Scholarship Calculator
How to use LSD.Law's per-school scholarship calculator: enter your LSAT and GPA to see the average 3-year award accepted applicants in your band actually received, plus the scatter plots and band tables behind the estimate.
Outside the top handful, law schools compete for applicants by discounting tuition — sometimes covering it entirely. Every school publishes the LSAT and GPA medians of its most recent class and wants next year's medians to be at least as high. An applicant above those medians pulls the numbers up, so the school offers merit money to land them.
The further above a school's medians you are, the larger the likely award. The further below, the smaller, until the offer disappears. Schools don't publish formulas, and two applicants with identical numbers can get different offers depending on softs, timing, and negotiation. Self-reported data from past cycles makes the shape of the curve at each school visible.
Every school on LSD.Law has a calculator — e.g. Arizona State's. Enter your LSAT, GPA, and the school, and it returns what accepted applicants with similar numbers reported receiving.
Inputs and outputs
Inputs: LSAT (120–180), undergraduate GPA, and a school. Output: a dollar estimate — the average three-year award accepted applicants in your LSAT band reported — alongside a count of how many got any award. "Most accepts in your band got $80k" differs from "two of twelve got $80k"; the calculator shows both. Signed-in users with stats on file see the inputs prefilled.
When the data supports it, a second figure shows the dollar-per-LSAT-point slope at that school, fit as a linear regression across bands. Where awards ride on numbers, the slope is tight. Where softs and negotiation do most of the work, the fit is weak and LSD suppresses the figure.
Reading the scatter plot
Two scatter plots sit below the headline number: LSAT versus award, and GPA versus award. Each dot is one accepted applicant who reported a non-zero scholarship. A trend line runs through the cloud, and a qualitative label (strong, moderate, weak, none) describes how much of the variance your numbers explain.
A tight cluster around the trend line means numbers drive the award and the estimate is reliable. A diffuse cloud means identical stats can produce very different offers — outliers are usually soft-factor boosts, post-offer negotiation, or conditional awards reported at face value. Read the cluster as a range. The band tables below the plots show every LSAT and GPA band side by side, useful for modeling a retake.
Using an estimate in negotiation
A scholarship offer from one school is leverage at another. Admissions offices expect applicants to shop offers around, and most have a scholarship reconsideration process for matching or countering a peer school's award. The calculator gives you a defensible number to ask for — what applicants with your numbers have historically received after negotiation, not what the financial aid office quotes unprompted. Pair it with the school profile for median awards and conditional-scholarship retention, and with cycle reviews from comparable applicants. The applicant-level data here is separate from the aggregate grant figures in the ABA 509; check both.
Watch for this
Many merit awards are conditional — you have to maintain a minimum GPA or class rank to keep them. Law school grading is curved, so a meaningful share of students lose some or all of their award. Every school profile reports what percentage of conditional scholarships got reduced the prior year; read that number before deciding.