Everything Law Applicants Need to Know About Transcripts and Grades
Not so long ago, applying to law school was a pain. Without a centralized platform, applicants had to apply to each school individually, gathering copies of all materials, including transcripts, and sending them to each admissions office. It took a huge amount of time, paperwork, and phone calls just to ensure the materials landed in the right hands.
Today, thankfully, the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC)—the same organization that administers the LSAT—runs a central clearinghouse for applicants to store materials and complete applications. Through the Credential Assembly Service (CAS), applicants can access and complete every law school application and submit transcripts, letters of recommendation, and other materials to their chosen schools.
CAS isn’t free, nor is it perfect. But it is easy.
This article explains what you need to understand about your transcripts as a law student, from uploading them to CAS to resolving special situations when applicants have transcripts from multiple institutions.
How to Use CAS to Send Transcripts with Your Law School Applications
To apply to law school, you will need to submit transcripts from every institution of higher learning where you have studied for credit, even if that credit was not toward a degree. While this is straightforward for most applicants, it can get trickier for those who've attended multiple institutions. For example, maybe you’ve transferred colleges, pursued a graduate program, studied abroad, attended community college, or taken college classes while in high school.
The first step is to set up your LSAC CAS account and pay the associated fee, currently $195 with limited needs-based assistance available. Then, request your transcripts from your institutions, each of which typically charges its own fee. Some schools have their own procedures for requesting transcripts, perhaps through the registrar or admissions office. Others, like community colleges, use the National Student Clearinghouse or other third-party organizations.
Information about transcript requests is rarely difficult to find, although it may take some online searches or even an email. In a pinch, simply navigate to the school’s admissions page website and conduct a search for any mention of transcripts.
There should be a form on the school’s website that you complete, requiring some key data like when you attended the school and possibly your student ID number. Once the form is submitted, you can pay to have your transcript delivered directly to LSAC. See more information here on the LSAC site.
Don’t wait until the last minute! Transcripts may take multiple days or even weeks to transfer, especially if they are coming from overseas.
Will My Transcript on CAS Update When I Receive New Grades?
Yes. This is a common question, especially among those who apply during the senior year of college. One advantage to CAS is that if you are currently in school, LSAC will automatically update your transcript report when schools send new grades. See this page on the LSAC site for more information. If you are concerned about this, simply check with the institution to confirm that they sent your updated transcript to LSAC.
[Next Read: A Year-By-Year Guide for College Students Applying to Law School]
How LSAC Calculates Your GPA from Transcripts
Through the Credential Assembly Service, LSAC will compile a transcript report that includes every undergraduate or graduate transcript received in a standardized format. The LSAC report includes several GPAs: a GPA for each institution, a GPA for each year and a cumulative GPA for all undergraduate work.
Some situations are a bit more complicated, like nonstandard grades or course withdrawals, or nonstandard grades from international universities that use totally different grading systems. For those instances, the LSAC provides guidance about how transcripts are compiled and GPAs are calculated.
How Law School Admissions Officers Consider Your GPA
Despite widespread misunderstandings, law schools do not simply sort applicants by their GPA. They do consider grades, because they are statistically correlated with law school performance and because the median GPA of accepted applicants factors into law school rankings.
Accordingly, applicants can compare their own grades against the median GPA for a given law school to gauge their chance of admission. However, there is more to the story.
When assessing an applicant for admission, law schools look at other data point and trends, often found in the academic record. Did recommendation letters and other application materials align with the applicant’s grades? Did the candidate's grades improve over time? Did they take challenging course loads? Where did they excel or perform poorly, and which of those classes are most relevant to law school?
Do Law School Admissions Officers Only Look at GPA or the Whole Transcript?
Law school admissions officers are not robots, only evaluating applicants on a single metric. They review applications holistically, looking at individual grades, class selection, and trends of improvement to gain a full picture of your academic record.
Having reviewed thousands of transcripts, admissions officers have seen it all. Applicants with multiple degrees or other complications need not stress over their GPA and what it reflects, because admissions officers are transcript experts who have dealt with other applicants in similar situations. When in doubt, an admissions officer could do research or reach out with questions.
For example, let’s say you began college planning to later attend medical school, performed disastrously in science classes, then switched to history and achieved straight As once you got the hang of college. To you, this may seem like a complicated and unexpected academic journey, but admissions officers have most certainly seen plenty of other applicants with similar records. They will be able to situate your GPA in context.
Remember: GPA is simply a measure of academic performance. The GPA of someone with consistent straight Bs may seem similar to that of someone who started with failing grades but achieved straight As by the end of school, but those numbers are actually telling different stories. An applicant’s GPA is a good data point, but it is not dispositive. Law school admissions officers look at the big picture.
That said, you could always write a brief addendum to clarify the situation, just as you might if you wish to clear up a weak point on your transcript. In a few sentences, clearly lay out the context needed to interpret your academic record.
What If I Apply to Law School With Multiple Degrees On My Transcript?
As stated above, the LSAC report includes a GPA for each institution, a GPA for each year, and a cumulative GPA for all undergraduate work. So, if you received multiple undergraduate degrees within one institution, law schools will see your overall undergraduate GPA that includes all programs. If you receive multiple degrees from separate institutions, like a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, LSAC will calculate separate GPAs for each institution as well as a cumulative undergraduate GPA.
[Next Read: Law School Financial Aid and How it Works]
