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TL;DR - how much do explanations for a lower GPA (or other note, such as "look at my increasing GPA" or "look at how hard my courses were" etc.) actually affect admissions.

I'm more curious about the process in general - I'll get in where I get in, knowing the little intricacies won't change that, but I do find some of these intricacies interesting.


What I'm curious about is to what extent the mini-essays explaining poor GPAs actually make an impact. We're all aware of the general idea of how these things go. "My GPA is low for your school, but look at the trend - I just wasn't focused my freshman year" or w/e, and, "I had a serious undiagnosed medical condition that affected my gpa for 3-4 semesters..." and so on.

Now I *imagine* that the things that would affect student performance for a single semester - suppose a car crash their parents and brother died, or perhaps something more mundane like "this one semester I was hospitalized for the XYZ affair..." - I imagine that those single semester issues might have some noticeable affect. But what about the longer term things - like, "I had serious undiagnosed medical conditions that hampered my studies"?

My inclination on it is that whatever the perceived loss in GPA, it still comes down mostly to what your GPA is. My *guess* is that, therefore, one bad semester could be overlooked for good reason (deaths in the family or such) more easily than a longer term issue (such as an undiagnosed serious medical issue), simply because the cumulative effect on the GPA would be worse. A student who is "really" (whatever that means) a 3.5 student (lets say based on semesters where they weren't affected by a bad circumstance) but had a significantly lower GPA during a single adversely affected semester (lets say they had a 2.0) would still have something like a 3.3, but a student with a longer term issue (like serious undiagnosed/untreated medical conditions for four semester) would, under the same circumstances, have a GPA something like a 2.8, and I imagine that ADCOMs couldn't (or wouldn't) give as much leniency there.

Thoughts on this? Does anyone have any knowledge on how much these explanatory letters actually affect admissions?

bump?

I think your intuition is right and it lines up with what admissions officers have told us. As you said the overall GPA ends up being all anyone really cares about, but to the extent an addendum might matter it needs to be able to tell a convincing story. Trying to explain years of poor grades is a tougher sell than explaining away one bad semester that is clearly out of line with all the rest.

Tiago Splitter wrote:I think your intuition is right and it lines up with what admissions officers have told us. As you said the overall GPA ends up being all anyone really cares about, but to the extent an addendum might matter it needs to be able to tell a convincing story. Trying to explain years of poor grades is a tougher sell than explaining away one bad semester that is clearly out of line with all the rest.

Yep. See my assumption here is that if a person had 2+ semesters negatively affected by a serious condition (abusive relationship, medical condition, etc., though I somehow get the feeling that abusive relationship would somehow get more sympathy points), then even if the adcoms were really convinced that it was a genuine and serious disadvantage, the adcoms would likely only treat them minimally better than the gpa the currently have. :/

It just seems to me like most adcoms are basically as much ranking wh*res as most law school applicants are.

thanks for the response.

Well to be fair the adcomms don't have much of a choice. They get fired if their ranking goes down, and the only things in the ranking they can control are LSAT and GPA.