Top Law Schools

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Reality: The only thing that matters is cumulative UGPA pre-graduation.

Upward trends and significantly different Degree GPAs are very small softs.

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broker02 wrote:To my credit, I did have a death in the family in the middle of that year, as well as some family financial stress (parent lost job, car repo'ed, house foreclosed, etc.) so I may put that in the addendum. After that, I did learn not to let things affect my performance anymore, a valuable life lesson.

It doesn't matter.

We know, you wish it did. We know, it's not fair. We know, your potential isn't / shouldn't be limited by a bad break a semester or two in college when you were learning the ropes.

It. Doesn't. Matter. At. All.

1,000,000,000 of these questions get asked. There's nothing we the great unwashed masses of TLS can do but shake our heads and say "You got a bad break, Kid. We've been watching admissions at law school for months - years in some cases - and we have never seen admissions cycles where a 'low' GPA caused by very forgivable circumstances lead to law school admissions that were better than the LSAC GPA itself predicted. And we've seen EVERY story - community college courses taken in high school, family deaths / illnesses, hard majors, strict curves, transfers, decades(!) between college and law school, graduate degrees with impressive graduate GPAs - but nothing matters. You don't have to believe it, you don't have to accept it - but we have no other advice to give".

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I think you shouldn't worry too much about GPA and worry more about the LSAT. a 3.71 is good enough to get you pretty anywhere but the top if you score well on the LSAT. a 3.77. is evern better. you can apply with the 3.71 then update to the 3.77 when fall grades come out. If you think you are not going to do extremely well on the LSAT, then your GPA is more than enough for the schools that your LSAT will take you. If you have a lowish LSAT, a 4.33 isn't going to help you much. GPA unfortunately doesn't carry much weight apparently. A bad GPA will kill you but a good one will not help much. But you have a decent if not good GPA so nothing to worry about. If they had to look into your transcript then I am sure they can understand the bad grades. I have 3 B's from 10 years ago, but I am not too worried about it.

you are screwed in the sense that it will be hard for you to get into HYS with that GPA but that is it

Yea, its honestly ridiculous to assume a 3.7 can hurt you unless you are shooting for HYS, in which case you should be worrying about getting 99th percentile + on the lsat. Otherwise, just do your best and you will be fine. Plenty of people get accepted to good schools with a 3.5(me included), don't worry.

At the beginning of this cycle I was an idealist like you, but like everyone's saying, admissions seems to be much more of a pure numbers game than any adcomm is likely to admit outloud. The biggest advantage of your trials though is probably to allow for a more compelling personal statement. Again though, that is a very soft factor and low numbers can preclude your application from even being seriously considered.

The good news is your LSAC GPA of 3.7 is nothing to sneeze at, whether or not you had mitigating circumstances. Just devote yourself to the LSAT at this point, your options are not limited by your GPA. Like someone else said if you had a 4.3 and didn't do well on the LSAT you'd have less options anyway. Good luck!

I would strangle three children for your 3.7.

Though I got into a T13 with 2.8.

No matter what GPA you have in order to get into a top school you need a great LSAT. If you are a worse GPA, you need a better LSAT. You don't even have a poor GPA.

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TL;DR version: I have a 3.71 or 3.77 LSAC GPA, so I need a high LSAT to get T14.

broker02 wrote:I am NOT the LSAT guy who can pull a 180 in his sleep.

You don't need to be.

You just need to be the LSAT guy who devotes time to serious preparation.

Almost everyone is capable of raising their scores, most often quite significantly.

Don't let your grades up, but for the best admissions chances, focus on the LSAT.

If you compare the LSAT range and UGPA range of the top law schools, you'll see that the variation in LSAT scores is much greater than the variation in UGPA. I noticed this looking at the raw numbers, but it is much more apparent visually, so I whipped up the following chart.


LSATvsUGPA

The shaded band shows your 3.71-3.77 range.

Note that I have not gamed the scales to create this effect or make it more dramatic - the scales for both LSAT and UGPA are from 50% of the max score/ to 100% of the max score (assuming 4.0 is the maximum UGPA).

As you can see, if you keep your grades up it is possible to have a good to great chance at nearly every school except those at the very top (YHS). Your LSAT score will be the determining factor.

Thanks to all who gave input. And that chart is very helpful, thanks for posting that. I'm planning on taking the June LSAT, and I'm beginning a study regimen in the next two weeks (after I finish a massive economics term paper).