lookingaround

Alberta are the only school I can think of immediately who specifically average scores, so the more times you take it, the harder it is to move your score with them (as 160/170 becomes 165 for them. 160/161/162/163/170 is still a 170 to almost everyone else, but only 163 to AB). More than that, the LSAT is a financial cost (directly for the exam, indirectly for getting there, anything else you're doing on the day), and a mental cost (fairly high-stress). Ideally you'd not take it until you're ready. If you're taking it 5 times and not getting a score you're happy with, that would suggest you need to change something about your studying (to improve your LSAT aptitude), or your test performance (if something like anxiety is bringing you way down on the real thing compared to practices). Or it might just mean that it's not something you're going to be great at, and you could better put the time and effort into improving other parts of your application/general life. For schools that only care about the numbers, whatever number you get out the end is the number they use, regardless of how many times you took to get there - but most people don't take 5-6 tries to get a number they can live with, and you should probably be more concerned with the underlying issues that are leading you to it rather than how law schools admissions might perceive it if you're considering that.

Sorry, I wasn't suggesting that the answer to the question they posed was 'no', I was asking if the answer to the question they refused to answer ('Are you American?') was 'no'. I agree that 'Can non-Americans work in Canada' and 'do non-Americans find it harder than other non-Canadians to overcome some hurdles related to entering work' are different questions, but I think the second of those is a direct response to this thread. OP wants to know if non-Canadians can get hired in various roles. The legal ability to work is an important part of that, but so is the social ability to convince an employer to hire them, which starts with convincing an employer that they should be prepared to think about it. If they are American then (new) NAFTA provisions are relevant. If they are not, they are not. If OP is passably North American then immigration status is something that will likely come up late in the process after a decision on 'we want them or not' has been established. If they are not then it's the first thing that will be dealt with (and in my experience, the second thing, third thing, fourth thing).

So the answer is no? Seriously, this is a non-trivial issue. In terms of both working rights and ability to blend in with other applicants, whether you're American (as some people seem to have assumed) or from anywhere else in the world (my starting point) is a major factor.

As people have said, if you are American you'll have access to (new) NAFTA work rights, otherwise you'll likely be relying on a Post Graduate Work Permit if you're so entitled (which is likely if this is your first Canadian degree). However, whether or not you're American (which you didn't answer when the difference was pointed out) is, in my mind, an important one in evaluating your likely success. Americans (with the possible exception of deep southerners) can easily fit into Canadian society with nobody even noticing that they're not Canadian. If that applies to you then both work rights and cultural fit issues are likely to be as above. If you are from elsewhere in the world, you will have additional assumptions to overcome, simply because there's an obvious first question - "Do you have the right to work here?". I'm a white, native English speaker, and have had multiple exhausting conversations which culminated in my holding my head in my hands and exhorting "You are literally holding my Permanent Resident card, I'm a domestic student, I cannot come back with a study permit that I'm not eligible to get", because my accent makes it clear that I wasn't raised here. It can certainly be overcome, but it produces an additional hurdle.

You describe your "problem" as " I am in danger of getting my first bad grade which is still not a horrible grade (B+)" If, in a four year degree, you have yet to attain any grade below an A, and you think this dip may alter your chances of entry, you would need to believe that there is a law school somewhere in Canada which requires a minimum entry standard of 4.0 If you do genuinely believe that, you are far too ill-informed to be applying for law school. If you know how ridiculous that assertion is, then your post is (at best) bizarre. If we're taking it at good faith then you need to overcome your anxiety issues before you go any further in the application process.

.... the LSAC have 9 different sexual orientation options followed by a 'write in your own if none of these' and 'prefer not to answer' (And seven gender options, with four subcategories). I'm actually finding it difficult to imagine a way they could be less 'you must define yourself and we are judging' (unless your viewpoint is that it's heresy to suggest there are more than two genders and two orientations - and complaints & mockery about just how loose the options are and how few people would need most of the options were indeed rife when that was launched). That said, I was surprised how long it took them, given that just about every reasonably sized and larger organization does diversity monitoring to find out what their users and applicants look like. There's nothing sinister about an organization thinking "We should probably check to see if our applicants look like society at large". This is particularly important for organizations like LSAC who know from the get-go that they're encountering a subset of the population (people who mainly have tertiary education), so their feed-in has been influenced by other social trends and isn't a normal sample. UVic aren't in quite the same boat as LSAC but they'll want to know data for the same reasons. I'm sure OP if you write to them, they'll consider adding your ethnicity to their list for the future. Personally I would consider it weird as hell if either organization their size wasn't doing diversity monitoring (particularly given that both seem to want to be thought of as being socially progressive). That said I don't know if UVic have a prefer-not-to-say option in their drop-down, which is common (for example in LSAC's expansive gender and orientation questions).

At the risk of being a bucket of cold water, unless your ECs are winning a Nobel prize while also winning an Olympic medal, don't expect them to carry you far. At the moment, you have no LSAT and a 2.4, which means next to no chance of admission anywhere. If you can come back with an LSAT (even a practice diagnostic), people could potentially start to give meaningful advice. Every school you'd be interested in will publish how they calculate GPA - you want to look heavily at schools that do last 2/best 2, and hope that you maintain your new grades through the remainder of your degree. As a general rule, for most schools, the higher into the 3.x range (as calculated by whatever they drop) your GPA looks to any given school, the lower towards or into the 15X range your LSAT can afford to be and have a chance. Alternatively, the higher into the 17X range your LSAT, the lower through a 3.x or even towards a 2.x your GPA could afford to be. Going forward, you need a good GPA, and a good LSAT. All you've really done is used up all your opportunities to do badly in GPA (as some schools will calculate it to exclude the work you've done so far).

Assuming you took a disclosed test: use the documents to identify your problem sections and questions that you had on the day. It may not have been the ones you expected. Prepare - get all the official 10 question books you can, and use them. Force yourself to review the questions afterwards, not just reading and going 'ohhh, right' but explaining the logic. Drill the sections in half an hour not 35 minutes. This will simulate more test anxiety in practice (which you'll have on the day for different reasons), and if you get used to only having half an hour that gives a 15% buffer on the day for a question to go badly, or just generally slow down.

You know, the admissions websites of schools you're interested in contain the answer to questions like this, and are quicker (and potentially more accurate). https://www.law.utoronto.ca/admissions/jd-admissions/admissions-frequently-asked-questions

? I was surprised at that claim, so I actually timed it; it took just under 5 minutes to find the precise GPA calculations on the university websites for the first 7 Canadian law schools I could think of (ranging geographically from the west coast to Toronto). If you want to attend law school, basic research skills are your friend. Examples from the websites (schools removed to encourage your searching, as you apparently missed these while reading "every university's individual site"): "if applicants have a four year degree (60 units/120 credits), we eliminate the 9 worst units (18 credits) from the GPA calculation. It does not matter when the worst grades were achieved", "take into account all undergraduate grades ... We do not drop lowest grades, nor do we look only at the best two years", ""The admission GPA is calculated on undergraduate courses only, using the best three academic years", ""The Admissions Committee looks at your best two (2) full years undergraduate GPA".

The 'no hats' rule btw is firm. as in, I've seen clerks wait until the Judge was pausing for breath, and then bark "hats off in the gallery!" while looking directly at the offender.

I don't have much to add to the thoughts and concerns about studying in the US beyond what people have already said. I will note that before you add any detail or comments (particularly about values and reasons) that you appear to be using a real name as your forum username? Posts on this forum are un-editable (after 1 hour), and undeleteable, which you may wish to bear in mind before posting personal information under your identifiable name.

You should aim for 180; there's no point trying to leave points on the table. What kind of LSAT would make you competitive depends on the school you're applying to. Some want cGPA. Some want the two most recent years. Some want the best two years. Some will drop the worst credits wherever they are in your transcript. The last of those is pretty much best for everyone, the rest can dramatically change what your GPA is calculated at. For what it's worth, 3.4 is a GPA with which a lot of people can get into law schools. It might not be their first preferences, but you asked about 'any'. Get an LSAT in the mid 160s and depending on where your GPA falls out in various calculations, and how serious you are about 'any' you may be competitive at a number of schools. The above is only applicable to numbers schools, as schools which place emphasis on background, references, etc are always something more of a crapshoot. I mean, they're not going out of their way to find low numbers, but starting a non-profit that ships food and christmas gifts to remote northern communities down ice roads might make a difference at, say, Lakehead, when it couldn't at eg Manitoba (who make decisions with no personal statement, references, or any other information beyond applicants' statistics). I mean, there's 16(?) schools in English-speaking Canada. If you're thinking about applying to foreign universities, it would take far less time than that to decide if there are any you are/aren't prepared to attend, and pull their publicity info on how they calculate GPA, and how they weigh it.

If you plan on practicing in Canada, TRU (or any Canadian school) beats a third tier private US school. Coming back you'd have to go through the NCA process to even be eligible to practice in Canada. The cost of attendance would be enormous (https://law.seattleu.edu/office-and-administration/student-financial-services/tuition-and-fees) - US$72,000/year from their own figures ($93k Canadian) - each year there is going to cost about the same as an entire degree at many Canadian schools. The name isn't going to impress people (the coming-back sequence and cost of attendance is arguable for world class universities like Yale or Oxford. BTW even some fantastic university names don't travel that well - I met a Judge this year who went to Pantheon-Assas. Clearly it didn't do them any harm (they're a Judge) but when I remarked on my being impressed by that, they said "Yeah, one of the best universities in the world and nobody here's heard of it". On the one hand, 'went to a barely ranked school' is less important in Canada which doesn't rank schools and treats most US schools interchangeably as 'foreign', on the other hand you'd be diving into the bottom half of one of the most stratified legal markets in the world, where they really do care about it, and there's a much better ranked one (like, 100 places higher) in the same city. If you're just starting to think about this, you have time to think, but that looks like a whole lot of downside.

More than anything, that looks like a ranking of who needs to borrow the most money to go to law school. Toronto and Osgoode have highest tuition, UBC has Vancouver cost of living, McGill has extra year of not working.