Harvard Law School Drops LSAT For GMAT

After years of debate over the LSAT's relevance to the practice of law, Harvard Law School has finally dropped the LSAT as an admissions requirement and replaced it with the requirement that applicants take the GMAT. The decision came after a new study revealed that students scoring in the 75th percentile on the exam were no less likely to rise to prominent positions in the legal field than those scoring in the 99th percentile.

Harvard Law's Assistant Dean of Admissions, Pilar Folso, stated:

These results confirm what we've all known for a long time. The LSAT, the Analytical Reasoning [ed. Logic Games] section in particular, simply doesn't test skills that are useful for the everyday practice of law. Lawyers don't place variables in order or group them into categories, so why should we consider the results of a test that measures the ability of future lawyers to perform these inane tasks? 

In contrast, the GMAT has demonstrably served as a far better indicator of test-takers' skills relevant to the practice of business, and we believe these skills are equally relevant to the practice of law.

Ms. Folso indicated that applicants will be permitted to submit either LSAT or GMAT scores throughout the 2013-14 admission cycle. However, applicants in subsequent years will be required to submit GMAT scores to be considered for admission.

The move has come as a surprise to many, given that the GMAT contains a math section (Quantitative Reasoning). However, it's not as extreme as it may appear at first glance.

The GMAT's Critical Reasoning section features questions that are extremely similar to those in the LSAT's Logical Reasoning section. Additionally, the GMAT's recently-added Integrated Reasoning section measures test-takers' ability to interpret both mathematical and scientific data. These skills are becoming increasingly important as patent law has been the fastest-growing legal subfield for the past 10 years.

Intellectual property cases involving the massive amounts of computing data generated by Internet usage, and those involving advances in medicine and biotechnology, require lawyers to wade through documents involving information with which they have not traditionally been familiar. Measuring such skills will allow Harvard to determine the extent to which its applicants possess the ability to interpret such data.

I'll be following this story closely to see whether other law schools follow suit. If Yale and Stanford make the switch, too, we may see the vast majority of ABA-ranked law schools quickly make similar changes for the 2014-15 admission cycle. At the time I published this blog post, Robert Morse (the man behind the U.S. News rankings), hadn't yet made any comment on how the move would affect Harvard's ranking in future years.