Is a 165 a good LSAT score? Here is the honest answer
"Good" is not a property of a score. Move the slider and see how many of the 196 accredited law schools a given LSAT actually puts you at or above.
The question we keep seeing
“I scored a 163. Every forum tells me something different about what that means. What does it actually mean?”
The short answer
- A score is only meaningful against a list of schools, so the useful answer is a count, not an adjective.
- The distribution of school medians is lumpy — a few points can move you past a lot of schools, or almost none.
- Being at a school's median is not admission, and being below it is not rejection.
Ask whether a score is good and you will get a number of confident, contradictory answers. The question has no answer in the abstract. It has a very clear answer against the actual distribution of law schools, which every accredited one publishes.Footnote 1Source 1American Bar Association — Standard 509 Required DisclosuresEach ABA-accredited law school's annual filing, including the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile LSAT and undergraduate GPA of the enrolled class. The histogram above is built from the median reported by all 196 accredited schools.abarequireddisclosures.org
Move the slider to your score, or to the one you are aiming at.
Where does an LSAT score land?
Each bar is the number of accredited law schools whose median LSAT is that score. Move the slider to your own.
At or above the median at 112 of 196 schools — 57%.
A median is the middle of the class a school enrolled, so roughly half its students scored below it. Being at or above one is not an admission — and being below it is not a rejection.
The shape is the useful part
Notice that the bars are not evenly spread. School medians cluster, which means the value of another point depends entirely on where you are standing. In some stretches three more points moves you past a dozen schools. In others it moves you past one.
That is the calculation worth making before booking a retake: not "would a higher score be better" — it always would — but how many more schools would this specific gain actually reach, and are any of them schools you would go to.
What being 'at median' does and does not mean
A median is the middle of the class the school enrolled. Half of the students there scored below it. So sitting at a school's median does not make you a likely admit, and sitting below it does not put you out — roughly half the class is below it by definition.
What the median really governs is money. Schools are compared on their published medians, so an applicant who pulls one up is worth more to a school than one who pulls it down, and scholarship offers follow. The fuller version of that argument, and the 25th/75th percentiles the slider does not show, are in LSAT and GPA medians.
Turning a count into a list
- Find the count at your current score, and again three points higher. If the gap is small, a retake is probably not the highest-value thing you could be doing.
- Remember the count includes schools you would never attend. Filter by where you actually want to practise — the employment outcomes matter more than the median.
- Check both percentiles, not just the middle, at the schools you are serious about.
- If one of your numbers needs explaining, that is what an addendum is for.
Katalyna's law school search does this against your real numbers — both of them — with each school's full percentile band, employment outcomes and bar passage alongside.
Try it in Katalyna
Law school search
Your LSAT and GPA against every accredited school's full percentile band.
Frequently asked
In the 2025 reporting year it was at or above the median at 153 of the 196 accredited law schools — the slider above recomputes this from the current filings. Whether that is good depends entirely on which schools you want, which is why a count is a more useful answer than an adjective.
Work out how many additional schools a realistic gain would actually reach. If three more points moves you past only a handful — and none you would attend — the retake is not where your effort pays best.
No. A median is the middle of the enrolled class, so about half of the students there scored below it. It affects scholarship money more reliably than it affects admission.