Any Acceptances this year with High GPAs and high 140 LSAT scores?

[pastmidnight]

Mod Comment: Prior to this post, a series of posts were removed for trying to derail the thread.

People come to this forum are aware (for the most part, clearly not in all instances), that this is where you come when you want serious advice from people who know what they’re talking about. If you want false cheerleading from other applicants who largely don’t know what they’re talking about, you go to Reddit. I do think being respectful is important, but I also understand the frustration with applicants who act like applying to law school and writing the LSAT are massive hurdles and significant achievements when really they are time-consuming inconveniences. These applicants also often refuse to listen to the good advice they receive from people on this forum.

If someone scores in the 140s, I do think that calls for some serious self-reflection, barring cases where someone had a medical emergency during the test or there were significant proctoring issues. If you as an applicant are unable to take a step back and seriously interrogate why you got the score you did and make necessary changes, that to me is just as much of an indication as your LSAT score that you are not ready for law school at this point in your life.

If anyone is worryingly looking through this thread for advice on how to improve their score:

• Do not write the LSAT until you are consistently scoring well on practice tests. If that means you can’t apply this cycle, do not apply this cycle. It is more or less the norm to take a gap year before starting law school at this point. Law school will always be there, you do not need to rush into things by applying this cycle. I continue to not understand why applicants do this (I know – it’s because they want to stay in school), but if you write the LSAT when you are ill-prepared there is a good chance that you won’t get in this cycle anyway.
• If you have test anxiety that is interfering with your vision or causing you to shake so much that you cannot hold a pencil or use a computer, that needs to be managed before you even consider registering to write the test again. I 100% understand that this is easier said than done, and wish I could offer more advice in this regard.
• If you need to travel a long way to write the test, consider arriving at least a day in advance. If you need to book time off of work, do it. If you know you really struggle to sleep in a new space or get nervous at night in new spaces (same), take that into consideration. If you would feel more comfortable travelling even further away to write the test if you could stay with family, do that.
• If you need accommodations, you should absolutely use them. Use them in law school too. Legal employers consistently say that they are looking for students with good judgement. Not using accommodations when you are entitled to them is IMO bad judgement.

If I worked in admissions and saw a student with a score in the 140s coupled with a near-perfect GPA, if I was being charitable I would assume that the student had a medical issue during the exam, that there was a proctoring issue, or that the student was not prepared to write the exam. If I was being less charitable, I would question the rigour of the university the student attended for undergrad. A student who applied with multiple scores in the 140s would to me indicate that the student had not taken the necessary steps to figure out why they were struggling with the LSAT, and that they were not ready for law school at this point in their life (which is okay – that doesn’t mean they will never be ready, they just aren’t at this moment).

Also: you often have to disclose your parents’ occupations/highest degrees when you apply to law school. I would have much higher expectations for students who come from families with doctors or lawyers, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

Also also:

[NONAMER]

Hi, everybody.

I do agree that a 149 is not a good score and does not indicate that a test - taker is doing well.

Yet, as a very short aside, some users on this forum, according to stats reported by them, have received acceptances with 146 and 149. So, although I am studying or preparing very intensively for the June 2024 LSAT, I hope that an offer is extended to me before or after June 2024. 

P.S: At least two who reportedly received acceptances with 149 and 146 have lower CGPAs than I as well. 

Edited March 12 by NONAMER

[lawyersarecool]

I find this discussion to be quite interesting, and think a lot of great points have been made. The LSAT is a huge time sink, and not everyone has a fluid test-taking experience (I wrote it three times and went from l52 until finally reaching 160). While the LSAT is not the only component of someone's law school application, it is quite significant. At the end of the day, an applicant's weighted average index score is going to be the primary method of evaluation, with the personal statement and letters of reference being an important piece, but not weighted as heavily. Your LSAT has a significant impact in ensuring you hit the magic number(s) that ensure an offer. Law school candidates are diverse; a majority are above-average students and many have extracurriculars or "softs" that set them apart from the average student. 

As hard as it may be for someone facing the situation to think about, a 149 is not likely to garner an offer of admission. This doesn't mean that law school is out of reach, or that said individual is unintelligent, but it does signify that certain concepts/methods of thinking are not coalescing. If you truly feel like law school is your calling, do not give up. Instead, take a break, figure out what isn't connecting, and then come back to the test when you feel ready and are PT-ing a lot higher. 

I would like to mention that I worked with an LSAT tutor and anecdotally heard of someone who scored within the 30th percentile and was admitted, but this person was purportedly a mature applicant with extensive leadership work within a provincial government. I do think that, if true, the aforementioned situation is one of those incredibly rare exceptions where an applicant can demonstrate significant competencies outside of academia. 

Edited March 13 by lawyersarecool

[CleanHands]

1 hour ago, lawyersarecool said:

extensive leadership work within a provincial government

Checks out that this person would have a low LSAT score.

[Yogurt Baron]

8 hours ago, lawyersarecool said:

The LSAT is a huge time sink

It really, really isn't, if you have the aptitudes it's testing for.

[Diplock]

3 hours ago, Yogurt Baron said:

It really, really isn't, if you have the aptitudes it's testing for.

Learning to hit a baseball even some of the time would be a huge time sink for someone with minimal athletic aptitude. Like me, frankly. While some people just have the skill almost immediately, and their efforts at practice are really just refining it.

Which is really just to say, yes.

[Yogurt Baron]

Yeah, I mean, look, maybe I'm being a dick when I keep beating this drum. But I feel like 15-20 years ago, it was mostly taken for granted that the LSAT was about getting a snapshot of somebody's inherent abilities. There's been a gradual movement toward this whole "study for the LSATs" thing. What I'm seeing on here a lot the past year or so is a notion that writing the LSAT is like buying a random lottery ticket, and if you get a bad score, that is something unfortunate that happened to you, with no correlation to your talents. I find it hard not to sometimes snap back to, "You know how everyone spends eight million years studying for the LSATs and still maxes out at a 145?" with, "Actually, no, many people just go write the test and do well, because we have the skills it's testing for, and you've got to think about whether you want to spend the rest of your life in direct competition with people who are more adept at this than you are."

This could be a hypocritical stance for me, of all people, to take; back when it was taken for granted that the LSAT measured your abilities, it was also taken for granted that the GPA you got at 18 reflected your inherent abilities. My GPA of 0.00001 didn't reflect my abilities; I went back and did undergrad over again; arguably that's no different from someone going back and writing the LSAT again. But at the same time, if someone has an experience with the LSAT like I had with my GPA, I wish them the best. If you've got a 180 brain and you're sick the day of the test and you write a 142, go back and write your 180. But if the best you can do is a 142, it is actually an option to say, "Wow, I am not good at this thing," rather than making excuses.

Anyway, old man yells at cloud, etc.

Edited March 13 by Yogurt Baron

[CleanHands]

2 hours ago, Yogurt Baron said:

-Snip-

It's pretty simple: the concepts of "equality" and "sameness" have become erroneously conflated in our society.

[NONAMER]

.

Edited March 14 by NONAMER