My daughter just completed the law school admissions cycle with a 3.88 LSAC GPA and a 172 LSAT and she attended a top 20 undergraduate school. It is impossible (for us anyway) to know for sure but it does seem as if the most elite undergraduate schools do receive some very minor boost in terms of GPA. By “very minor” I mean maybe between 0.05 and 0.1. It is going to be the combination of your GPA and your LSAT score which influences which law schools admit you. For Harvard Law you are going to need an extremely strong LSAT score as they are notoriously focused on the numbers and keeping their LSAT median at 173 really does not give them much latitude in admissions decisions. The LSAT is fundamentally different than tests like the ACT or the SAT so as you get closer to taking the LSAT you should probably take a diagnostic test to better understand how much test prep will be required. It is extremely difficult to predict Stanford Law admissions decisions. Stanford and Yale both have relatively small incoming classes and they have scores of 175+ LSAT / 4.0 students to pick from. When you look at the profiles of students admitted to Stanford Law you do see more variance in terms of both GPA and LSAT score. I don’t pretend to know what Stanford Law is looking for but it is something more than just strong GPA and strong LSAT
Money and career plans factor into many law school students ultimate decisions on where they go to law school. It is very common for students to apply to many, many law schools to “blanket the T14” as the saying goes. When you do this with strong stats your going to find scholarship offers of $120K to full tuition+ at lower ranked T14 schools vs. full price at other schools. It is important for you to understand what limitations the law school you attend might have on your future career and to weigh that against the net cost of attendance. My daughter was forced to chose between NYU at sticker ($300K), Columbia with $65K scholarship (net $235K) and Duke with $120K scholarship (net $150K) in the final decision
Long winded answer but provided your GPA is not well below a law schools median or 25th percentile its the combination of GPA and LSAT that will really matter. There are not many doors closed to you if you had a 175 LSAT to go with your Harvard 3.7. If you scored 170 on the LSAT you’re going to have a touch time getting into some of the T6 schools with that 3.7 GPA. If you score 165 on the LSAT you might struggle to get into any T14 schools.
OP: Any GPA above a 3.80 is great for all law schools–even the top three.
Only the top 4 law schools “need” a GPA above a 3.70 in order to be competitive (assuming that your LSAT score is at or above median for that law school & that you are not a URM).
I have seen no empirical evidence supporting the claim that law schools give grads a bump to their GPA depending on where they went to school. That includes the undergrad associated with the law school.
CU: without the reps per school, this means absolutely nothing. If 80-90% of total admits hailed from the above ~dozen ‘elite’ schools, you’d have a good argument. OTOH, if its only ~3-4 per school in the “most predominant”, and 1 from nearly every Cal State…
There are thousands of Californian’s who attend OOS schools every year and it should be no surprise that they’d come back instate for professional school. As SLS is rather discriminating, Boalt is the next best instate. Moreover, Boalt is particularly attractive for reverse splitters.
@bluebayou I’m just taking it from there website. They claim that besides the UC schools and a couple of others 4 smaller elite private universities are predominant in there admissions. I guess you don’t believe them or are the intentionally misleading us?
since when do colleges, and the UC’s in particular, not mislead? hahahaha
But regardless, is there a statistical definition of ‘predominant’? And since there is not, as any AP Stat student knows, then Boalt can say pretty much anything they want and it will be [mathematically] true.
@bluebayou I have no doubt that there is some misleading going on here, they throw in four prestigious colleges not located on the west coast for a reason…
The law school numbers graphs for this year show that Yale doesn’t like a 3.8. Harvard is fine with a 3.8, if you get 174+. Stanford cares more about 3.9+ than about huge LSAT. All assuming non-URM.
The problem, though, is the OP doesn’t have a 3.8 or a 3.9 or a big LSAT score. There is a lot of work ahead.
Right, but we have absolutely no way to speculate why those 4/5 were named. Without some actual numbers, any conclusions is just confirmation bias.
(fwiw, Boalt is the one top school that puts much more focus on GPA so it is attractive to reverse splitters from those ‘prestigious colleges’, but that is just my speculation.)
Off the topic, fyi, Boalt Hall is now known as Berkeley Law or UC Berkeley School of Law. This name change is to be more politically correct and political pressure to disassociate from the Boalt name.
What does this correlate to? All one has to do is blindly cite without any “research,” the same usual suspects: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, and it should be accurate with respect to L-school placement.
Here’s what the site states that you didn’t link:
Is this what it has come to, counting those who’ve reported their attendance of top L-schools on a social-media site? Granted it’s a wonderful service, but how can it be guaranteed to representative of a legitimate sample size (because it isn’t going to be all-inclusive)?
This is reminiscent of Payscale’s self-reporting of salaries by college: it’s too passive, and cannot be representative when people are left to self-report or not. Sure, the site doesn’t legitimately propose to order them, but still…
Someone in another thread linked Computer Science majors’ placement with beginning salary for a number of colleges, and there were some schools which were downgraded because nowhere near all their graduates by graduation year were located on Linkedin when compared to an the colleges’ estimated graduating class. The question arises again: how can this be a legitimate methodology?
An A- GPA from Harvard is fabulous and reason to be proud. Assuming great references and a rigorous course selection and major with a great LSAT, you will for sure have several offers from T-14 schools.
Law schools are aware of the quality a grading of top schools and adjust accordingly. They know that Princeton, MIT and UChicago grade more harshly. They also evaluate the rigor of the undergraduate classes selected.
Directly from interview with Dean of Admissions of University of Virginia law School as an example:
" TLS: Do you consider the relative prestige or rank of an applicant’s undergraduate institution?
I do not look at rank or prestige at all. I do look at the LSAT College Mean for the school and the relative grade inflation at that school.
TLS: Do you consider the relative difficulty of an applicant’s undergraduate major?
We do the best we can because this is not on the LSAC Report. Engineering students typically have lowers GPAs than do liberal arts majors. But we do not have data on different majors at different schools. That is where detailed letters of recommendations are particularly helpful. If an engineering professor writes that while the overall GPA at the university is 3.4, in the School of Engineering it is a 2.9 that can put an applicant’s GPA into better perspective.
So UVA lowers the GPAs of Ivy League graduates for admissions purposes? That’s very interesting. But the good dean can say what he wants, because it’s clear that UVA isn’t accepting many 2.9 GPA applicants-not with a median GPA of 3.89. Although the dean only said such applicants may be put into “better perspective”; nobody said anything about actually admitting them. And it appears that interview is 10 years old, and the dean interviewed is no longer at UVA. And back in 2009-when the interview was given, the director of admissions at UVA was Cordel Faulk. https://www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/directory/administration/clf8g/clf8g
And looking at the numbers, it’s clear UVA is chasing the high scorers like everybody else. https://www.law.virginia.edu/admissions/class-2021-profile
You are trying to quantify a simple statement. Law schools are aware of the quality of undergraduate schools, different programs and their grading scales. They take that into account. That’s al/.