majority of people working there are from unsw/usyd, its likely that they went to unsw/usyd AND also got really good grades and potentially other extracurricular stuff, not just that 'unsw and usyd = good' "
you have a good point that the cohort at usyd is already quite academically strong due to the high atar entry, however i think a 50% on your record wouldn't exactly help you surpass someone with a 75-85% on their record, even if u did go to the top unis; i think thats a fair enough assumption.
to make my point as specific as possible, the most prestigious law firms might cherry pick graduates from usyd/unsw, but those graduates would also likely have a distinction/high distinction average, so a pass would effectively make applying for the more prestigious law firms irrelevant as you would be instantly rejected due to the competitiveness of the firms. hence the only situation we are considering here is those firms that are not as prestigious, and i think in that case they would absolutely take the higher marks, despite the fact that the uni is less prestigious.