| Topic Name: |
2nd/3rd Tier Chances |
| Message Name: |
GPA/LSAT |
| Date Posted: |
08/01/2001 |
| In Reply To: |
I am an older law school applicant. My undergrad gpa is 2.77 from a top 50 school and I have a 3.0 from a top 50 MBA program with several years of work experience. I recently took a practice LSAT with only 2 lessons of Kaplan and scored a 149. Assuming I am on track to score in the mid 150s on my LSAT, what would be my chances of gaining admissions to a tier 1 or tier 2 school? |
| Message: |
Ignore the derision from some other posters. Anonymous and semi-anonymous message boards generate these kind of comments. In the "real world" of lawyers, folks worry about more things than your undergrad GPA on the one hand and the fact of your MBA on the other hand.
Run your 2.77 and 149 through officialguide.lsac.org.
Then run a 2.77 and 155 through. This will show you the ranges you are in, based on your LSAT guess. LSAT guesses based on practice exams are notoriously unreliable, though, and Kaplan may help you raise it.
Still, I did a quick run on the 2.77/149 and found that mostly the schools at which you could have a great chance were 3rd tier and 4th tier, but that you were not out of the running at some second tier schools. A more-scan-friendly resource is the 1st, 2d and 3d tier table at www.usnews.com. When you go below the top half (or quarter, or 2/3, depending on who you ask) of the first tier, then your focus should be on finding affordable schools with good placement (and particularly one that is used to working with older applicants) rather than on attending the highest ranked non-first-tier school, damn the expense (above the 14th or 25th or 35th or what have you school, opinion varies, you should attend the high ranked school, even if it is more expensive). Implied in your question is the issue:
what positive impact will your
work experience and MBA have on the admission result you normally would obtain based on GPA and LSAT alone. The answer is this: LSAT and GPA are placed in a formula. Above a formula benchmark, at all but the very top few schools, you're pretty much in. Below this benchmark, you're pretty much out. The benchmark is set so that an intermediate set of folks is neither in or out. As to those folks, review of the
apps for things like social work, business experience, academic ribbons, etc. can factor in, as well as things like geographic diversity,
in some places other forms of diversity, and all sorts of non-formula things. Because you can't predict how well last year's GPA/LSAT stats will match this year's application pool (recession should mean more law school apps), you can't guess what it will really take based on 155, 2.77. The trick now is to score high on that LSAT, offset that 2.77 a bit, and when you get the LSAT score back, see what your "likely" admit result is. Then apply to some schools you "just miss" getting in on the numbers, some schools you
should make it into on the numbers, and some schools you think you are over-qualified for on the numbers. You will get surprises in either direction from this process (once in a while someone even gets into a tier 1 program and rejected by a lower tier, a reflection of the way different formulas and evaluations work), but in general the GPA/LSAT tables will clue you in.
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