If excelling at the LSAT — with its tricky logical reasoning questions and not-so-easy games — is becoming an impossible task, you’re in luck. A few law schools have nixed it from their admissions requirements.
Kind of.
The American Bar Association, which governs most U.S. law schools, announced in 2014 a rule that allows law schools to relax their policy on the LSAT.
Up to 10 percent of a school’s entering class can be admitted without taking the LSAT, but the applicants must matriculate from the university’s undergraduate college, or pursue another degree in addition to their J.D.
The applicants must also be at the top of their class. According to the ABA, “Applicants admitted must have scored at the 85th percentile nationally, or above, on a standardized college or graduate admissions test, specifically the ACT, SAT, GRE, or GMAT; and must have ranked in the top 10% of their undergraduate class through six semesters of academic work, or achieved a cumulative GPA of 3.5 or above through six semesters of academic work.”
A few institutions, including the Drake University School of Law, St John’s University School of Law and University of Iowa College of Law, recently announced they would take advantage of this admissions rule.
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The change may allow law schools, which have experienced a rapid decline in applicants over the last few years, to attract a few more students who might otherwise consider going to a law school that isn’t connected to their undergraduate college, experts say. It may not make law school easier to get into overall.
“We will have, now, a tiny bit of discretion in how we admit people,” says James Gardner, interim dean of the University at Buffalo–SUNY School of Law, which announced in February that it would change its admissions standards to encompass the ABA’s rule. “It is by no means giving anybody carte blanche to admit whoever they want.”
Applicants at Buffalo and other institutions implementing the policy change will still have to prove themselves in other ways. “We look at their transcript. We look at letters of reference. There’s a personal essay and another optional essay,” says Gardner. Andrea Charlow, an associate dean and law professor at Drake University, says her school will also review these criteria for applicants as well as the rigor of the applicant’s undergraduate courses.
Even with an exemplary undergraduate record, students applying to their university’s law school may still have to keep their fingers crossed for an acceptance letter.
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“They are not guaranteed admission, but must compete with the entire applicant pool for a place in the class,” says University of Iowa’s law school dean Gail Agrawal in a March statement that announced the new admissions change for the law school.
Because of the strict eligibility requirements for students to apply without taking the LSAT, some law school experts don’t anticipate that schools will get a huge enrollment boost from this change.
“You may get, I don’t know, 10 or 20 more people applying from your home institution,” says A. Benjamin Spencer, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who’s also researched the history of law schools in the U.S.
But this rule may help with efforts to diversify law schools, Spencer says. “There’s people who are members of groups that tend to under perform on the LSAT and if you dispense with the LSAT, and they’ve demonstrated good performance at the college, that might be a way to bring them in without the LSAT score bringing down your overall class LSAT figure, which is something the schools always have to pay attention to.”
He can foresee more schools changing their admissions policy to allow certain undergrads to apply without taking the LSAT, especially if the school has a strong undergraduate college. But he’s not sure if this change will be enough to entice top undergrads to stay at their university for law school.
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“Students tend to pick their law schools based on their ranking,” says Spencer. “And if a student’s a really good student at one of those universities, their opportunities may be better at other law schools.”
Schools that waive the LSAT requirement for certain applicants are also pushing back against law school rankings, experts say. University of Buffalo’s Gardner, for one, argues that the U.S. News ranking system “severely punishes law schools that admit students with lower LSAT scores even if everything else in their file points to the conclusion that they’re perfectly capable of doing the work and becoming great lawyers.”
The U.S. News law school ranking methodology, however, factors in the median LSAT scores of a school’s full-time and part-time entrants — one of 12 components evaluated.
Changing the LSAT admissions requirement is one of many changes among law schools in recent years, says Spencer. Some institutions have increased their offerings of non-J.D. programs, expanded scholarship packages or included more hands-on opportunities into the curriculum.
Some researchers have even looked into revising the admissions practices for law schools to give the LSAT less weight. A 2008 report on research from the University of California–Berkeley discussed placing less emphasis on the LSAT and how successful an applicant would be in law school and more focus on how successful an applicant would be as a lawyer.
But the American Bar Association often has the last word on admissions changes for the schools it approves.
“Law schools want to innovate in various ways,” Spencer says. “But they’ve been prohibited from innovating in those ways because the ABA has those restrictive requirements.”
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As Law Schools Undergo Reform, Some Relax LSAT Requirements originally appeared on usnews.com
