A 176 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 176 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 176 sits above every T14 median, and scores above a median are what merit awards are for.
Sorted against real medians rather than rankings, a 176 looks like this: comfortably clear at 34 schools, level at 0, and slightly short at 0.
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 176 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 176 sits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale Law School | 172 | 174 | 176 | at 75th |
| Stanford Law School | 171 | 173 | 176 | at 75th |
| University of Chicago Law | 171 | 174 | 176 | at 75th |
| Harvard Law School | 171 | 174 | 176 | at 75th |
| Columbia Law School | 171 | 173 | 175 | above 75th |
| University of Pennsylvania Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | above 75th |
| University of Virginia Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | above 75th |
| NYU School of Law | 170 | 172 | 174 | above 75th |
| Northwestern Pritzker Law | 170 | 173 | 175 | above 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 | above 75th |
| Georgetown Law | 168 | 171 | 173 | above 75th |
Scores like this are scarce enough to change how they are read. When roughly 0.5% of a testing year clears your number, admissions offices stop treating it as a hurdle you got over and start treating it as something to acquire.
The shape of the curve matters more than the point on it. From a 176, one more scaled point moves you 0.2 percentile points, and five moves you 0.4. Those two figures are what any retake decision actually rests on.
Merit aid is a purchase, and what schools are purchasing is a better-looking 509 report. A 176 clears 14 T14 medians outright, and each of those is a school with a financial reason to want you.
At 10 of those schools a 176 sits above the reported 75th percentile, which is the band where named awards live. Competing offers are the lever; use them.
Our guide to LSAT scores and scholarship offers goes into how to actually ask.
Treat the number as a centre of gravity rather than a fact. The band around a 176 runs from 173 to 179, and the whole retake question turns on how wide that is in percentile terms.
The whole band is worth 1.1 percentile points — effectively identical scores. Whatever reason you might have for sitting again, it is not this one.
No. You have 4 points of scale left above you, worth 0.4 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 calculatorApply early, apply high, and negotiate. A 176 in a file submitted in September is worth more than the same score submitted in February, because scholarship money runs out in the order applications arrive.
Variance has almost nothing to offer here: 173-179 spans 1.1 percentile points. Only a named median above you justifies another sitting.
The next point is worth 0.2 percentile points, and the exchange rate improves with distance: 0.4 points for the climb to 180.
14 of the fourteen report medians at or below 176; the other 0 report higher. Treat the first group as targets and the second as reaches.
By tier, a 176 matches the HYS (Harvard, Yale, Stanford) band. No school in our median table sits within two points of it.