How Important are Good Grades for Law School Admission

For traditional students, good grades are the chief requirement for law school admission. Your work inside the classroom is much more important than your work outside of it. Don't expect your extracurricular activities to compensate for a poor GPA.

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In this respect, law schools are different from MBA programs, large corporations, and, indeed, most of the things that non-prelaws will do after they graduate from college. People who want to work for large corporations, especially, are often advised to become members of fraternities or sororities, to hold elected office in these social clubs, to participate in team sports, and in general to show evidence of being group-minded people.

These large businesses (and the graduate programs that support them) are looking for evidence that the people they hire will be team players. The quarterback of a football team has provided such evidence, as have the members of the offensive line. Presumably, they will bring their team-orientation with them to the sales meeting, the committee, and the corporate working group.

But law schools are looking for a different kind of person. They want people who are self-starters, who can work alone, and who have the discipline to work by themselves for a long time on some long-term project. Good grades, which indicate individual achievement, are much better predictors of your ability to do law school work than anything you can do outside the classroom.

Some law schools ignore the extracurricular activities of traditional applicants, judging them entirely on their grades and LSAT scores. But most law schools pay some attention to the outside activities. They say that they want their students to be "well-rounded" and to have diverse backgrounds, and they can judge these secondary characteristics from the organizations that their applicants join. In addition, applicants who have extracurricular activities in addition to good numbers must necessarily have a lot of energy, good self- discipline, and good organizing and scheduling skills. Undergraduates who join organizations will fit in well with lawyers, who tend to be gregarious and great joiners. Finally, law schools know that some extracurricular activities provide useful experience and teach law-related skills.

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For all these reasons, extracurricular activities "count." For students on the border between acceptance and rejection at a particular school, they can count a great deal. If your extracurricular record is strong, and especially if your activities demonstrate leadership, you should apply to law schools that promise in their catalogs to "go behind the numbers" and "judge the whole person," and you should be sure that all your activities are fully described on your applications.

But extracurricular activities don't count that much. Don't let your classroom work go on the assumption that your outside activities will make up for your lapses. Whenever you have to choose between making good grades and spending time on a club or sport, you should work on your grades.

Choosing Extracurricular Activities

For application purposes, it really doesn't matter what college clubs or teams you join. Each of the traditional school activities-Greek-letter organizations, affinity clubs, student government, even athletics-has something to recommend it. Law as a profession is so diverse that it would be hard to find an activity that would not be useful to some lawyers or law students somewhere. If you are a good tennis player, for example, you probably don't think of your skill as being particularly useful to your legal career. But the late United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was a tennis fanatic and played almost every day well into old age. Like all Supreme Court justices, Black hired one or two law clerks each year from among the many honors graduates of top law schools who eagerly sought those prestigious positions. He could choose whomever he wanted, and he made sure that he always had a suitable tennis opponent working in his office.

The moral of this story is that you never can tell what will come in handy. If you are trying to decide what activities to participate in, consider continuing whatever you did in high school. Or join whatever your friends join. Or go to the organizational meetings that clubs hold at the begin-ning of each school year and talk to the members. Look for congenial people and don't try to guess which things will most impress law school admissions committees.

Once you've found activities you enjoy, stick with them. It's marginally better to have a record of continuous participation in a few things than a record that lists numerous activities with only one or two semesters in each. A student who is continually dashing from group to group leaves himself open to the criticism that he isn't really interested in the activities but is merely fattening his r£sume Either that or he can't get along with anyone.

Law-Related Social Activities

Since you are interested in law, it's natural for you to be interested in activities related to law. Your campus will offer a wide variety of such activities-so many, in fact, that you may have difficulty choosing among them. You can concentrate on activities that will help you to develop skills that you will use in law school, or that will give you the opportunity to show off law-related talents. Newspaper jobs offer the possibility of publication, and clips can be sent along with law school applications. In addition, many newspaper jobs pay salaries.

Students interested in political careers often participate in student government. This cannot be recommended for everyone, because on many campuses "school politics" has become an ineffectual joke. Too often, student government attracts the windy, the self-serving, and the self-important. Or it becomes an arena in which disputes between self-aggrandizing social organizations are played out. You'll have to judge your own campus for yourself. At its best, student government can be an excellent teacher of group "deliberation"-that is, of making decisions by discussing, compromising and voting. It may also be the best way to meet the other students on your campus who are interested in legal careers. At its worst... well, let's just say that at its worst it's not worth your time.

Most campuses offer other government-related activities. Model United Nations programs and their close relatives, model legislative and model state government programs, offer good practice in deliberation and may be free of the posturing and cynicism that affects traditional student government. Some schools also sponsor law day programs or essay competitions on legal themes.

The best choice for students interested in political careers is to bypass student activities entirely and get involved in real-world political campaigns, or to schedule internships in state or local government. The best way to learn about politics is to go out and do politics. Campaigns recruit numerous volunteers. Since they are perennially short-handed, they are usually willing to let young people take on important and responsible work. In fact, the traditional path to becoming a paid political campaign professional begins with volunteer work on a local campaign. However, campaigns will make severe demands on your time, especially in September and October. You shouldn't let this work interfere with getting good grades. Presidential primary campaigns, which usually occur in January, February, and March of a presidential election year, may be a better choice than traditional general election campaigns. And although some campaigns pay part-time workers, most do not-at least not at first. If you need to earn money during the school year, you may not be able to schedule this valuable experience.

Prelaw Clubs

Campus prelaw clubs are designed to acquaint undergraduates with law school, law school application procedures, and legal careers. At their best these are small organizations with a strong social component; they bring like-minded students together to exchange information, tutor die laggards, and, in whatever ways are required, support each others efforts to make good grades and present themselves well to law schools. Prelaw clubs often bring law students, young lawyers, and other knowledgeable people to speak on campus, and they may arrange trips to nearby law schools. Sometimes they publish newsletters and keep track of alumni who have gone on to law schools. And they usually are in close contact with the campus prelaw adviser, so they serve as a dissemination channel for the information that he or she collects. Prelaw clubs can help you learn about the options that are available in legal careers and collect the information that you will need when you have to choose which law schools to apply to.

You may still find some prelaw clubs that run cram courses for the LSAT, although private proprietary schools have taken on the lion's share of this work. Some prelaw clubs, especially on large campuses, field teams that participate in local or national mock trial competitions, or in "moot courts," a kind of simulated appellate legal procedure. These competitions are a specialized kind of debating; they combine the attention to presentation that forensics teams specialize in with research on legal topics.