Resume Question

treyrg25

I have an MA, and my GPA is pretty high for that, but my undergrad GPA is pretty low. I left my undergrad GPA off of my resume for obvious reasons, and I'll be writing an addendum, but I wanted to know if it is okay to include my MA GPA. I do want to emphasize it, and while I can do that in the addendum as well, I want to conserve space to explain my low undergrad GPA. Keeping my MA GPA on seems like a good way to do that, but I'm worried that it might seem weird to include that one but exclude my undergrad one.

LSAT 2022

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treyrg25

^This is what I was thinking as well! Thank you!!

Selene Steelman

Former admissions officer here. The admissions committee will see all transcripts in your LSAC CAS Report with courses taken, scores received, and GPAs earned. The first page of the CAS Report will have an academic summary of all coursework completed for your undergraduate degree. Your graduate degree GPA may be used to assess your more recent academic performance and future potential for law school but will not factor into the GPA used for ranking and reporting purposes. The GPA that is significant for ranking and reporting purposes is the LSAC cumulative GPA which appears on the first page of the CAS Report. (The LSAC cumulative GPA may be different from the GPA on your degree-granting undergraduate transcript.)

For this reason, it may make sense to remove any GPAs from the resume and use the space to offer other information that the committee would otherwise not see in the application. NOT including the (lower) undergraduate GPA while including the (higher) graduate GPA (which is less significant for admissions review) might strike the committee as odd. From an admissions perspective, I would suggest either including both GPAs or leaving both GPAs off the resume. Either way, your intended audience, the admissions committee, will have access to both elsewhere in the application. You can include a GPA addendum that explains the disparity between your undergraduate and graduate performance and provides some context with which the committee should evaluate your overall file. Good luck!

treyrg25

@"Selene Steelman" that was super helpful, thank you!!!