Law school admissions experts say it’s important for J.D. hopefuls to realize that highly ranked law schools prefer to admit applicants with stellar college grades. So applicants to elite schools who lack an impressive college transcript need to compensate for that academic weakness in order to get accepted, experts warn.
Erin Goodnow, co-founder and CEO of the Going Ivy admissions consulting firm based in Arizona, says that selective law schools typically have many more applicants than spots available, and these schools are determined to enroll only the most promising aspiring attorneys. Prestigious J.D. programs use undergraduate GPAs as a tool to identify the J.D. applicants who are the “cream of the crop,” she says.
Although top law schools will occasionally admit students who lack high GPAs if they have other qualities that compensate for that deficit such as an outstanding admissions essay or LSAT score, this is rare, Goodnow says. These institutions usually err on the side of admitting applicants with high GPAs, she notes, and she urges J.D. applicants with low GPAs to be realistic about their admissions chances at exclusive J.D. programs.
“If you have the strongest story and some amazing circumstances in your life, or you get a perfect LSAT score or something like that, that can definitely compensate, but you have your work cut out for you,” Goodnow suggests.
[Read: 5 Traits That Help People Get Into Top Law Schools.]
Goodnow says the extraordinary selectivity of top law schools puts significant academic pressure on college students who hope to become lawyers. She advises college students who dream of attending a top law school to earn grades as high as possible, because grades are a major factor in the law school admissions process.
“College is not particularly a time to find yourself anymore,” she says. “It’s a time to prove who you are and prove that you are material for these top schools.”
Goodnow argues that GPA is the No. 1 most important factor in law school admissions, but some other law school admissions experts suggest that standardized test scores are the most important factor and that GPA is the second-most important factor. However, regardless of whether they believe GPAs or test scores are more influential in the J.D. admissions process, experts emphasize that these two statistics matter.
GPA figures that 193 ranked law schools submitted to U.S. News in an annual survey clarify what GPAs were typical among entering law school students in 2017. These statistics reveal a significant gap between the average median GPAs at top-10 law schools vs. the average median GPA at all other ranked law schools.
The average median GPA among the 10 law schools with the lowest GPAs is below a 3.0 on a 4.0 scale, where a 4.0 corresponds to a straight-A average and a 3.0 corresponds to a straight-B average. That means some law schools welcome B-minus college students.
However, among the highest-ranked law schools, the norm is to admit people with near-perfect college grades. All of the top-10 law schools had median GPAs of 3.7 or higher. Seven of these 10 schools had a median GPA that was at least a 3.8, and among those three had a median GPA that was a 3.9 or above. The school with the highest median GPA was Yale Law School — the No. 1 school in the U.S. News Best Law Schools rankings — where the typical GPA among entering students was 3.91.
Experts say that one reason GPAs tend to be higher at prestigious law schools is college grade inflation. Research by Stuart Rojstaczer — a former Duke University professor and a national expert on college grading — has demonstrated that the average GPA among U.S. college students rose significantly over a 30 year period, 1983 to 2013.
Another contributing factor, experts say, is that GPAs facilitate admissions decisions.
“GPAs are attractive because they provide a hard number that law schools can track and control via who they admit, and because they allow admissions officers to instantly compare GPAs between students, which is not something so easily done for extracurriculars or career achievements,” says Dave Killoran, CEO of the PowerScore test prep firm. “In short, law schools love a standardized, universal metric when evaluating applicants.”
However, law school admissions experts say applicants who attended rigorous colleges or completed difficult college majors, such as chemistry, should understand that J.D. programs will consider that fact.
Anna Ivey, a former dean of admissions at the University of Chicago Law School who now heads the Ivey Consulting admissions coaching firm, says that J.D. admissions officers understand that the same college GPA may be easier or harder to achieve depending on someone’s undergraduate program.
“GPAs matter a lot in the admissions process, but admissions officers are looking at the context as well, so it’s not just about that one, final number,” Ivey said via email. “They scrutinize the whole transcripts and look at individual grades, the coursework and the difficulty of the program, among other things. Consistently strong performance at a demanding undergraduate program gives them more information about you as a prospective law school student than a high LSAT score that you earned in roughly three hours on a single day, although both are of course good to have.”
[Read: Manage a Split in GPA, LSAT Scores as a Law School Applicant.]
Jeff Thomas, Kaplan Test Prep’s executive director of prelaw programs, notes that it is common for J.D. admissions officers to research how high an applicant’s grades were in comparison to his or her peers within the same major. Thomas adds that admissions officers also evaluate whether an applicant took challenging courses. So a student with a 3.7 GPA who regularly took advanced, 400-level courses would make a better impression than someone else with the same GPA who had primarily taken 100-level, introductory courses, Thomas suggests.
Experts say that law school hopefuls who have already graduated college and who worry that their undergraduate GPAs are not good enough for acceptance at a desirable J.D. program should focus on polishing other aspects of their law school applications, such as their admissions essays and LSAT score.
Jon Denning, the vice president at PowerScore, said via email that “undergraduate GPA is typically the most fixed application element for students in their senior year (or beyond), so if that number is below the median at a target school it becomes all the more critical that other, less predetermined factors — the LSAT above all — are as impressive as possible.”
[Read: Get Into Grad School Despite Low, Mediocre Grades.]
District of Columbia criminal defense attorney Matthew Wilson says that law school applicants with law-related work experience, who earned their bachelor’s degrees many years ago, may be able to override the stigma of low college grades by showcasing their professional accomplishments.
“Many law school applicants are several years removed from the undergraduate education and have spent time working in the ‘real world,'” Wilson said via email. “A glowing letter of recommendation from an employer, especially from a law firm or legal organization, may be much more important to an admissions officer than undergraduate grades that are several years old.”
Jeremy Rovinsky, the dean and general counsel of National Paralegal College in Arizona and a lawyer who earned a J.D. degree from George Washington University, says that researching median GPAs and standardized test scores at various law schools can help J.D. applicants apply to the right schools.
Rovinsky suggests that J.D. applicants who are determined to attend law school the following school year should apply to at least one safety school where their credentials are well above the norm, at least one match school where their credentials are typical and at least one reach school where their credentials are below average.
He says law school applicants should know from the outset that J.D. admissions are competitive. “It’s just supply and demand,” he says. “There are a lot more students who want to go to law school than who want to go to some master’s program in some other field.”
However, Rovinsky adds that aspiring attorneys shouldn’t be discouraged from applying to any law school at all simply because their college grades aren’t ideal.
“It doesn’t hurt to apply,” he says. “You never really know what’s going to happen.”
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How High Is the Typical College GPA Among Accepted Law School Applicants? originally appeared on usnews.com
