A 171 is above the median at part of the T14 and below it at the rest. Which half you build your list around decides almost everything.
You are inside the range that T14 admissions committees are working with, which is a genuinely different position from being near it. The remaining question is narrow and answerable: is one more point worth another cycle, given that 10 of those medians still sit above you?
A 171 makes the T14 a real conversation rather than a hopeful one — it clears 4 of the fourteen medians outright.
Ignore the rankings for a moment and sort by median instead. A 171 sits above 14 schools and level with 15. The level group — NYU, Penn (Carey), Stanford among them — is where you look like a typical admit.
Reach, Target and Likely are positions, not predictions. A median is the midpoint of an admitted class, which means half of everyone who got in scored below it. Schools in your Reach column admit people like you every year; the rest of the application just has to do more of the work.
Read the last column as the position a 171 occupies in each school’s reported range. Figures are the ABA 509 medians published on our law school tier page.
| Law school | 25th | Median | 75th | Where a 171 sits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale Law School | 172 | 174 | 176 | below 25th |
| Stanford Law School | 171 | 173 | 176 | in range, below median |
| University of Chicago Law | 171 | 174 | 176 | in range, below median |
| Harvard Law School | 171 | 174 | 176 | in range, below median |
| Columbia Law School | 171 | 173 | 175 | in range, below median |
| University of Pennsylvania Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | in range, below median |
| University of Virginia Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | in range, below median |
| NYU School of Law | 170 | 172 | 174 | in range, below median |
| Northwestern Pritzker Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | in range, below median |
| University of Michigan Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | at median |
| Duke University Law | 169 | 171 | 173 | at median |
| UC Berkeley Law | 168 | 170 | 172 | above median |
| Cornell Law School | 170 | 173 | 175 | in range, below median |
| Georgetown Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | at median |
The room gets small quickly up here. Around 2.2% of test takers reach a 171 or better, which in a normal year is a group smaller than the number of seats the schools chasing them have to fill.
Everything about how hard to push comes down to the exchange rate here: 0.5 percentile points per scaled point, or 1.7 for a realistic climb to 176.
Merit aid is a purchase, and what schools are purchasing is a better-looking 509 report. A 171 clears 4 T14 medians outright, and each of those is a school with a financial reason to want you.
The move most people miss is applying deliberately one tier below their ceiling. The same score that is unremarkable at a reach school is an asset at a school whose median it clears, and assets get discounts.
Our guide to LSAT scores and scholarship offers goes into how to actually ask.
Sit the same test twice with the same ability and you will not get the same score. The measurement error runs to roughly 2.6 points, so a 171 is shorthand for the range 168 to 174.
The whole band is worth 3.6 percentile points — effectively identical scores. Whatever reason you might have for sitting again, it is not this one.
This one deserves real arithmetic, because the schools you care about are separated by single points. A 171 is under the median at 10 T14 schools, the nearest being NYU School of Law at 172.
Set that against a score band worth 3.6 percentile points and you have an actual decision rather than a feeling. Pick the median you want to clear, then answer.
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 calculatorSplit the T14 into the 4 schools where your score does the work and the 10 where your GPA has to. Apply to both groups, but write the applications differently.
Moving from 171 to 172 is worth 0.5 percentile points. Five points, to a 176, is worth 1.7.
Yes at 4 T14 schools, where a 171 matches or beats the reported median. At the remaining 10 it is a below-median application.
Schools reporting a median within two points of 171 include NYU, Penn (Carey), Stanford, Cornell. Check current 509 data before building a list.
Roughly 2.2% of test takers reach 171 or higher, which places the score at about the 98th percentile.