A 177 clears the median at every law school in the country. That turns the application from a question of admission into a question of price.
There is a point where the LSAT stops being a filter and starts being a bargaining chip. A 177 is past it. Every T14 median sits at or below your score, and schools compete for the small group of people who can say that.
Yes — and specifically, yes for money. A 177 sits above every T14 median, and scores above a median are what merit awards are for.
The list that matters is the one built off medians. A 177 clears 34 of the schools we track outright and matches 0 more. Chicago, Columbia, Harvard are among the first group.
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 177 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 177 sits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale Law School | 172 | 174 | 176 | above 75th |
| Stanford Law School | 171 | 173 | 176 | above 75th |
| University of Chicago Law | 171 | 174 | 176 | above 75th |
| Harvard Law School | 171 | 174 | 176 | above 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 0.3% 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 177, one more scaled point moves you 0.1 percentile points, and five moves you 0.2. Those two figures are what any retake decision actually rests on.
A 177 does not mean anything on its own. Next to a 3.9 it is the part of your application that needs explaining; next to a 3.2 it is the part doing the rescuing. Same number, opposite job.
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 177 puts you on the good side of that trade.
Splitters and reverse splitters covers how committees treat each case.
A 177 on Saturday could have been a 174 or a 180 on a different form. That is not a criticism of the test — it is what a 2.6-point standard error means in practice.
At this end the measurement error is invisible in practice: 0.8 percentile points across the entire range. Nobody reading your file could tell the difference.
No. You have 3 points of scale left above you, worth 0.2 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 177 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.
Moving from 177 to 178 is worth 0.1 percentile points. Five points, to a 180, is worth 0.2.
A 177 is at or above the reported median at 14 of the fourteen T14 schools, so yes for part of that list. It is below the median at the other 0, where a high GPA has to carry the file.
No school on our median table reports a median within two points of 177, and it sits outside every tier band's published median range.
The published percentile for a 177 is around 100. Put the other way, 0.3 out of every 100 test takers score at least this well.