A 179 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 179 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.
Yes, obviously — and more usefully, it is finished. There is nothing above a 179 worth chasing and nothing below it you need to worry about.
Sorted against real medians rather than rankings, a 179 looks like this: comfortably clear at 34 schools, level at 0, and slightly short at 0.
These categories describe distance from a midpoint, nothing more. Half of every admitted class came in under the median, so a Reach school is one you apply to with a good story, not one you cross off.
Read the last column as the position a 179 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 179 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 |
The room gets small quickly up here. Around 0.1% of test takers reach a 179 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 percentile points.
Going back in means accepting that the result is partly chance. Your realistic range is 176 to 180, and a bad Saturday inside that range is a real possibility.
There is nothing here worth gambling for — 0.4 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.
The test reports a single figure and hides the uncertainty behind it. For a 179, that uncertainty spans 176 to 180.
At this end the measurement error is invisible in practice: 0.4 percentile points across the entire range. Nobody reading your file could tell the difference.
There is a point past which more LSAT simply does not register, and a 179 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.
The upside is 0 percentile points and the downside is a visible lower score. Very few applications have ever been improved by turning a 179 into something else.
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 calculatorPut the LSAT down. Nothing you do to this score changes an outcome, and every hour you would spend on it is worth more spent on the parts of the application that are still genuinely open.
There is no tier or school in our tables where a 179 is the typical admitted score.
A 179 is approximately the 100th percentile, so about 0.1% of test takers score at or above it.
On the median table a 179 reads as Likely at 34 schools and Target at 0, so yes for a real list of programmes.
Your band is 176-180, worth only 0.4 percentile points, so there is little upside from variance alone. Retake only to clear a specific school median.