Law Schools

The Law Schools With The Highest LSAT Scores (2018)

Plus, the school with the lowest LSAT scores.

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The LSAT’s dominance may be fading thanks to the rise of the GRE — thus far, 16 law schools have started accepting the alternative test for admissions purposes, including Harvard and Columbia — but for the time being, scoring well on the exam is still critical to one’s likelihood of being accepted to top-tier law schools.

According to the Short List blog of U.S. News & World Report, the median LSAT score for full-time students entering in fall 2017 was an average of 156 at the 185 law schools that are ranked by the magazine. Twelve of the schools at the tippy top of the list, however, had an average median LSAT score of “nearly 170.”

Which schools made the list? You might be surprised by one of them.

School (name) (state) Median LSAT score for full-time students entering in fall 2017 U.S. News law school rank
Harvard University (MA) 173 3
Yale University (CT) 173 1
Columbia University (NY) 171 5
Stanford University (CA) 171 2
University of Chicago 170 4
Duke University (NC) 169 11 (tie)
New York University 169 6
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor 169 8
University of Pennsylvania 169 7
University of Virginia 169 9 (tie)
Northwestern University (Pritzker) (IL) 168 11 (tie)
Washington University in St. Louis 168 18

Note that the twelfth law school listed here isn’t the twelfth-ranked law school in the most recent edition of the U.S. News rankings (and due to a tie for eleventh place this year, no law school is ranked in twelfth place). We skip over UC Berkeley, Cornell, Georgetown, UT-Austin, UCLA, and Vanderbilt to land at Washington University in St. Louis — the law school in eighteenth place — for the final school with a 168 median LSAT score. Hmm, let’s break this down further and look at their median LSATs:

Perhaps those six schools ought to consider raising their standards just a teensy-tiny bit in order to better compete with the entering stats of WUSTL’s students. As we all know, one point can mean worlds of difference in law school admissions, and later on the bar exam and in the employment market.

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For your daily dose of schadenfreude, the ranked law school with the lowest median LSAT score for full-time students entering in fall 2017 was the Appalachian School of Law, which clocked in with a 143. In case you were wondering, the 25th percentile LSAT score for Appalachian was 141. If Cooley Law hadn’t been unranked in this year’s edition of the U.S News rankings, it likely would have taken Appalachian’s slot as the law school with the lowest median LSAT score for full-time students entering in fall 2017, with a 142 (and a 25th percentile LSAT score of 139). Ouch.

How did your law school measure up against these schools?

12 Law Schools Where Students Had High LSAT Scores [Short List / U.S. News]

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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