Several web sites post scattergrams for law school admission. They vary somewhat from school to school, but the general pattern is that they closely follow a combination of GPA and LSAT. The outliers who get in with lower stats are generally URMs, not students who attended MIT or similar.
As an example, I looked up the scattergram for NYU at NYU Law School - Admissions Graph | Law School Numbers . I chose NYU because it was a T10 law school with a large sample that does not have stats almost exactly at the maximum. After removing the post-COVID 2020-21 and 2021-22 cycles, it looks like a few hundred application decisions remain. There appears to be a stat thresholds similar to below. Above this threshold, the applicant is almost certain to be either accepted or waitlisted. Below this threshold, they are probably going to be rejected.
4.0 GPA – 164+ LSAT = accepted or waitlisted
3.9 GPA – 165+ LSAT = accepted or waitlisted
3.8 GPA – 167+ LSAT = accepted or waitlisted
…
3.5 GPA – 171 + LSAT = accepted or waitlisted
However, there were a significant number of outliers who were accepted with lower stats, sometimes much lower. These were almost without exception URMs. The 4 lowest stat acceptances are listed below.
- 3.23 GPA + 162 LSAT – Black, female, non-traditional applicant, Liberal arts major, Undergrad school not listed
- 3.29 GPA + 164 LSAT – Black, female, other info not listed
- 3.34 GPA + 165 LSAT – Black, female, non-traditional applicant, Political science major, Howard University
- 3.24 GPA + 166 LSAT – Black, female, non-traditional applicant
There appear to be no non-URM acceptances significantly below the stat threshold mentioned above, as if there is a hard stat threshold for non-URMs. The lowest GPA non-URM admits on that stat threshold attended a variety of different colleges and had a wide variety of majors. Selective colleges do appear to be overrpresented, although there are many exceptions… This could relate to applicants who have top soft non-stat factors also being overrepresented at selective colleges.
Having high stats above the threshold was enough to not get rejected, but not enough to get accepted. Many high stat applicants were waitlisted. The limited information available about applicants offers little insight as to why some high stat applicants were waitlisted and others were accepted. I see little pattern based on college name/type or major. I expect influence from non-stat criteria, which may or may not include course rigor. The highest stat waitlisted applicants that listed school info were as follows.
- 4.09 GPA + 179 LSAT – “Top 10” college, Engineering major
- 4.1 GPA + 177 LSAT – HYPSM, Philosophy major
- 3.91 GPA + 176 LSAT – “Mid-Tier State School”, Social Sciences major
- 4.0 GPA + 174 LSAT – “Large Public”, Political Science major