Scholarship Calculator

The estimate is a lookup, not a model. When you enter a score, LSD finds the LSAT band you fall into (175+, 170–174, 165–169, and so on), looks up every accepted applicant at that school in that band who reported a non-zero scholarship, and averages their 3-year awards. That average is the headline number. Alongside it, the card shows how many of the accepted applicants in your band actually received any award at all — the recipients-over-total ratio — so you can tell the difference between "most accepts in my band got $X" and "a handful of lucky people got $X and everyone else got nothing."

If you also enter a GPA, the calculator shows the GPA-band average as a secondary reference point. If your LSAT band is too thin to report (fewer than the threshold number of recipients), the GPA band takes over as the primary figure. If both bands are empty, the card says so instead of inventing a number. Signed-in users with LSAT and GPA on their profile see the fields prefilled on page load.

Underneath the estimate, LSD prints a single number: each additional LSAT point at this school is worth about $X. It's derived from a linear regression on the LSAT band midpoints against the average scholarship in each band, using only bands with at least five recipients. The slope of that regression is the dollar value per LSAT point.

The dollar-per-point only appears when the underlying relationship is real. Before printing the slope, LSD checks the R² of a separate regression run on the raw unaggregated data points — band-averaged R² is inflated, so the raw value is the honest gate. If that raw R² is below 0.1, the dollar-per-point is suppressed: at schools where awards are driven by soft factors or negotiation, a clean per-point figure would mislead you. The band average above it still holds either way.

Below the estimate card are two scatter plots side by side: LSAT vs. scholarship amount, and GPA vs. scholarship amount. Each dot is one accepted applicant from that cycle who reported a non-zero scholarship. The y-axis is the 3-year scholarship total. A trend line is overlaid on each plot, and below it LSD prints the raw R² and a qualitative label — strong, moderate, weak, or no meaningful correlation — so you can see at a glance how much of the variance in awards is actually explained by the stat on the x-axis. The plots are evidence for the estimate above, not a second calculator.

Outliers — unusually high or low awards for a given score — appear as isolated dots. They may reflect conditional scholarships, soft-factor boosts, negotiation after competing offers, or data-entry mistakes. Look at the cluster, not the extremes.

Below the scatter plots, the calculator shows the full band breakdown that the top-of-page estimate is pulled from. Each row has the average scholarship for accepted applicants in that band, the number of recipients over the total count of accepted applicants in the band, and the percent who received any award at all. The LSAT bands run from below-150 up through 175+; the GPA bands run from below-3.25 up through 3.9+.

The band tables are useful for exploring what happens at other score ranges — what you'd get with a retake that moves you up a band, or what applicants a tier below you are getting offered. They're also the raw material behind the headline number, so any estimate you see at the top is traceable back to a single row in the table.

Every number on this page comes from self-reported scholarship data entered by LSD.Law users during or after their cycle. That carries two important caveats. First, not every accepted applicant reports, and applicants who received awards may be more likely to report than those who didn't — so the percent-receiving column is a floor, not a precise rate. Second, the calculator is scoped to applicants marked as accepted; waitlist-to-accept paths and late negotiations are in there if the user reported the final offer, but deferrals and holds are not.

The calculator is separate from ABA 509 grant data. The 509 reports show aggregate grant totals by recipient count and percentile at a school level — see the ABA 509 guide for that. The scholarship calculator is the applicant-level view: it tells you what individual people in your score range actually walked away with.