A 178 is at the ceiling of the scale. The useful question is no longer whether it is good enough, but what it does and does not buy you.
You are at the top of the scale. Not near it — at it. A 178 is rare enough that admissions offices see a handful of them in a cycle, and the practical effect is that your LSAT has stopped being a thing anyone will discuss.
A 178 is as good as this test gets. Treat the LSAT as a solved part of your application and spend the time elsewhere.
Sorted against real medians rather than rankings, a 178 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 178 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 178 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 |
A 178 is not a good score with a comfortable margin; it is a rare one. Only about 0.2% of people who sit the LSAT land here or above, and the percentile scale barely has room left to describe the difference between them.
Notice how fast the return changes. A single point from here is worth 0.1 percentile points; the full five to a 180 is worth 0.1. The LSAT scale is not linear, and knowing which part of it you are on is most of the strategy.
There is no tier above a 178. Every published target on our law school tier table sits below your score, so the framework has run out of rungs.
What replaces it is preference. The question stops being which school will take you and becomes which one you actually want.
The test reports a single figure and hides the uncertainty behind it. For a 178, that uncertainty spans 175 to 180.
Up here the window stops mattering. Its ends are 0.5 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.
There is a point past which more LSAT simply does not register, and a 178 is well past it. To a committee comparing files, the difference between your score and a perfect one is not information.
The practical consequence is that your remaining leverage is elsewhere entirely: GPA, letters, the personal statement, and how early in the cycle you apply. Unlike the score, most of those are still movable.
No. You have 2 points of scale left above you, worth 0.1 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 calculatorThe rest of the file is the file now. Which schools, in what order, with what story about why you want to do this — those are the questions left, and they are the ones you can still get wrong.
14 of the fourteen report medians at or below 178; the other 0 report higher. Treat the first group as targets and the second as reaches.
No school on our median table reports a median within two points of 178, and it sits outside every tier band's published median range.
The published percentile for a 178 is around 100. Put the other way, 0.2 out of every 100 test takers score at least this well.
A 178 clears the reported median at 34 schools outright and matches it at 0 more. That is a workable application list.