A Top Law School's Tryout Admissions Program For Students With Bad GPAs and Low LSAT Scores

No law school in the country has a similar 'audition' process for would-be law students.

You really want to go to law school, but it seems like all of the odds have been stacked against you. Maybe you’re really intelligent, but you partied too much in college and your GPA has a major hangover. Maybe you experience severe anxiety during standardized testing situations and your LSAT score sucks. Your numbers look like they belong at the bottom of a toilet, and you fear that your applications will be rejected even at law schools that have stereotypically been classified as commodes. What on earth can you do when no law school will accept you?

One law school has an innovative program for students who are facing this problem.

Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law has created a program that will throw these would-be law students right into the mix with regular J.D. students to see if they’ll be able to compete. Through ASU’s Masters of Legal Studies Honors Program, students will be able to take fall classes and be graded right alongside traditional law students — and the 1Ls and their professors will have no idea that they’re any different. Honors students’ grades are removed when calculating the 1L curve, but if they’re able to crack the top 50 percent of the J.D. class with their first semester marks, they’ll be formally admitted as law students starting in the spring semester. Those who don’t make the grade may drop out or continue to take classes in the spring and earn a master in legal studies.

The school determined that the single best predictor of how students would do on the bar exam was the grades they earned while at ASU Law, so the master’s honors program gives them a semester of 1L coursework to evaluate. The school admitted 36 students to the inaugural cohort last fall, and 11 of them earned grades that put them in the top half of the J.D. class. Thus, they started as full J.D. students in the spring. Sylvester expects a couple of those 11 to be in the top 5 of the class once they have a year of J.D. grades under their belts. Among the remaining 25, some stayed and completed their masters while others cut their losses after one semester and left. Several of the students who finished the masters reapplied to ASU and [Dean Douglas] Sylvester expects them to get in this time.

“We’re saying, ‘Here’s an opportunity to prove to us that you’re a lot more than your numbers,’” Sylvester said in an interview with Karen Sloan of Law.com. “Some of these students definitely did that. This is a way for us to hedge our bets on that bottom quartile of the class, and also give potential law students a much better indication of whether or not they’re going to succeed.”

Not only does ASU’s Honors Program allow students who wouldn’t have been given a chance elsewhere to essentially go try out for a place in the law school class, but it also helps the school to protect its bar pass rate. This seems like a win-win all around, but of course, there’s one big catch. No, ASU isn’t trying to game the U.S. News law school rankings by admitting Honors students like transfer students without reporting their underwhelming admissions stats. Those will be reported to U.S. News the following year since Honors students who are accepted into the J.D. class will become students in January. The kicker here is the fact that thanks to ABA rules, Honors students will have to repeat their fall 1L coursework to receive credit towards their law degrees.

Aha! That must be how ASU Law is benefitting from this program — Honors students will have to pay more for their degrees than traditional law students. Not so fast there, negative nancies. Because Honors students will have to essentially repeat a semester of classes they’ve already taken, ASU is going to waive one semester of their tuition so that their degrees don’t cost a single cent more than traditionally admitted students.

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Congratulations to Arizona State Law on creating this unique opportunity for would-be law students. We don’t know of any other law school that has this kind of an admissions program, so it’s truly revolutionary.

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked 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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