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Hi,

How much do law schools care about graduate grades?

My situation:
I made the mistake of getting a master's degree in a social sciences discipline at Stanford. My undergrad was from Berkeley. My undergrad GPA was terribly high (3.98 by LSAC). Now that I want to apply to grad school, how much will my low Stanford grad school GPA of 3.5 hurt me in the admissions process to a T-14 or a T-5 law law school?

T5?? you're going to hurt a lot of people's self-esteem for that one, buddy.

They don't care at all.

I think yale would probably dock you for it because my reaction would be that you couldn't handle top level work (just going by GPA, maybe if you had extenuating circumstances it would be different), but I think they would be the only school to take the holistic view. Also, it depends on what your LSAT is, if its high, your ok, if its low, that would tend to detract from your high GPA.

Correct me if I am wrong but, you don't have to report grades for anything after Undergrad...

LateNight wrote:Correct me if I am wrong but, you don't have to report grades for anything after Undergrad...

You still have to report grad grades, but they don't count in your LSDAS GPA. OP, they won't care about your 3.5 Stanford grad GPA.

OP, since law schools won't have to report your grad school GPA, it will carry considerably less weight with them than your undergrad GPA. And the master's from Stanford isn't a bad soft, either.

I think they will care, to be honest. Or at least at the t3 where the standards are very high (Harvard less so, though). There are usually two things that go into assessing an application 1) How will it affect the school's numbers? 2) Will the student do well in the classroom?

Although #1 tends to be most important for most schools, the MA grades will hurt you for #2. I don't think it will be a major problem--they know that sometimes things aren't the best fit--but I suspect those are below median grades for your MA program, and law schools will be slightly hesitant because of it. If you can get one, the best way to remedy the problem is probably to have very good academic letter of reference from someone in your MA program.

So it isn't a huge deal, but it isn't irrelevant.

The only grades they use for USNWR purposes are your undergraduate grades. Consequently, only your undergraduate grades will matter to the vast majority (probably all) of law schools. With a 3.98, your are safely above the 75%ile at every law school in the country.

And on your grad one, 3.5 from a Stanford program probably won't be looked at negatively by Stanford. Not totally sure on that, but any way you look at it, it's not as though you did poorly in grad school... you just didn't dominate it like you did in undergrad.