Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14 Forum

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Which is my best but also most realistic option?

Chicago
0
No votes
Columbia
0
No votes
Cornell
0
No votes
Duke
0
No votes
Nortwestern
1
17%
Pennsylvania
0
No votes
Boston
0
No votes
Notredame
2
33%
Other (Please Comment)
3
50%
 
Total votes: 6

APerez114

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Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by APerez114 » Tue Feb 22, 2022 8:49 am

Hi!
I’m South American (think Brazil or Argentina) with a 3.50 GPA LLB from my country (B+/2:1/8,50) and currently pursuing an MSc in Finance from my country, too (my GPA here may vary between 3.0 and 3.6).

Work:
I have two years of experience as junior associate in a Top National Law Firm and want to break in US Big Law by doing a JD-MBA. I also worked nine months in two different counties in law related jobs and six months in an internship at a local court. Now I’ll spend a year working on consulting in my country in a middle size and not well known firm.

Extracurriculars:
I had been in two student associations during the LLB, did an exchange program in an important university (think Australia, NZ, Netherlands, Singapore), been a teacher assistant in one subject and took an additional law diploma during undergrad in a topic related to Technology Law.

I also did another exchange program during the MSc in a great university (think France, Denmark)

My questions:

1) What are my chances for T14 JD-MBA Program (Nortwestern-Pennsylvania-Chicago-Columbia-Cornell-Duke) with this background? Would having a 3.6 GPA in LLB have improved a lot my chances in these universities?

2) What other options should I consider if my GPA is too low for T14? Are Notredame or Boston JD-MBAs good options for my long term goal?

3) What are my chances of obtaining a scholarship?

4) I also want to know if submitting an LSAT is mandatory for JD-MBA programmes or the GMAT/GRE is enough.

5) I’m also considering obtaining Italian citizenship. Would this fact enhance in any ways my application?

Thanks a lot!

The Lsat Airbender

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Re: Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by The Lsat Airbender » Tue Feb 22, 2022 1:49 pm

1 & 3) It's impossible even to speculate about your chances until you write the LSAT (or other exam). I voted "Other" in the poll partly for this reason. I'm not even sure whether you'd have a CAS GPA, since your degree is foreign, but no the LLB is not going to be a huge help and in fact 3.6 would be a mild negative if reportable. In any case, the entrance exam will be at least as consequential as everything else combined.

2) What is your long-term goal? JD-MBA is rarely worth the extra time/effort/expense compared to doing only one of those degrees. If you want to be a lawyer, would probably just do a JD (which also broadens your school options); if you want to do business or anything else besides law, the MBA would be preferred (ditto).

2b) I see that your short-term goal is biglaw, in which case you should probably dispense with the MBA and try to attend any T13 law school. I assume you're not a U.S. citizen or otherwise authorized to live and work here; Notre Dame and BU are decent schools but unacceptably risky for someone who needs H1B sponsorship to get hired.

4) I believe this varies by program at the moment but several programs will accept the GRE and/or GMAT. These programs are new, so hard to say what it would mean for your admissions chances.

5) Would not matter either way.

nixy

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Re: Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by nixy » Tue Feb 22, 2022 4:15 pm

Yes, I don't think your LLB GPA will be reportable - it will be evaluated by LSAC and they'll decide if it's superior, above average, or some lower category I always forget, but it won't be a number and it won't count toward law school rankings. So your LSAT will be much more important for determining your admissions chances.

I think all the other stuff you'll done will make you an interesting candidate as long as you can provide convincing reasons why you need a US JD/MBA and what you want to do with it. But you'll need a good enough LSAT score.

APerez114

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Re: Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by APerez114 » Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:17 pm

nixy wrote:
Tue Feb 22, 2022 4:15 pm
Yes, I don't think your LLB GPA will be reportable - it will be evaluated by LSAC and they'll decide if it's superior, above average, or some lower category I always forget, but it won't be a number and it won't count toward law school rankings. So your LSAT will be much more important for determining your admissions chances.

I think all the other stuff you'll done will make you an interesting candidate as long as you can provide convincing reasons why you need a US JD/MBA and what you want to do with it. But you'll need a good enough LSAT score.

Thanks a lot for your answer! I think I have a silly question, but as I am a foreigner, I’m not familiar enough with some concepts.

1) What does it mean that my LLB GPA won’t be reportable? Does it imply that they won’t take it into consideration or that I shouldn’t include it in my application?

2) And about the LSAT, are you suggesting that I should do it despite the fact that the US University doesn’t require it for the JD-MBA programme?

TBH I tried to figure out which was the equivalent US GPA for my national GPA (8,50/10) but I think it’s difficult to know it exactly. I think 3.50 its quite accurately, but I’m not 100% sure.
I found a guy in LinkedIn from my country with an 8,62/10 (I think it should be a 3.54 GPA) who managed to get into Columbia LLM (but he also had amazing Extracurriculars) and others with 8,30 an 8,31 (3.42 GPA equivalents) who were doing an LLM in Yale and an MSc Law & Finance in Oxford.
However, maybe the JD-MBA GPA requirements will be different and more competitive... I’m not sure. Or maybe I’m not correctly calculating the equivalent US GPA for my country qualifcations system.

Maybe this information will give you a better insight of my profile and my chances.

Thanks a lot!

APerez114

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Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Feb 14, 2022 12:21 pm

Re: Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by APerez114 » Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:27 pm

The Lsat Airbender wrote:
Tue Feb 22, 2022 1:49 pm
1 & 3) It's impossible even to speculate about your chances until you write the LSAT (or other exam). I voted "Other" in the poll partly for this reason. I'm not even sure whether you'd have a CAS GPA, since your degree is foreign, but no the LLB is not going to be a huge help and in fact 3.6 would be a mild negative if reportable. In any case, the entrance exam will be at least as consequential as everything else combined.

2) What is your long-term goal? JD-MBA is rarely worth the extra time/effort/expense compared to doing only one of those degrees. If you want to be a lawyer, would probably just do a JD (which also broadens your school options); if you want to do business or anything else besides law, the MBA would be preferred (ditto).

2b) I see that your short-term goal is biglaw, in which case you should probably dispense with the MBA and try to attend any T13 law school. I assume you're not a U.S. citizen or otherwise authorized to live and work here; Notre Dame and BU are decent schools but unacceptably risky for someone who needs H1B sponsorship to get hired.

4) I believe this varies by program at the moment but several programs will accept the GRE and/or GMAT. These programs are new, so hard to say what it would mean for your admissions chances.

5) Would not matter either way.
Thanks a lot for your detailed answer! I wrote more information about me in the reply to the other user that would be relevant for answering this last question:

Can you think in any other schools apart from BU or Notredame that will fit better with my profile and that will be more prone to give me a scholarship? Maybe Wake Forest or Fordham?

Maybe it’s too optimistic, but I think that with summer internships that the JD/MBA offers I will manage to obtain at least a H1B soposorship...

Thanks a lot!

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Phantasio

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Re: Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by Phantasio » Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:39 pm

APerez114 wrote:
Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:17 pm
nixy wrote:
Tue Feb 22, 2022 4:15 pm
Yes, I don't think your LLB GPA will be reportable - it will be evaluated by LSAC and they'll decide if it's superior, above average, or some lower category I always forget, but it won't be a number and it won't count toward law school rankings. So your LSAT will be much more important for determining your admissions chances.

I think all the other stuff you'll done will make you an interesting candidate as long as you can provide convincing reasons why you need a US JD/MBA and what you want to do with it. But you'll need a good enough LSAT score.

Thanks a lot for your answer! I think I have a silly question, but as I am a foreigner, I’m not familiar enough with some concepts.

1) What does it mean that my LLB GPA won’t be reportable? Does it imply that they won’t take it into consideration or that I shouldn’t include it in my application?

2) And about the LSAT, are you suggesting that I should do it despite the fact that the US University doesn’t require it for the JD-MBA programme?

TBH I tried to figure out which was the equivalent US GPA for my national GPA (8,50/10) but I think it’s difficult to know it exactly. I think 3.50 its quite accurately, but I’m not 100% sure.
I found a guy in LinkedIn from my country with an 8,62/10 (I think it should be a 3.54 GPA) who managed to get into Columbia LLM (but he also had amazing Extracurriculars) and others with 8,30 an 8,31 (3.42 GPA equivalents) who were doing an LLM in Yale and an MSc Law & Finance in Oxford.
However, maybe the JD-MBA GPA requirements will be different and more competitive... I’m not sure. Or maybe I’m not correctly calculating the equivalent US GPA for my country qualifcations system.

Maybe this information will give you a better insight of my profile and my chances.

Thanks a lot!
1) All law school applications are processed through LSAC, which collects all your transcripts, issues a CAS report and summarizes your transcripts, and then sends the report to law schools that you apply to. Check with your target schools but several of them may require you to separately apply to law school and business school to be considered for the JD-MBA program. Since you graduated from a non-US/Canadian college, your uGPA will not be reflected in the report. Instead, LSAC will simply report it as Superior, Above Average, Average, or Below Average, and that's all that matters to the law schools. You must include it as part of your application. Check the "no cumulative GPA calculation" section on this website, and just browse the LSAC website in general to get a sense of what law school application is like: https://www.lsac.org/applying-law-schoo ... marization

Also, you are right that LLM and JD are just different programs with different application requirements (as well as different admission teams). In terms of application standards, the two degrees are not comparable at all.

2)Whether a law school requires it depends on the specific school's policy. Several schools started accepting GRE/GMAT only in recent years. The vast majority of JD applicants took the LSAT. If the school allows it, you can certainly apply with GRE/GMAT, but your result will be highly unpredictable since we simply have fewer data points. Also, you need to understand that US law schools care about the US News ranking. The median GPA and median LSAT of the incoming class are two factors that will have an impact on a school's ranking. An applicant's uGPA and LSAT scores are usually quite indicative of how well the applicant will do in terms of application results. (As the saying goes, "Law school application is largely a numbers game.")You already do not have a reportable GPA, usually, that means that a school will put more weight on your LSAT score. If you don't have an LSAT score either, it is virtually impossible for anyone to actually gauge your chance.

nixy

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Re: Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by nixy » Tue Feb 22, 2022 6:56 pm

Sorry, I should have specified, when I referenced a foreign GPA not being reportable, I meant schools don’t have to report it for ranking purposes. Law schools tend to live and die by the US World News & Report annual ranking of law schools. A big factor in that ranking is students’ GPAs and LSAT scores, which the schools have to report to USNWR to get ranked. So law schools have a huge incentive to admit students who will improve their standing wrt GPA or LSAT or both, and this helps make law school admissions the numbers game it largely is.

The USNWR rankings don’t count foreign degrees because you can’t really calculate where “above average” fits in a typical U.S. 4.0 scale. So in practice, your UGPA becomes a lot less important, for good or for ill. Not saying schools don’t consider it at all - and less than a superior will probably be an issue at the very tip top schools - but much less than if they have to report it.

I don’t know enough about JD/MBA programs to know whether it makes sense for you to do the LSAT rather than just the GMAT. If you can get into a JD/MBA by only doing the GMAT, that might be a good move, but I don’t know how programs like that work. I mostly know people who had to take the LSAT to get into the JD part, but I also mostly know people who added the MBA to the JD. I also don’t know if foreign UGPA works the same way for MBA admissions. On purely the JD side, it makes sense to take the LSAT, if you can do well on it.

LLM programs are really different from JD programs and the admissions requirements are very different. So I wouldn’t rely on those (which isn’t to say that your UGPA will prevent you getting into a top school).

The Lsat Airbender

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Re: Chance Me 3.5 GPA T14

Post by The Lsat Airbender » Wed Feb 23, 2022 8:56 pm

APerez114 wrote:
Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:27 pm
Can you think in any other schools apart from BU or Notredame that will fit better with my profile and that will be more prone to give me a scholarship? Maybe Wake Forest or Fordham?

Maybe it’s too optimistic, but I think that with summer internships that the JD/MBA offers I will manage to obtain at least a H1B soposorship...
If your goal is biglaw, and especially if you need to jump the additional hurdle of H1B sponsorship, looking at lower-ranked schools (i.e., those with <50% biglaw placement) is honestly a waste of time.

In other words your goal should be to maximize your chances of getting a T13 admission [with scholarship], which probably means (1) getting a terrific LSAT score and (2) dropping your requirement to do a simultaneous MBA, which unnecessarily restricts your law-school choices.

I'm assuming of course that your goal is biglaw (and the exit opportunities available therefrom). If you're simply trying to get any highly-paid job in the U.S., I'd also look at top b-schools without law schools (MIT, Dartmouth). But a lower-ranked JD/MBA program seems like the worst of all worlds and I do not understand why you are so interested in that.

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