Apply Colleges

Yes and no. When you apply to law school, you send in all your transcripts to the LSDAS service administered by LSAC, but only your undergraduate classes for your first bachelor’s degree count toward your LSDAS GPA. A second bachelor’s degree, master’s degree(s), and all other post-graduate work do not get calculated into your LSDAS GPA. Sadly, this is the GPA that gets reported to law schools and the only GPA that law schools really consider. And, more importantly, when law schools report median GPAs and LSAT scores to the US News and World Report for ranking purposes, only LSDAS GPAs matter. USNWR does not accept any other kind of GPAs.

For you, that means you’ll be applying with a 2.5.

While law schools will see your master’s work and your transcript, your master’s in engineering won’t count as anything other than a “soft” factor, like work experience, volunteer activities, letters of recommendation, dean’s list, and so on. Your post-graduate GPA won’t be considered as your real GPA, unfortunately, but a master’s in anything, especially a challenging subject like engineering, will be viewed favorably by law schools.

With a 2.5, even in a science major (which I assume yours was), certain schools are just going to be closed to you. Another sad reality about law school is that science and math majors whose programs curved grades don’t usually get much GPA forgiveness. For example, a 3.8 GPA in communications is almost universally going to be preferred to a 3.6 in engineering, assuming the LSAT score is the same. Why? Well, remember USNWR? USNWR doesn’t ask for the majors or undergraduate institutions of the school’s matriculating students, so even if the school stacked its class full of brilliant science and math majors, the lower GPAs would drop the school’s ranking.

Here’s the good news. You can still get into a tier one law school, even a top-25 law school, if your LSAT is high enough. By “high,” I mean at least 167-168, preferably over 170. Washington University in St. Louis and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are ranked in the top 25 and take low GPAs/high LSATs all the time. Now, if you have at least one year’s post-college work experience, and you can get an LSAT around 172 or higher, then you can apply Early Decision to Northwestern. Northwestern is really the only law school in the top-14 willing to take sub-3.0 folks, but you need to have a rockin’ LSAT. And part of the reason Northwestern does this is because it’s really the only top-14 school that cares if you have work experience, so they consider GPA a little less important because most of their students are a few years out from college. If you apply regular decision, you’ll probably be waitlisted or rejected and may not hear from the school until July or August. If you apply Early Decision (binding commitment to attend if admitted), that’s your best shot.