No pressure, but grades are perhaps the most important single factor in law school admissions.
Straight-A students may not be shoo-ins for success in law or in life, but law schools consider undergraduate grades to be a reliable indicator of academic potential. Law schools see students with good grades as having a proven ability to analyze information, communicate effectively and meet expectations.
But if grades were the only thing that mattered, law schools wouldn’t need admissions officers. Law schools know that grades are just one clue to an applicant’s abilities, along with standardized test scores and other factors. Some bright students get low grades because they took on challenging classes or competing responsibilities; others took time to hit their stride or find their niche.
[Read: College Classes That Best Prepare You for Law School.]
Don’t despair if you feel like your grades don’t reflect your academic potential. To compensate for a weak GPA on your law school application, consider these three tips:
— Explain your grades in an addendum.
— Show your abilities elsewhere.
— Take extra classes.
Explain Your Grades in an Addendum
Applicants often include an addendum to give context for other application materials, like a poor transcript or a complicated answer to a background question. An addendum should be brief, professional and forthright. If you have a concrete reason for underperformance, like an illness or personal challenge or change in majors, describe it succinctly and explain how the situation resolved or why it will no longer affect your academic performance.
For example, maybe you struggled with a mental health issue and your grades suffered for a semester. You can’t change your past, but you can use a carefully crafted addendum to show that you took hold of the situation, sought help and learned to manage it — showing your maturity and resilience.
You might also explain in an addendum if a class you performed poorly in was unusually difficult. If you took a higher-level course in science or mathematics whose difficulty may not be readily apparent to readers of your transcript, consider providing context about the rigor of the material or average grades in the course.
[READ: Advice for Law School Applicants With STEM Backgrounds.]
However, if you find yourself piling up excuses or needless explanations, reconsider whether your addendum adds to your application or merely draws attention to your weak points. For example, you don’t need an addendum just because your first-year grades were embarrassingly low. Most college students take some time to learn how to handle the workload.
Likewise, admissions officers are well aware that many former premeds applying to law school may have low grades on notoriously difficult prerequisite classes like organic chemistry.
Show Your Abilities Elsewhere
Grades aren’t the only way to show you can reason, write well and tackle mental challenges. Get recommendation letters from people who can speak to your intellectual abilities. Use your personal statement to showcase your communication skills. Write a resume that specifies how your jobs required high-level performance under pressure.
A strong LSAT score can compensate for a low GPA, so it is well worth the investment of time and effort it takes to do well. Many competitive law schools screen applicants using a weighted index of their grades and LSAT scores, so extra points on the LSAT may effectively boost your GPA.
If you score poorly on the LSAT, you can try to address it in an addendum as well, but that can be trickier to explain than poor grades. After all, applicants have more control over when and how many times they take the LSAT than they do over undergraduate grades.
Take Extra Classes
If you are still an undergraduate, take summer classes or increase your course load to balance out earlier underperformance and to show a strong trend of improvement.
Consider taking a gap year before applying. Then, your transcript report will include all of your senior-year grades, which may raise your cumulative GPA. And it will be easier to focus on coursework without having to complete applications.
[READ: How to Choose Between Applying to Law School, Taking a Gap Year.]
If you have already graduated, you can still take classes to show your academic capabilities. If a master’s degree or another graduate program is financially prohibitive, look for graded classes open to the public at a nearby university or community college.
Such classes won’t hold the weight of your undergraduate GPA because graduate classes are less easily compared, and because applicants’ undergraduate grades affect law school rankings. Nevertheless, they strengthen your argument that you can handle classwork.
Unless you’re a time traveler or a master computer hacker — in which cases law school may not be for you — you can’t change your transcript. But this advice can help you make clear to law school admissions officers that you are more than the sum of your grades.
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How to Address a Low GPA in Law School Applications originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 02/06/23: This article was published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
