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I went to a college with a Pass/Fail system (ie no GPA) so I assumed that my "GPA" is just gonna be something like "NA" or simply left blank.
But a 0.00???
Does that mean if a school accepts me, I'd be bringing their entering class average GPA down with my "0.00 GPA"? This is ridiculous! Not a single school would be willing to accept me in this case.
Guess I'll have to call or email LSAC asap.
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14 comments
If you look at 509 reports, there are some students' GPAs that are not factored into a school's GPA medians. Take a look at Harvard's 509 -- http://hls.harvard.edu/content/uploads/2016/12/2016-Standard-509-Information-Report.pdf -- last year, there were 26 not included. I had always assumed those were international students, but maybe some are from P/F schools.
Interesting. I know of several schools that don't use letter grades. There's an applicant increase this cycle. I wonder if that could help some. I wish they didn't list the GPA as 0.0 because it's more like Not Applicable. How's your studying going?
@pcainti665
My guess is that there just ain't many schools that do this. Or rather, not many people from schools like mine are applying to law school.
I was talking to the registrar people at my school and they recounted less than 20 in their entire career :(
@pcainti665
Haha I wish my school allowed me to do that. But in reality it's the other way round. We don't have the option of including a "good grade" because there simply isn't a grade for any of the classes. And if someone happened to have failed one class, out of say, 100 classes that are counted towards our degree, LSAC would count the failed class and issue a 0.00 as the "average GPA".
I don't know what's went wrong in my case. I passed all my classes but still got a 0.00. lol.
Agreeing that they should have a category for schools that don't issue grades. However, I also think many admissions specialists know which schools fall into this category but you could contact them once you apply to clear things up if it seems like it hasn't been figured out yet.
@katrakkade441 said:
I went to a college with a Pass/Fail system (ie no GPA) so I assumed that my "GPA" is just gonna be something like "NA" or simply left blank.
But a 0.00???
Does that mean if a school accepts me, I'd be bringing their entering class average GPA down with my "0.00 GPA"? This is ridiculous! Not a single school would be willing to accept me in this case.
Guess I'll have to call or email LSAC asap.
First of all you should call LSAC anyway, but the 0 wouldn't be as dire as you seem to think.
The main figures that law schools are ranked on is their median LSAT and GPA. They also try to keep their 25th and 75th percentile GPA's up as well. Even a 0.0 would still just factor in the same as any other below median and 25th GPA.
When people get really low GPAs law schools sometimes are hesitant to admit people because they don't believe they can succeed even though it doesn't hurt their statistics anymore than someone .01 below their 25th. That reason clearly wouldn't apply to you.
@leahbeuk911 Yeah..it's sort of annoying. A lot of other less difficult schools have A+'s also that can inflate people's GPAs.
For example, I know people from Stanford who load up on easy courses their senior years - like arts or PE courses - to just get a bunch of A+'s...
@pcainti665 said:
@leahbeuk911 Stanford also has A+'s, so you can get a GPA as high as 4.33
Ugh, I get so irritated that LSAC doesn't adjust for that. I attended a university my freshman year that allowed A+'s, but the school I transferred to for the other 3 years did not. It seems that standardizing everyone's scores would mean removing the A+'s to make it a true 4.0 scale, not a 4.33.
Dang if I was you I would have taken every class pass/fail except for 1 class, and then gotten an A in that class.
ez pz 4.0 lol.
But I'm not sure how the LSAC will read a 0.00 GPA...
@leahbeuk911 Stanford also has A+'s, so you can get a GPA as high as 4.33
You'll probably want some stellar LORs that talk about your work as a student and their comments on your projects, papers, and exams. If they can say something about your work in comparison to other students, this could help. The college's US News ranking is also important.
I feel like Stanford also has a different grading system? Don't remember if it was pass/fail and I could be totally off, but I thought I remember something being different about how they grade like that.
Edit: nope, nevermind, should have googled first haha. Stanford is regular 4.0 system.
A close friend of mine studied at John Hopkins and I believe he also took all of his classes P/F too. I think Swarthmore college, MIT, and Brown (as you mentioned) also have optional P/F grades.
I'm also curious to know how admissions will view a purely pass/fail transcript. Perhaps they put more emphasis on LSAT score?
@gregoryalexanderdevine723
Thanks for your reply! Do you happen to know which schools have the pass/fail system? I know Brown has it as optional, but most people who's got grad school in mind specifically opts out of it.
It will be helpful if I could talk to someone else in the same situation as me.
@katrakkade441 said:
I went to a college with a Pass/Fail system (ie no GPA) so I assumed that my "GPA" is just gonna be something like "NA" or simply left blank.
But a 0.00???
Does that mean if a school accepts me, I'd be bringing their entering class average GPA down with my "0.00 GPA"? This is ridiculous! Not a single school would be willing to accept me in this case.
Guess I'll have to call or email LSAC asap.
I'm not exactly sure how it will be considered/calculated by law schools, but I know that several high ranking colleges that have pass/fail grading systems and some of those students certainly go on to graduate schools each year. So it's not like you won't have any chance at any school. I'm just not exactly sure how they work it all out.