The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) recalculates every law school applicant's GPA from scratch using its own standardized formula through the Credential Assembly Service (CAS) — a process that can produce a GPA meaningfully different from the one printed on your undergraduate transcript, most commonly because LSAC counts every attempt of a repeated course rather than just the most recent one.
Why LSAC recalculates your GPA at all
Undergraduate institutions don't all calculate GPA the same way. Some drop your lowest grade, some apply "academic renewal" that erases a poor early grade once you retake the course, some exclude community college credit earned before matriculation, and some use a 4.0 scale while others allow grade points above 4.0 for an A+. If law schools compared applicants' self-reported transcript GPAs directly, they'd be comparing numbers computed under wildly inconsistent rules.
To fix this, LSAC ingests every official transcript from every post-secondary institution you attended before earning your first bachelor's degree — including community college, dual-enrollment, and study-abroad coursework — and recalculates a single standardized GPA using one consistent set of rules applied to all applicants. This LSAC GPA, not your school's own transcript GPA, is what shows up in the CAS report law schools actually use.
LSAC includes coursework from every school attended before your first bachelor's degree, even if your undergraduate institution didn't count that coursework in its own GPA (for example, community college credits your school only used for transfer credit, not grade points).
How LSAC treats repeated courses
This is the single biggest source of confusion. Many undergraduate schools offer some form of grade forgiveness or academic renewal: retake a course you did poorly in, and only the new grade counts toward your official GPA, or the old grade is flagged as excluded. LSAC generally does not follow this convention. If your transcript shows both the original attempt and the repeat — which is common, since most schools keep the original grade on the record even when they exclude it from GPA math — LSAC includes both grades and both sets of credit hours in its calculation.
In practice, this means a student who failed Organic Chemistry and retook it for an A may see their undergraduate transcript GPA reflect only the A, while their LSAC GPA reflects an average of the F and the A. The exception: if your school's transcript doesn't show the units and grade for the original attempt at all — meaning the record has been fully purged, not just excluded from the GPA formula — LSAC generally can't include what it can't see, so only the visible attempt counts.
How LSAC treats withdrawals
Standard withdrawal grades (typically shown as "W" on a transcript) do not carry grade points and are not counted in the LSAC GPA calculation, similar to how most undergraduate institutions treat a standard withdrawal. However, a "punitive" withdrawal — often recorded as WF (withdraw failing) or WU (withdraw unsatisfactory) — is a different story. LSAC generally treats these as equivalent to a failing grade worth 0.00 grade points unless your institution has specifically classified that particular withdrawal code as non-punitive.
This distinction matters because students sometimes assume any withdrawal is GPA-neutral. If you withdrew from a course while failing it rather than while still in good standing, check how your registrar codes that withdrawal before assuming it won't affect your LSAC GPA.
LSAC GPA scale vs. your transcript scale
Another quiet difference: LSAC converts grades to its own point scale, which allows up to 4.33 for an A+, rather than capping at 4.0 the way many US undergraduate scales do. If your school doesn't award grade points above 4.0 for an A+ (or doesn't award A+ at all), this may not change your number much — but if your school does recognize A+ grades above 4.0, your LSAC GPA could actually come out slightly higher than your transcript GPA on that basis alone, even before accounting for repeated courses.
Worked example: transcript GPA vs. LSAC GPA
Consider an applicant whose undergraduate transcript shows the following, and whose school applies academic renewal (dropping the original grade) when a course is repeated:
| Course | Attempt | Credits | Grade | Counted on Transcript GPA? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calculus I | 1st attempt | 4 | D | No (renewal applied) |
| Calculus I | 2nd attempt | 4 | A | Yes |
| Intro Psychology | — | 3 | B+ | Yes |
| Composition | — | 3 | A- | Yes |
Under the school's own renewal policy, only the second Calculus attempt, Psychology, and Composition count — producing a relatively strong transcript GPA. LSAC, however, includes both Calculus attempts:
- Transcript GPA calculation credits used: 4 (Calc, 2nd attempt) + 3 (Psych) + 3 (Comp) = 10 credits
- LSAC GPA calculation credits used: 4 (Calc, 1st) + 4 (Calc, 2nd) + 3 (Psych) + 3 (Comp) = 14 credits
Because the LSAC version pulls in the D from the first Calculus attempt across an extra 4 credit hours, the resulting LSAC GPA comes out measurably lower than the transcript GPA in this scenario — a gap purely attributable to how repeats are handled, not to any actual academic difference.
Typical LSAC GPA ranges by law school tier
There is no universal cutoff, and every school's admitted class includes applicants below its median GPA, especially those with a strong LSAT score or compelling non-academic factors. That said, published ABA Standard 509 disclosures give a rough sense of where medians tend to cluster:
| Tier (informal) | Typical Median LSAC GPA |
|---|---|
| Top 14 ("T14") | roughly 3.7 – 3.96 |
| Top 50 | roughly 3.5 – 3.8 |
| Regional / other ABA-accredited | roughly 3.0 – 3.6 |
These ranges are illustrative and shift from year to year. Individual schools publish exact median GPA and LSAT figures in their ABA Standard 509 Information Reports — check those directly for any school you're seriously considering, rather than relying on general tier averages.
Admissions committees at most schools also weigh the LSAT score more heavily than GPA in the overall admit decision, though the exact balance varies by institution and by how far outside the median an applicant's numbers fall.
What this means for your application strategy
Because you can't retroactively change how LSAC counts a past repeated course or withdrawal, the practical takeaway is to know your LSAC GPA — not just your transcript GPA — well before you apply, so there are no surprises. If your LSAC GPA is meaningfully lower than your transcript GPA because of an early rough semester followed by a repeat or a string of withdrawals, some applicants address this directly in an addendum explaining the circumstances, which many law schools explicitly invite.
Before you request your CAS report, you can get a rough sense of your standing by adding up your coursework, including every attempt of any repeated class, with our GPA Calculator or CGPA Calculator — useful for estimating where you land before LSAC's official recalculation, and for understanding how repeated courses affect GPA more generally, even outside the law school context.
