How much weight is placed on Pre-1L year and school rank? Forum

[Whitters]

Forgive me if this is obvious. Most transfer websites say something about LSAT and GPA mattering. However, if I had the LSAT/GPA I would already be into the transfer school of choice. So I was curious how much that factor really mattered if you have stellar grades at your first law school. Secondly, would the difference between say a school in the 30s or a school in the 50s with the same class rank be significant? Thanks!

[AOI87]

From researching the schools that I am interested in, Admissions say that your 1L GPA is the #1 factor they consider. They went on further to say that the LSAT does not play as big a role as it did last year. I think it is fair to say that admissions looks at everything.

[vanwinkle]

Everything I've seen indicates that 95% of transfer ability is 1L grades.

The reason for this is that GPA and LSAT are supposed to be predictors of law school and bar passage performance, and while they're valuable factors for predicting that among 0Ls, they're far less reliable than actual law school grades. Not only that, but schools do not have to report the GPA/LSAT of transfer students to USNWR, so it doesn't affect their rankings.

Think about it for a minute; if schools heavily weighed UG GPA and LSAT, how would folks from T2s and TTTs ever transfer up to the T14? And yet they do consistently--at least those who are first in their class do.

[Bert]

From researching the schools that I am interested in, Admissions say that your 1L GPA is the #1 factor they consider. They went on further to say that the LSAT does not play as big a role as it did last year. I think it is fair to say that admissions looks at everything.

And class rank. Do to the general trend of graduate school grades inflating, schools don't look only at your GPA as a number. They generally look at your LS GPA and your class rank together.

[UCLAtransfer]

LSAT and UGPA mean next to nothing for most schools. Unless you are looking at HYS, the only way I would see it coming into play is if they were deciding between two applicants who had otherwise identical stats.