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Do law schools care about where you went for undergrad?

femininomenonfemininomenon Core Member
edited June 7 in Law School Admissions 9 karma

When I was a teenager, my parents said they would only financially assist me if I attended one of the 3 bible colleges owned by our religion. Well, I got rejected from 2/3. The one I went to has a 95% acceptance rate. I think it's rather implied that if a college has a 95% acceptance rate, their curriculum is probably not that rigorous or challenging. I graduated with a 3.96 GPA, magna cum laude, full scholarship, and regret attending there everyday for numerous reasons and also because I am no longer a part of that religion.

Will T14 or T20 law schools care about where I went? I know everyone says GPA and LSAT are the two most important pieces of your application, and although I have a high GPA, I'm trying to get a really high LSAT score to compensate for the fact that I attended a college with a 95% acceptance rate, but is this something I should worry about? I really am quite insecure about it.

Edit: It is an accredited college by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities.

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Comments

  • aalyriannasaalyriannas Live Member
    2 karma

    No. The school you went to for undergrad does not matter. Its all about the work you put in.

  • rlq209rlq209 Live Member
    1 karma

    Do law schools prefer in-house students who attended undergraduate at their establishment?

  • GNA451--GNA451-- Core Member
    69 karma

    I'm not an expert here, but I think the conventional wisdom is that it's not a major factor in admissions. The cynical / reductionist reason is that there's no extra weighting for strength of undergraduate institution for incoming class in the US News and World rankings of law schools so it doesn't "help" law schools with their ranking to admit folks from more prestigious undergrads.

    I will say that in LSAC when you upload your transcripts to receive an official LSAC GPA (mine was higher than what my transcript says because LSAC does take into account A+ vs. an A, which is interesting) - you'll note that they do have statistics for your undergrad school in terms of what range of GPAs applicants usually have (LSAT as well). My hunch would be that they may take a glance to understand if your school has grade inflation or deflation. This is pretty much pure conjecture just based on the fact that it's included in the LSAC report though.

    The last thing I think that they definitely do take into account around undergrad (again, not a huge weight, but something they'd consider) is the difficulty of the major - e.g. it's pretty widely known that hard sciences generally have deflated GPAs compared to say, humanities.

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