Every year, there are students who get a relatively low LSAT score and complain that their 4.0 GPA should more than compensate for their low performance on the LSAT. They think that they shouldn't be viewed unfavorably by the law school admissions committees since they have a high GPA.

They are wrong.

As my previous post pointed out, the GPA and the LSAT score indicate two completely different things about a law school applicant. The former shows how diligent an applicant is, while the latter corresponds to the applicant's reading and reasoning ability. In other words, the GPA is longitudinal data, while the LSAT score is a snapshot of a person's mental capabilities at one point in time.

First of all, there is no argument that one's reading and reasoning ability is relevant to law school. Do you think there's anything else going on in law school? Sure, there is the Barristers' Ball, but you didn't go to law school to go to prom, right?

Now, one could say that diligence matters in law school too. Yes, that is absolutely true. It's diligence that will get you through 300 pages of dense reading. But here's the kicker: diligence doesn't matter if your low reading and reasoning ability prevents you from understanding what you're reading. That's the problem with students with low LSAT scores and high GPAs; they're going to be the students who work hard, but don't understand what they're reading in law school.

You kind of want your lawyer to understand the case that they're reading, right?

The LSAT Genius
New York's Best LSAT Tutor, Bar None.

You have a 3.5. Your dream law school's median GPA is 3.65. Do you still have a shot? Absolutely. Your LSAT score can more than compensate for your less-than-perfect GPA. If your dream law school's median LSAT score is 163, then you should shoot for the 170s. Except for schools like Yale and Berkeley that historically care a lot about the GPA, your LSAT score is going to matter a lot more to the admissions committee than your GPA, so a LSAT score that's much higher than the school's median is going to attract attention.

When law school admissions committees receive an application, an index score is created, which is an aggregate of your GPA and LSAT score. The problem is that at most schools, the GPA and LSAT score are weighted differently. In fact, it's safe to say that at most law schools, the LSAT score is twice as important. That's why I always tell my LSAT students that their application should be prioritized in the following way:

60%: LSAT
30%: GPA
10%: Recommendations, résumé, personal statement

The LSAT score is such a large part of the admissions decision that you need to tread carefully with your LSAT preparation. If you don't have sufficient time to prepare, then don't even register for the LSAT. What is a sufficient amount of LSAT preparation? For full-time students and those with full-time jobs, it has historically been 6–9 months. It's not impossible to score well with much less time (my own LSAT preparation took 3 months), but that's only if you're already scoring high without any test preparation or you aren't in school or working.

Since a high GPA is not correlated at all with a high LSAT score, do not mistakenly assume that you won't need to prepare as much as everyone else. Many people don't understand why the GPA wouldn't be correlated with the LSAT score. What does a high GPA indicate? It indicates diligence, the willingness to work hard for 4 years. A high LSAT score indicates your ability to read and reason quickly. One doesn't need to read and reason quickly to get good grades in college courses, so it makes sense that there would be no correlation. Once again, a high GPA does not exempt you from a lot of preparation. If you're considering the September 2014 LSAT, for example, it's not too early to start preparing now, even if your GPA is a 3.95.

The LSAT Genius
New York's Best LSAT Tutor, Bar None.