A 175 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 175 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.
A 175 is above the median everywhere that publishes one. From here the application is about GPA, story and timing, not about the score.
Ignore the rankings for a moment and sort by median instead. A 175 sits above 29 schools and level with 5. The level group — Chicago, Columbia, Harvard 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 175 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 175 sits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale Law School | 172 | 174 | 176 | above median |
| Stanford Law School | 171 | 173 | 176 | above median |
| University of Chicago Law | 171 | 174 | 176 | above median |
| Harvard Law School | 171 | 174 | 176 | above median |
| Columbia Law School | 171 | 173 | 175 | at 75th |
| University of Pennsylvania Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | at 75th |
| University of Virginia Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | at 75th |
| NYU School of Law | 170 | 172 | 174 | above 75th |
| Northwestern Pritzker Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | at 75th |
| 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 | at 75th |
| Georgetown Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | above 75th |
The room gets small quickly up here. Around 0.6% of test takers reach a 175 or better, which in a normal year is a group smaller than the number of seats the schools chasing them have to fill.
The shape of the curve matters more than the point on it. From a 175, one more scaled point moves you 0.1 percentile points, and five moves you 0.5. Those two figures are what any retake decision actually rests on.
Improvement is not free, so price it. A single point above a 175 moves you 0.1 percentile points — and that figure is wildly different at other places on the scale.
Five points is the realistic unit of a retake, and it would take you to 180. In percentile terms that is almost nothing, which tells you the score is close to done.
There is a fact about the LSAT that nobody mentions until you are staring at a score report: it cannot measure you to the point. A 175 really means somewhere in 172–178, and which end you landed on was partly luck.
At this end the measurement error is invisible in practice: 1.5 percentile points across the entire range. Nobody reading your file could tell the difference.
No. You have 5 points of scale left above you, worth 0.5 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.
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 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.
On the median table a 175 reads as Likely at 29 schools and Target at 5, so yes for a real list of programmes.
With just 1.5 percentile points across the 172-178 band, a retake needs a concrete target rather than a hope of noise.
The next point is worth 0.1 percentile points, and the exchange rate improves with distance: 0.5 points for the climb to 180.
14 of the fourteen report medians at or below 175; the other 0 report higher. Treat the first group as targets and the second as reaches.