LSAT Requirement May Be Eliminated

The ABA's Standards Review Committee has voted, once again, to consider dropping the "LSAT requirement" for admission to law school.

In this post, I address 3 questions:

1. What is the LSAT requirement?
2. Why would the committee consider dropping it?
3. How would this affect law school admissions?

1. What is the LSAT requirement?

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar adopted a set of standards called "Standards and Rules of Procedure for the Approval of Law Schools."

Within that set of standards, Standard 503 states (PDF):

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. In making admissions decisions, a law school shall use the test results in a manner that is consistent with the current guidelines regarding proper use of the test results provided by the agency that developed the test. 

Interpretation 503-1 

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.

Interpretation 503-2 

This Standard does not prescribe the particular weight that a law school should give to an applicant’s admission test score in deciding whether to admit or deny admission to the applicant.

Interpretation 503-3 

A pre-admission program of coursework taught by members of the law school’s fulltime faculty and culminating in an examination or examinations, offered to some or all applicants prior to a decision to admit to the J.D. program, also may be useful in assessing the capability of an applicant to satisfactorily complete the school’s educational program, to be admitted to the bar, and to become a competent professional. 

Interpretation 503-4 

The “Cautionary Policies Concerning LSAT Scores and Related Services” published by the Law School Admission Council is an example of the testing agency guidelines referred to in Standard 503. [See Appendix 2]

Nowhere does it mention the LSAT in particular. However, it's far easier for law schools to use the LSAT than some other test, so most simply opt to use it.

The ABA's Standards Review Committee recently met and proposed a few modifications to Standard 503, one of which being to eliminate it altogether (PDF p3-4). The other is to reduce Standard 503 to (PDF p3):

A law school shall require each applicant for admission as a first year J.D. student to take a valid and reliable admission test. 

Interpretation 503-1 1 

This Standard does not prescribe the weight that a law school should give to an applicant’s admission test score in deciding whether to admit the applicant.  

Basically, applicants' scores on this "valid and reliable admission test" could be irrelevant to admission. It doesn't even have to assess an applicant's ability in law school. And what does "valid" really mean, anyway?


2. Why would the ABA committee consider dropping the LSAT requirement?

Here's the key part of the stated justification (PDF p4):

The decision to delete what, for shorthand purposes, will be termed the LSAT requirement, does not suggest, and indeed should not be taken to express a lack of confidence in that instrument or in the wisdom of using a fair and valid objective test as one key measure in winnowing a class of entering students from each school’s applicant pool. The LSAT can and does provide a fair measure of first-year law school performance and correlates well with the final law school grade-point average, rank in class, and performance on bar examinations.  It helps a law school identify promising performers.  It also helps schools avoid the admission of those who are not capable of satisfactorily completing the law school program. Given the enormous investment of resources that individuals make in securing a legal education, the LSAT offers would-be students some predictability when they make such an important investment.  In the future the LSAT probably will continue to be viewed by most law schools as an essential factor in the admissions equation since an LSAT score has consistent meaning across the applicant pool.  

The issue here is not the wisdom of employing the LSAT as a valuable tool in calculating admissions decisions; rather, it is whether, as a matter of judging institutional quality, law school accrediting authorities should require the use of a valid and reliable test.  It is our understanding that accreditation standards governing other professions are not so specific.  It is also true that such entrance tests are still used in the admission process in other professional schools because they provide helpful evidence as well as added efficiency in the admissions context. 

The committee seems to suggest that, although it considers the LSAT to be a great test, it might not require law schools to use it anymore simply because accreditation bodies for other professions (ABA counterparts) aren't so strict.

This seems a rather weak justification, given the LSAT's immense value.

It's useful in predicting law school performance - it's been found to have a .35 correlation coefficient with 1L grades. In comparison, undergraduate GPA has only a .28 correlation coefficient with 1L grades.

Why would you really want to remove the requirement that law schools use such a useful test?

The ABA Journal spoke with committee members on both sides of the issue:

"It ought to be up to the schools to decide who they want to admit, and based on what factors," says committee member David Yellen, dean of Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Yellen also says it doesn't make sense to keep a requirement in the standards that is slowly being "chiseled away" through variances. 

But those who want to keep the requirement say the test scores offer useful consumer information. They also say that grades are a very unreliable indicator of a law student’s success. 

"I think this is absolutely fundamental to the quality of a legal education in America," says committee member James Hanks Jr., a partner with the Venable firm in Baltimore.

Even if we take Dean Yellen's arguments at face value, it still seems that bottom-tier law schools stand to benefit significantly from the elimination of the LSAT requirement.

3. How would this affect law school admissions?

How would U.S. News deal with schools that had no LSAT scores to submit when compiling its law school rankings? Or schools that accepted a significant percentage of students with no LSAT scores?

If they weren't "punished," schools could matriculate applicants with high GPAs who might have done horribly on the LSAT, while schools that continued to require it would essentially be punished for doing so, as they might not be able to admit enough applicants with equally high GPAs.

When the ABA previously considered dropping the LSAT requirement, Robert Morse (the man behind the U.S. News rankings) stated:

It's likely that a very large proportion of law students will continue to take and submit the LSAT, even if it's made optional at some schools. It is important to note that the LSAT has been proven to be the best and most reliable predictor of first year success at law school. With that in mind, U.S. News will continue to conduct the annual law school rankings, and the LSAT will remain a heavily weighted factor.

I emailed him for comment on Monday evening. If I hear back, I'll be sure to update this blog post with any additional thoughts he might want to share.

No one is requiring that Loyola (current U.S. News rank #67) or others choose their students based upon their LSAT scores. Schools that don't like the LSAT can apply for a variance as other schools have if they prefer to accept some students who haven't taken it.

Of course, if the LSAT were optional, reputable law schools would continue to require it for admission, as it serves useful purposes (and because the high LSAT scores of their admitted students confer legitimacy to the school).

However, some of the less-reputable schools (e.g. Cooley and others in the bottom tier) might choose to no longer require it. Such schools have nothing to lose when it comes to whatever punishment they might receive in the rankings.

Removing the LSAT requirement would allow these schools to admit applicants who are intimidated by the exam (and/or would have achieved LSAT scores that would have prevented admission to even these schools).

It's not much of a stretch to suspect that these students would be at increased risk of dropping out and failing the bar exam. A study by the Law School Admission Council found:

Both law school grade-point average (LGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score were the strongest predictors of bar examination passage for all groups studied. Other measurement variables, such as undergraduate grade-point average (UGPA) and selectivity of the undergraduate school, failed to make a practical additional contribution to a bar-passage prediction model that already included LGPA and LSAT scores.

While schools that didn't require the LSAT might be punished by U.S. News, their LSAT medians would likely improve. Applicants who avoided taking the LSAT would be those most likely to bomb it. (Perhaps those who overestimated their abilities, took it, and bombed might be viewed as pariahs by all but the worst of the worst schools.)

The ABA might take the brave step of marking LSAT-optional schools with an asterisk and fine print indicating that some students at the school did not submit an LSAT score. While Judge Schweitzer's "reasonable consumer" might take that to be a red flag, not all applicants are so discerning.

If this measure passed, and the LSAT became optional, it might be just the boost 4th-tier schools need to maintain their class sizes amid falling applicant numbers. Those who can't break 140 on the LSAT would get to go to law school, after all.

Photo by americanpsycho