A 162 beats most people who sat the test. This page covers which schools that makes realistic and what another few points would change.
You are past the part of the LSAT that is about learning the test and into the part that is about consistency. A 162 usually means you know what you are doing and lose points to pacing, not to confusion.
Solid. A 162 is enough to apply on, and close enough to the next tier that another sitting has a specific target.
You are past the crowd but not clear of it. About 14.8% of test takers are still at or above a 162, and in absolute numbers that is a lot of people applying to the same places.
The curve is steepest through the 140s and 150s and nearly flat above 172, which is why the same five points mean completely different things to different people. For you they are worth 9 percentile points.
The word "splitter" just means your two numbers disagree. Whether a 162 makes you one — and in which direction — is decided by your transcript, not by the LSAT.
The two numbers are not weighted equally, which is the part worth knowing. Schools guard their LSAT median harder than their GPA median, so a high-LSAT/low-GPA applicant does better than the mirror image of themselves. A 162 is near the line; a strong GPA decides which side you land on.
Splitters and reverse splitters covers how committees treat each case.
Getting out of the 162s is rarely about learning new material. It is about noticing that the same four or five kinds of question keep taking your points, which is invisible until you start writing them down.
The sequence that works is accuracy, then pace, then endurance. Skipping to the end is the most common way people plateau for a whole cycle.
The stack that gets people from a 162 to a 167: logical reasoning drills for volume, a question-type error log for direction, and a three-month plan so it does not sprawl.
Sorted against real medians rather than rankings, a 162 looks like this: comfortably clear at 4 schools, level at 4, and slightly short at 3. Ohio State (Moritz), Wisconsin, SMU (Dedman) sit in that middle group, where your score neither carries the file nor drags it.
Do not read those labels as odds. Every school on this list admits applicants below its median annually — that is what a median means. What changes across the columns is how much your GPA, letters and timing have to carry.
A score becomes a school list only when it meets a GPA. The law school admissions calculator takes both and sorts every school we track into Reach, Target and Likely against their reported medians.
Open the admissions calculatorThe test reports a single figure and hides the uncertainty behind it. For a 162, that uncertainty spans 159 to 165.
Across that range you gain or lose 14.2 percentile points for free. Worth a retake if you have somewhere specific to aim; not worth one just to see what happens.
Retake if you have a target, not because the number could be higher. From a 162 the nearest target that changes anything is 165.
The usual reason people in this band repeat their score is that they practise questions instead of practising the test. Full timed sittings plus a question-type error log is what actually moves it.
Before anything else, sit a full timed test under real conditions. Most people in this band are losing points to the clock rather than to the questions, and that is the kind of problem you can see in a single sitting.
Roughly 14.8% of test takers reach 162 or higher, which places the score at about the 85th percentile.
Yes. 4 schools report medians at or below 162, with another 4 sitting within two points of it.
Because the 159-165 band covers 14.2 percentile points and only your best score is reported, the odds are on the side of sitting again.
Moving from 162 to 163 is worth 2.2 percentile points. Five points, to a 167, is worth 9.