Top Law Schools

In calculating one's GPA does LSAC calculate a GPA for each semester of undergrad and then find the average or do they simply add up the total number of credits corresponding to each letter grade? For instance, in using law school predictor's gpa calculator, should I find an average semester by semester, divide by number of semesters, yielding cumulative GPA....OR....do I tally up the number of A's,B's, etc. for my entire undergraduate experience and plug the result of the count into the corresponding letter grade?

holley18 wrote:In calculating one's GPA does LSAC calculate a GPA for each semester of undergrad and then find the average or do they simply add up the total number of credits corresponding to each letter grade? For instance, in using law school predictor's gpa calculator, should I find an average semester by semester, divide by number of semesters, yielding cumulative GPA....OR....do I tally up the number of A's,B's, etc. for my entire undergraduate experience and plug the result of the count into the corresponding letter grade?

http://www.lawschoolpredictor.com/wp-co ... ulator.htm

rinkrat19 wrote:

holley18 wrote:In calculating one's GPA does LSAC calculate a GPA for each semester of undergrad and then find the average or do they simply add up the total number of credits corresponding to each letter grade? For instance, in using law school predictor's gpa calculator, should I find an average semester by semester, divide by number of semesters, yielding cumulative GPA....OR....do I tally up the number of A's,B's, etc. for my entire undergraduate experience and plug the result of the count into the corresponding letter grade?

http://www.lawschoolpredictor.com/wp-co ... ulator.htm

Still clueless, with all due respect

holley18 wrote:

rinkrat19 wrote:

holley18 wrote:In calculating one's GPA does LSAC calculate a GPA for each semester of undergrad and then find the average or do they simply add up the total number of credits corresponding to each letter grade? For instance, in using law school predictor's gpa calculator, should I find an average semester by semester, divide by number of semesters, yielding cumulative GPA....OR....do I tally up the number of A's,B's, etc. for my entire undergraduate experience and plug the result of the count into the corresponding letter grade?

http://www.lawschoolpredictor.com/wp-co ... ulator.htm

Still clueless, with all due respect

1. Enter grades
2. Get LSAC GPA
3. ???
4. Profit

(it calculates a GPA for your entire educational career, all institutions and all years, up to your first bachelor's degree. It does not average terms.)

The GPA calculation is based on all of your grades collectively. If they just averaged semesters, the calculation would not account for semesters in which the number of classes you took varied.

An example of why, if it's helpful: Consider that over 2 semesters you took 6 courses. In the 1st semester, you took 5 classes and received all Cs. In the 2nd semester, you took 1 class and received an A. If each semester was weighted the same, then your average GPA for that year would be a 3.0, or B-equivalent, because it would just be (2.0 + 4.0)/2 = 3.0. That wouldn't make sense, and wouldn't be a helpful depiction of your academic performance. The correct way, which is how LSAC does this, is to weight each class individually, making the calculation (2.0+2.0+2.0+2.0+2.0+4.0)/6 = 2.33.