To be as specific as possible, I attended a 4-year public university (top 60 in country) for my freshman year, and got a 3.52 GPA. I was a spring admit (interned in the fall) at a top 20 national university where I now have a 3.96 (got an A- in a 2 credit class I took for fun) as a business student with an International Relations minor, and I hope to only increase my GPA during my junior and senior year. How heavily weighted is my new GPA compared to my transfer GPA, considering I only spent 2 semesters at my previous institution? Do they just take my new and old GPAs and equally average them? Since that drops my GPA, would my upward trend matter to law schools?
LSDAS = Law School Data Assembly Service handles GPA calculations for law school applicants.
If an applicant has a strong upward GPA trend, then that can be noted by the applicant on the law school application.
For law school, every college level class that you take until you receive your bachelor’s degree is used to calculate a cumulative. (That includes any dual enrollment courses taken in HS.)
Your GPA is not weighted whatsoever. LSDAS does the numbers crunching for everyone.
An upward trend is better than the alternative but still of almost no value to LS applications as most college students have upward trends. For two reasons: Lower division courses can be graded more harshly than upper division courses; and, your upper division courses tend to be major-related and in theory, you major in something that you enjoy, so you should do better in those courses.
Consider taking the LSAT and applying to LS after you graduate. That way you can earn another semester of (hopefully) all A’s to boost the GPA.