After high school, Barrett attended Rhodes College, where she majored in English literature and minored in French. She graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude and was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa.[16] In her graduating class, she was named most outstanding English department graduate.[17] She then studied law at the Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She was an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review[18] and graduated first in her class in 1997 with a Juris Doctor summa cum laude.
magna cum laude : GPA >= 3.85, usually top 10% of the class
summa cum laude.: GPA = 4.0, usually top 1% of the class