Law/graduate school - repairing your GPA

I got into a Tier 1 law school with a 2.7/163. I was five years out of undergrad. LSAT is much more important than GPA. I didn't take a course for the LSAT, but took several official exams from the past five years and used the two Powerscore Bibles (an absolute MUST in my opinion for LSAT prep). I studied approx. 10 hours per week for four weeks and then took off work the week before the exam and took two full exams per day M-Th. I think I could've gotten a better score if I'd put in more time, but I ended up getting in where I wanted to go, so all is good.

In my personal statement I stressed that I was a different person than I was at 20-23 and had grown a lot from being in the working world, and that my primary focus in undergrad was working for the student paper for clips since GPA is essentially a non-factor (compared to clips/experience) for getting journalism jobs.

The basic line of thinking for LS admission committees is that GPA measures your work ethic while LSAT measures your intelligence and ability to do the necessary work as a first-year student. If you do well on the latter, your work experience can adequately compensate for the former.

 

One possible tripwire is that if you retake courses in college, the original grades are factored into your final GPA by the LSAC people, even if your "official" GPA doesn't. I know I retook a handful of classes when I transferred schools; they don't get counted in my GPA (3.3) but would be by LSAC.

I got a 157 on the LSAT back in the summer of 2004 with little prep. Is it worth my while to retake it if I decide to get off my fat ass and get into law school?

One mitigating factor there: You know how they tell you to pick a letter and answer any of your unanswered questions with it when you're about to run out of time, so you can at least have an outside chance of getting points? Well I picked "b" and dove into the ungodly Games section, a Orwell-worthy example of an inappropriate name. With one minute left I had two Games examples totaling 10 questions that I still had to answer. I figured out the first one, then went B-crazy over the last nine.

When I got my test score back, I also got the answer key. I looked for those nine questions. The order of the correct answers:

B-D-B-B-B-B-B-B-B

No shit.

 

What's the top score on the LSAT? I think I'd heard 180.

And how hard is the LSAT to prep for? Are we talking more common-sense essays and stuff? Multiple choice? A combination?

 

I'm not in grad school, but I'd think if you went back to school for a couple of basketweaving classes, the committee that reviews your past education would realize you just went back to take some gpa-boosters, right?

 

The LSAT doesn't measure knowledge but process. It never hurts to take a prep course, though even the one-day deals can be pretty pricey. When I took it, you get five sections (four count). You'll get at least one reading comprehension section, an analogies section and a section of logic games (if Albert has to sit next to a girl and Bertha must sit next to a redhead and the seating arrangment must go girl-boy-girl-girl-boy, then how many places can Debra sit?). They recently added an essay section -- I took it at a law school convention a couple of years ago because they were paying like 20 bucks for volunteers, and it turns out to literally be the same essay I had to write as part of my college exit exam.

It's all multiple choice, but the kicker is that no matter how hard you study and how many classes you take and how many practice exams you do, you'll NEVER have enough time to properly answer all the questions. It's part of the design.

 

The LSAT is basically an IQ test, and the kind you've never taken before and will never see again.

 

I spent extensive time researching the LSAT itself (time that probably should've been spent actually STUDYING for it, but like I said, I'm in where I want to be so no complaints), so I will try to answer what I can. I can't tell you how to get a 175, but I'll help with what I know about the exam.

180 is the top. But 170 is top two percent. The exam is graded on a curve. See below.

In short... yes. The difference between a 157 and a 162 is 15 percentile points. but the difference between a 167 and a 172 is only 3.4 percentile points. Getting into the 160s is a big difference.

If you retake, seriously... buy the Powerscore Logic Games Bible. I was getting 10-12 on my prep tests. Finished the book, and was getting 18-22. Ended up getting 21/22 on the actual exam. It was the single-best investment I have ever made.

Generally not unless you are applying to Yale-Stanford-Harvard, or schools of that ilk. They get SO many apps from SO many places, that they often just look at the numbers. If you are on the fringe, then that stuff can matter a little more.

The essay doesn't count on the score. May change in the future, but as of the upcoming Feb exam, it is not scored.

Time actually wasn't an issue for me at all except a little on the RC section. That's the main reason I am pimping the two Powerscore Bibles (logic games and logic reasoning). They helped me SO much with speed, and I really didn't study nearly as much as I probably should have.

 

Awesome stuff, Cracker.

 

Cracker - Are you in law school now? Do you feel like it was worth it?

 

I am, and I do. Not everyone in my class feels that way, but it seems that the older students are more sure about it than some of the straight-outta-undergrads. I think several of them just went because they still didn't know what to do with their lives.

It's a ton of work, and I think it'd be hard to stay motivated if your heart wasn't in it. So I would make sure that you truly do want to go before you actually do.