Gauging The Impact Of A Voluntary LSAT

The ABA is toying with the idea of eliminating the current accreditation standard mandating use of standardized tests at admission.  The National Law Journal has the skinny.  ABA accreditation standard 503 currently provides that:

A law school shall require each applicant for admission as a first year J.D. student to take a valid and reliable admission test to assist the school and the applicant in assessing the applicant’s capability of satisfactorily completing the school’s educational program.

Interpretation 503-1 elaborates:

A law school that uses an admission test other than the Law School Admission Test sponsored by the Law School Admission Council shall establish that such other test is a valid and reliable test to assist the school in assessing an applicant’s capability to satisfactorily complete the school’s educational program.

As a practical matter, almost every law school demands the LSAT (though a few will accept the GMAT under certain circumstances.)  What might it mean for the ABA to drop this requirement?

Commentators have varied views.  Brian Leiter argues that it would cause law schools to "focus more on the prior academic record of the applicant and other qualities that might be indicative of likely success."  But he adds that it might result in outsized reliance on nominal GPA - irrespective of the difficulty of the undergraduate program - simply because the US News will insist on some putatively objective metric.

Vivia Chen, over at The Careerist, argues:

My hunch is that the law schools that won't require LSATs will be either newly opened law schools looking for bodies or those rated at the bottom....I fear that schools that don't require the extra hurdle of the LSAT will attract even more applicants (probably some very weak ones, who shouldn't be in law school in the first place)--and that the cycle of bad schools and jobless graduates will escalate. My bet is that established law schools will continue to require LSATs. 

Brian implies that elmination of the rule might signal the demise of a required LSAT.  Chen (and David Yellen, Dean at Loyola Chicago) believe otherwise.  Indeed, in their view, the act of requiring the LSAT might function as signal of quality: the school would, in effect, show its bravado by exposing itself to quantitative comparison with peers.   

My own sense is that things could go a couple of different ways.  First, US News could create a ranking method that effectively forces law schools to accept the LSAT.  For example, if they were to continue heavy reliance on the LSAT, schools could be punished for deviating from the norm.  The ABA doesn't require schools to produce employed-at-graduation data, but US News relies on it nonetheless.  (Admittedly, because of their current method of gap-filling for schools that fail to provide this info, the US News methodology can have the effect of helping non-compliant schools.)

If US News stops relying on the data, schools might still rely on it as a signal of quality.  Under these circumstances, however, the GMAT - or perhaps even the GRE - might become widely accepted alternatives.  (On an unrelated note, shouldn't high school students seeking admission to an elite college take both the SAT and the ACT?  They're similar but by no means identical.  And I'll bet few students can assess, ex ante, where they'll perform best.  Similarly, if law schools accept multiple tests, the savvy applicant will take all of them - and forward only their best results.  This is currently impossible because LSAC tracks the testing experience of each applicant.)

Or perhaps, in some dream world, schools will no longer require these tests, gather a full portfolio of each applicant, conduct a searching analysis, and admit the best candidates overall.

No.  That won't happen. 

Of this I am confident:  as long as shoppers continue to purchase, and everyone in the law world continues to discuss, US News law school rankings, the magazine will continue to figure out a way to produce them.  At this point in history, it seems to be their biggest product.  You gonna ask Coke to stop making Coke?

Comments

[Ben Buchwalter]

That's a really interesting point about US News effectively forcing the LSAT to remain in effect. Has there been any indication about whether the ABA's claim that they would make the test voluntary is anything more than talk?

[taobao direct]

better late than never