Law school admissions officers are generally unconcerned with applicants’ history or performance in high school. After all, law school is a professional school, and high school is a distant memory for all but early college graduates.
While law school applications may ask for the name of an applicant’s high school, applicants should generally refrain from including high school on their resume for law schools. They should not seek recommendation letters from high school coaches or teachers, and they should try to avoid focusing their personal statement on childhood events.
[Related:Law School Applicants: Don’t Write Your Letters of Recommendation]
SAT and ACT scores will be irrelevant, except for applicants for accelerated B.A.-J.D. programs or direct admission programs who may be able to submit these scores in lieu of the LSAT or GRE.
That said, any applicants who took college classes in high school, such as dual enrollment programs at a local community college, may find that their high school past still comes to haunt them.
How College Classes Taken in High School Appear on Law Applications
Law school applicants are required to submit transcripts — from all higher learning institutions they have attended — to the Law School Admission Council’s Credential Assembly Service, or CAS.
This includes other colleges and universities where a student has taken courses, except for study abroad programs whose grades appear on the transcript of an applicant’s home institution.
Grades for Advanced Placement or the College Level Examination Program only factor into your transcript summary if your undergraduate transcript includes grades and credits for them. You do not need to submit transcripts for such classes taken at your high school, even if you received credit for those courses in college.
[READ: How Law Schools Evaluate a Transcript With Multiple Degrees.]
However, if you took college courses in high school that don’t appear on your college transcript, you would need to contact the college and request your transcript. And, unlike grades for graduate programs taken after the awarding of a college degree, these grades would factor into your cumulative undergraduate GPA.
This may be unwelcome news for applicants who were not exactly academically minded in high school. How many teenagers think ahead to how their course grades might look to law admissions officers years in the future?
Fortunately, your CAS report breaks down your GPA by institution and by year, so readers will not confuse courses taken in high school with undergraduate courses. Law school admissions officers are more interested in your cumulative GPA in college than in an errant C- you got in a calculus course that went way over your head when you were 16.
Advice for Applicants With Low Grades
Low grades from college courses taken in high school can be addressed like low grades on your college transcript. Write an addendum that provides context to make clear why you underperformed in those classes and why they are not indicative of your academic potential.
[Read Law School Admissions Process: A Month-By-Month Guide.]
There is no need to act defensive or overly apologetic. Simply explain why you took those classes, why you performed poorly and what you learned from those experiences. For example, perhaps that was the end of the road for your high school dream of becoming an engineer and the beginning of your search for a field that involved fewer differential equations.
And if that old math grade makes you cringe, just add one more thing to your list of embarrassing legacies from high school, like evidence of bad haircuts you never want to see again.
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How College Classes Taken in High School Can Affect Law School Applications originally appeared on usnews.com
