Every year, thousands of law school applicants rely on the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) to fairly present their academic history to admissions committees. But there's a little-known policy in LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service (CAS) that quietly disadvantages countless students—especially those who attended schools with more conservative grading systems.

Here’s the problem: LSAC calculates applicants’ GPAs on a 4.33 scale, which gives extra weight to A+ grades (counted as 4.33 instead of 4.0). That might sound fine at first—until you realize that many colleges and universities don’t award A+ grades at all, or don’t assign them any extra weight.

That means students from schools without A+ grades are automatically capped at a 4.0, while students from A+ granting schools can exceed that—even if both sets of students earned straight As. Same effort, different reward.

This skews law school admissions and scholarship decisions, giving an unfair edge to applicants from A+ institutions. And LSAC makes no adjustment for the fact that many schools simply don’t use the A+ grade or treat it as equal to an A.

We’re calling on LSAC to fix this.
This isn’t about gaming the system or demanding special treatment. It’s about fairness. Applicants should be evaluated based on the grades they earned—not by quirks in how their school calculates them.

In 2019, LSAC agreed to remove the LSAT’s “logic games” section after a legal settlement showed it unfairly impacted visually impaired students. That decision proved LSAC can change when a policy is shown to be inequitable.

Now we’re asking for the same level of fairness when it comes to GPA.

 
We ask LSAC to:

• Eliminate the 4.33 GPA scale and cap GPAs at 4.0 across the board; or
• Adjust GPA calculations to reflect institutional grading policies—so students aren’t penalized for where they went to college; and
• Be more transparent with how GPA conversions are calculated and used.

Law school admissions should reward hard work and academic success—not whether your school handed out A+s.

If you agree, please sign and share. Let’s push LSAC to create a system that’s actually fair for everyone.