The LSAC and the CAS

The Law School Admission Council is a nonprofit corporation located in Newtown, Pennsylvania whose members consist of more than 200 law schools in the United States and Canada. The LSAC acts as an intermediary between law school applicants and law schools by providing a number of services to facilitate the law school admission process. For more information on the LSAC and its services, go to the LSAC website. 

The LSAC creates, administers, and scores the LSAT. All law school applicants are required to take the LSAT. For more information on the LSAT, go to the  the LSAC website or click on the link for the LSAT section of this website.

The LSAC also sponsors the Credential Assembly Service. The CAS provides a means of centralizing and standardizing the objective and subjective admissions criteria for the benefit of law schools. Your transcripts and letters of recommendation are sent to the law schools via the CAS. Nearly all law schools require that applicants use the CAS so that applicant information is received in a uniform manner from a single source.

Register for the CAS by going to the LSAC website and paying the required fee. You should do so at least four to six weeks before you start submitting applications to law school. You can register for the CAS and the LSAT separately. Your CAS registration is valid for five years. If you register for the LSAT at any time during your CAS period, the CAS period will be extended for five years from the date of your latest LSAT registration.

After you register for the CAS, download the transcript request form and send it to the registrar’s office of each college or university you attended. These include schools you attended for summer or evening courses, schools where you took college level courses while in high school even though they were for high school credit, or schools you transferred from even though the credits were transferred to Wheaton College and appear on your official Wheaton College transcript. The colleges will then send your official transcripts to the CAS for processing. Request an additional copy of each of your official transcripts for your own review.

Once your LSAT score is available, the CAS will prepare a report that includes the following:

• A year-by-year grade and credit hour summary
• Photocopies of your official transcripts
• Your GPA for each academic year and your cumulative GPA as calculated by each college and the CAS. The CAS provides law schools with a uniform basis for comparing GPAs by converting grades to a standard 4.0 system using a common set of numerical values to represent the various grading systems used by colleges. As a result, there may be some variation between the GPA calculated by the CAS and the GPA calculated by Wheaton College. The CAS GPA is considered more accurate by law school admissions committees because it incorporates all of the grades you received from all of the colleges you attended into one score, and it uses the same formula for everyone.
• If your official transcript contains an academic note, such as dean’s list, summa cum laude, academic probation, suspension, etc., it will also be noted on the law school report.
• The mean LSAT score and GPA of students at Wheaton College who have subscribed to the CAS and your percentile rank among those students.
• All LSAT scores that you received in the last five years, including cancellations and absences.
• Copies of your LSAT writing sample.

You should review your CAS report since each law school to which you apply will request an CAS report from the LSAC.

You will need to pay for each report. While you do not need to list the law schools to which you are applying when you register for the CAS, you will either need to pay for one report for each law school application you plan to submit when you initially register or make subsequent payments on-line.

The LSAC also provides a letter of recommendation service to CAS registrants. Many law schools require you to use this service. Students who are planning to pursue other interests between college and law school can use this service to “store” faculty letters of recommendationfor several years. For additional information on the LSAC’s letter of recommendation service, go to the LSAC website  or clink on the link for Letters of Recommendationsection of this website.

You should check the status of your LSAC file regularly to determine the receipt (or nonreceipt) of transcripts and letters of recommendation and the reports requested by law schools.