Calculating Your LSAT Score Percentiles

Wondering what your LSAT score will be and whether it will get you into your top choice law school?

Since it’s based on a curve, it’s difficult to predict your LSAT score, even with a good estimate of the number of questions you’ll answer correctly.

Your score on the LSAT is based on a raw score converted to a final LSAT score. The converted score is included in your LSAT Report, and what LSAT percentiles are based on.

Your LSAT raw score is a percentage based on the number of multiple-choice questions you answer correctly out of the total number of questions. But your final LSAT score is a number from 120 (lowest) to 180 (highest).

So how does your raw score get converted into your final score? This article will help you understand your raw score, scaled score, and LSAT percentiles.

Originally published on May 2nd, 2022, this article was updated, fact-checked, and republished on July 13th, 2022.

The 3 Types of LSAT Scoring

The LSAT exam consists of five sections, four of which are scored.

In total, there are 99 to 102 multiple-choice questions. Every question in the four scored sections is weighted equally, and there is no deduction for wrong answers.

To make these scores comparable across different sittings of the LSAT, they are converted into an LSAT score, which determines your LSAT percentile.

Raw Score

Your raw score is the percentage of correct answers you get on the exam. Since each question is weighted equally, it doesn’t matter which section you perform best on, only how well you perform overall.

The LSAT difficulty level varies because every exam is different. This means the average score will be lower on some exams and higher on others. This makes the raw score an inadequate measurement of success on the LSAT.

Converting raw scores to scaled scores is a more accurate way to compare performance and account for variations in the exam, and that’s why the LSAC uses such a complicated scoring system.

Scaled Score

Your scaled score is a way for your raw score to be compared against the scores of all other LSAT test-takers. It’s a score from 120 (lowest) to 180 (highest) and is a conversion of your raw score.

Only 0.1% of test-takers get a perfect 180 LSAT score. Many students aim for 170 to have a shot at an Ivy League law school, but the average score is around 155.

Each scaled score has a corresponding LSAT percentile score, and both of these are included in your LSAT Report.

Percentile Score

LSAT score percentiles tell law schools (and anyone else looking at your LSAT score) the percentage of people who scored lower than you on the exam. It’s a measure of exactly where you stand in comparison to everyone else who took the LSAT that year.

LSAT percentiles are calculated based on the scores of the past three years, meaning they are slightly different each year based on the average score and curve used to distribute the scores.

Your percentile score is included in your LSAT Report.

How Is Your LSAT Percentile Score Calculated?

Now that we’ve covered what each of these scores means and how they’re calculated, let’s talk about conversions.

Every year, the creators of the exam create a conversion chart, which shows the scaled score to which each raw score corresponds. This chart varies slightly each year, depending on the difficulty of the exam, to ensure fair scoring across every exam.

Once each raw score is paired up with its respective scaled score and the exam has been completed by everyone within that session of the LSAT, the LSAT percentiles can then be calculated.

The LSAT score percentiles are based on the total number of people who achieved each scaled score and, therefore, what percent of test-takers fell below each threshold.

Raw score (percentage correct)	Scaled score	Percentile
100	180	99.9
*	179	99.9
99	178	99.9
98	177	99.8
97	176	99.7
*	175	99.5
96	174	99.3
95	173	99.0
94	172	98.6
93	171	98.1
92	170	97.5
91	169	96.5
89	168	95.6
88	167	94.4
86	166	93.1
85	165	91.5
83	164	89.5
81	163	87.7
79	162	85.2
77	161	82.5
75	160	80.1
73	159	77.2
71	158	73.7
69	157	70.6
67	156	67.0
65	155	63.1
63	154	59.9
61	153	56.0
59	152	51.8
57	151	47.9
55	150	44.1

Resources:

You can find many online LSAT score calculators such as this one that can help you estimate a scaled score based on your raw score.

What LSAT Percentiles Score Do You Need?

Understanding how LSAT scoring works is just a means to figure out how difficult it will be to reach your goal: getting into law school. You’re probably asking yourself which percentile you need to be in to get accepted to your dream law school.

It all depends on which school since they all have different admission requirements.

Most law schools publish the median and the range between the 25th and 75th LSAT scores of the accepted students for the previous year. Of course, the highest-ranking law schools will accept people in the highest LSAT score percentiles, but this doesn’t mean they’re impossible to get admitted to.

For example, here are the most recent LSAT score medians for the top 10 law schools in the USA:

School	Median score	25th and 75th percentiles
Yale University	174	171-177
Harvard University	174	170-176
Columbia University	174	172-176
Stanford University	172	170-175
University of Chicago	172	169-175
New York University	172	170-174
University of Pennsylvania	171	167-173
Northwestern University	171	167-172
University of Virginia	170	164-172
University of California – Berkely	169	165-171

If the school you want to go to isn’t included in the list above, you can find this information on the Entering Class Profile page of almost every school’s website.

As you can see, the median scores for these schools fall within the 96th percentile, meaning these students scored better than 96 percent of other test-takers. While this may seem daunting, knowing how high you need to aim on the LSAT to get into the top schools is helpful.

How to Get a Higher LSAT Percentile Score

Considering what the top law schools are looking for in terms of LSAT score percentiles, you may think these scores are impossible to get. Don’t let that stop you from going after your goal.

There are plenty of strategies to improve your LSAT score, even if you didn’t quite nail it the first time – and you don’t need to figure this all out on your own. Many of the best LSAT prep courses are designed to help you reach these high percentile scores and get accepted to the law school of your choice.

While these prep courses may seem like a big financial investment, they’re well worth it. Many courses, like The Princeton Review, will guarantee a minimum score or a minimum score improvement.

Most courses also come with practice tests, which will give you an advantage over students who aren’t used to the test format – and a way to gauge how ready you are to take the exam.

Finally, consider including tutoring sessions in your exam prep. Tutoring may be more affordable than you expect, and it’s by far the most effective way to reach a higher percentile.

Check out our comparison of LSAT tutors and tutoring packages to get started.

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