A 172 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 9 of those medians still sit above you?
Yes for 5 T14 schools, no for 9. That split is the only summary of a 172 that actually helps you.
The list that matters is the one built off medians. A 172 clears 19 of the schools we track outright and matches 15 more. Boston University, Duke, Georgia are among the first group.
These categories describe distance from a midpoint, nothing more. Half of every admitted class came in under the median, so a Reach school is one you apply to with a good story, not one you cross off.
Read the last column as the position a 172 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 172 sits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale Law School | 172 | 174 | 176 | in range, below median |
| 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 | at median |
| Northwestern Pritzker Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | in range, below median |
| University of Michigan Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | above median |
| Duke University Law | 169 | 171 | 173 | above median |
| UC Berkeley Law | 168 | 170 | 172 | at 75th |
| Cornell Law School | 170 | 173 | 175 | in range, below median |
| Georgetown Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | above median |
A 172 is not a good score with a comfortable margin; it is a rare one. Only about 1.7% of people who sit the LSAT land here or above, and the percentile scale barely has room left to describe the difference between them.
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 1.4 percentile points.
Admissions committees read two numbers, not one, and the interesting question is which of yours is carrying the other. With a 172, that depends entirely on the GPA sitting beside it.
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 172 puts you on the good side of that trade.
Splitters and reverse splitters covers how committees treat each case.
The test reports a single figure and hides the uncertainty behind it. For a 172, that uncertainty spans 169 to 175.
Up here the window stops mattering. Its ends are 3 percentile points apart, which is nothing, so variance has no gift left to give you. A retake would need a named school median to justify it.
Precision matters more here than anywhere else on the scale. You are short of 9 T14 medians, and the closest one — Stanford Law School at 173 — is the number to decide against.
Set that against a score band worth 3 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 calculatorPick the median you actually want to clear, then decide about a retake. Not the percentile, not the ranking — a specific school with a specific number. A 172 makes that a real decision rather than a hypothetical one.
A 172 is at or above the reported median at 5 of the fourteen T14 schools, so yes for part of that list. It is below the median at the other 9, where a high GPA has to carry the file.
A 172 matches the reported median at Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, WashU St. Louis, among others. These figures shift each cycle.
A 172 is approximately the 98th percentile, so about 1.7% of test takers score at or above it.
A 172 clears the reported median at 19 schools outright and matches it at 15 more. That is a workable application list.