How LSAC Recalculates Your GPA For Law School Admissions

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) has established the following rules for how to recalculate your GPA for law school admissions purposes: The ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools require the reporting of grade point averages that are based on the total number of earned hours, not credits; and in which repeated courses are counted only once, with no penalty attached to them.

What Is The Purpose Of This Calculation?

LSAC recalculates your GPA in several ways to create one standard index. The purpose of this calculation is to assign a common representation of your grades and allow schools to better compare one applicant against another by using the same formula for ranking students.

1) To start, law schools want all applicants in the pool to have an equal chance at admission. If applicants submit different types of grades (e.g., 1 A, 2 B’s, and 1 C), it can be difficult for admissions officers to differentiate these students without more information about their academic performance throughout college.

What Is Included In This Calculation?

The grade point average (GPA) on an LSDAS report is often misunderstood by law school applicants and programs. An LSAC calculation is made when you submit your LSDAS report, regardless if you have submitted an official transcript from the school where the grades were earned.

The grade point average on an LSDAS report is calculated in a very specific way which differs from the way most undergraduate institutions calculate it. First of all, the LSDAS GPA does not have any letter grades included in it; rather it uses numerals 1-4 as a scale. Second of all, credit hours are used as opposed to actual course units completed or hours spent in courses.

What About My Extracurricular Activities?

When you apply to law school, schools will look at your cumulative grades, meaning your GPA (grade point average), and the number of credits you’ve taken in various subjects. They may also take into account any classes you might have repeated.

However, they will not take into account whether or not you took these courses on a pass/fail basis or if you achieved honors for them, even if these details are shown on your transcript. Schools just want to see what grades you got in each class without any particular type of credit or distinction factoring in.

I Have Multiple Majors, Does This Affect Anything?

If you have multiple majors and these are not related then it will affect your GPA calculation. Your undergraduate GPAs are averaged and weighted as follows:

Composition, Literature & Language (1/2) Natural Science & Mathematics (1/2) Social Sciences (1/4)

While your overall undergraduate grade-point average is calculated using the aforementioned weightings and averaged grades, in the case of multiple majors the highest major is used for both averaging and weighting. The formula for calculating your law school index is then

So When Will I Learn The Results of this Calculation?

When you apply to law school, you’ll find that law schools don’t accept the original grade from high school on their application. They will send it off to LSAC, who will then recalculate the GPA using the new formula they’ve developed. The results should be available in a few weeks and will be sent out in an email you’ve registered your email address with.

It’s also helpful to know that if this is your first time applying to law school or transferring credits, even if you have already been rejected from other schools, then don’t forget to include your last GPA for every period when giving updates about your progress for them to make an accurate assessment of how likely you are to succeed at their school.

There Are Two Options On My Report, What’s The Difference Between Them?

LSAC provides two different types of transcripts: an academic report and a university-validated report. Academic transcripts come from the college or university you attended, whereas the university-validated transcript is created by LSAC. To create a university-validated transcript,

LSAC evaluates your coursework and assigns grades for every class you’ve completed. You can request to have an academic or university-validated transcript sent to law schools on your application without requesting that both are sent.

The only time in which you will receive both an academic and a university-validated transcript is if there are discrepancies between your records from the school’s Registrar’s office and those from the coursework provided by LSAC; then they will send both transcripts to avoid confusion.

Keep browsing Law Scribd for more updates.