Do schools use LSAT score or percentile?

[Spinnaker]

Despite all the reading of admissions policies on various schools, I actually still don't know - do schools consider the LSAT actual score (120-180) or percentile rank? 

In other words, would someone improving their score from 172 (97th percentile) to 178 (99th) have far less benefit than someone improving from say 159 to 160? 

I'm asking in the context of someone who needs a higher LSAT score to compensate for a lower GPA. Is it the percentile that matters or the raw score?

[Dghoul]

This really isn't a factual based either/or question on admission policy. It is more of a statistical effect. The answer is, unsurprisingly: "it depends". 

If we take all applicants as an aggregate, an imagine the admission process as a ranking procedure for them all, then percentile is more important: from 159 to 160 is a 4%(?) improvement. While from 172 to 178 is less than 3%. 

The problem is of course, that admission is school based. The overall applicant pool is very poor approximation for the applicants to any particular school. E.g. To make it extreme, maybe all reasonable applicants to Yale has a LSAT above 170, and 177 is just their 75 percentile. Then the 172 to 178 improvement, while only outranks 2% of the overall applicant pool, could outrank 40% in the applicant pool for Yale. Conversely, while 159 to 160 would outrank 4% of the overall applicants, it won't have any effect for Yale applicants (it won't improve your competitiveness among reasonable applicants at all). 

Moral of the story, whether the 159-160 is more important than 172-178 depends on the school you are applying. For a middle-of-the-road schools, the former matters more; for elite schools the latter. 

Also keep in mind that the usual percentile data from LSAT is exam score distribution, not applicant distribution. Applicants can take multiple exams, and some low scorer may never apply. So even the overall applicant pool has a higher score distribution than those data. 

As someone who also needed a high LSAT to offset low GPA, my personal advice is just focus on your scores. Percentile does nothing for your prep anyway.

[Naj]

[LMP]

14 hours ago, Spinnaker said:

Despite all the reading of admissions policies on various schools, I actually still don't know - do schools consider the LSAT actual score (120-180) or percentile rank? 

In other words, would someone improving their score from 172 (97th percentile) to 178 (99th) have far less benefit than someone improving from say 159 to 160? 

I'm asking in the context of someone who needs a higher LSAT score to compensate for a lower GPA. Is it the percentile that matters or the raw score?

Any increase will help, the purpose of the percentiles if just to gauge to against other writers of the same test. Which controls for eaiser or harder tests. There is no real benefit to dwelling on it beyond that.