A 174 clears the median at every law school in the country. That turns the application from a question of admission into a question of price.
A 174 changes what the conversation is about. You are no longer asking whether a school will take you; you are asking what they will pay to have you, because a score this far above their reported median makes their numbers look better the moment you enrol.
Yes — and specifically, yes for money. A 174 sits above every T14 median, and scores above a median are what merit awards are for.
Sorted against real medians rather than rankings, a 174 looks like this: comfortably clear at 26 schools, level at 8, and slightly short at 0. Chicago, Columbia, Harvard 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.
Read the last column as the position a 174 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 174 sits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale Law School | 172 | 174 | 176 | at median |
| Stanford Law School | 171 | 173 | 176 | above median |
| University of Chicago Law | 171 | 174 | 176 | at median |
| Harvard Law School | 171 | 174 | 176 | at median |
| Columbia Law School | 171 | 173 | 175 | above median |
| University of Pennsylvania Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | above median |
| University of Virginia Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | above median |
| NYU School of Law | 170 | 172 | 174 | at 75th |
| Northwestern Pritzker Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | above median |
| University of Michigan Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | above 75th |
| Duke University Law | 169 | 171 | 173 | above 75th |
| UC Berkeley Law | 168 | 170 | 172 | above 75th |
| Cornell Law School | 170 | 173 | 175 | above median |
| Georgetown Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | above 75th |
The room gets small quickly up here. Around 0.9% of test takers reach a 174 or better, which in a normal year is a group smaller than the number of seats the schools chasing them have to fill.
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 0.8 percentile points.
A retake is not a step up, it is a re-roll. What you are gambling with is the range 171–177, because that is what a 174 means once you allow for measurement error — and the dice can come back lower.
There is nothing here worth gambling for — 1.9 percentile points across the whole range. Only a specific school median could justify it.
How the LSAT score band works has the statistics in full.
Your score is not really a number, it is a window. LSAC measures with an error of about 2.6 points, which means the honest way to describe a 174 is "somewhere between 171 and 177, probably".
At this end the measurement error is invisible in practice: 1.9 percentile points across the entire range. Nobody reading your file could tell the difference.
No. You have 6 points of scale left above you, worth 0.8 percentile points in total, and a file that shows every score you have ever earned. That is a bad bet in both directions.
The only version of this that makes sense is a specific school whose median sits above you and a GPA that cannot cover the difference. If that is not your situation, you are done.
The next useful step is to stop looking at the score alone. Put a 174 and your GPA into the law school admissions calculator and see which of these schools your actual profile lands in.
Open the admissions calculatorBuild the list from the top and do not talk yourself into a safety-heavy strategy. Your score is above every median in the country; the risk in your application is not admission.
A 174 is approximately the 99th percentile, so about 0.9% of test takers score at or above it.
Yes. 26 schools report medians at or below 174, with another 8 sitting within two points of it.
Your band is 171-177, worth only 1.9 percentile points, so there is little upside from variance alone. Retake only to clear a specific school median.
One point buys 0.3 percentile points from 174; a full five-point improvement to 179 buys 0.8.