Oddly, the law schools themselves don’t seem to care about the “average” score. They care about the median. Which is to say, they want that line above which half their students have a particular score or better to be as high as possible. If you look at how scores vary between the 25-50-75th percentiles at any given law school, but especially the most prestigious, you can get an idea of just how little (or how much) a high score matters, really. Hint: medians are much higher than what these schools consider to be the minimum threshold for success. The drive for high medians, but maybe not so much high bottom quartile (or very minimum) scores, has everything to do with schools wanting to compete in USN&WR rankings and little to do with that particular score being some kind of bright yellow line below which “you shall not pass,” be it at the school, on the bar exam, or in the profession.