LOS ANGELES, Aug. 09, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The American Bar Association is currently considering a proposal that would make standardized testing optional in the law school admissions process. TestMasters, an education company that has helped hundreds of thousands of law school applicants prepare for the LSAT, is contributing to the public debate by publishing a series of articles during the open public comment period, which expires on Sept. 1.
Over the past several decades, the LSAT has been the most important factor in the law school admissions process — and for good reason. Studies have consistently shown that an applicant's LSAT score is by far the single best predictor of first-year law school grades, outperforming the next-best predictor (undergraduate GPA) by more than 40 percent. No other admissions tool is specifically designed to ensure that law schools accept only those applicants who appear capable of satisfactorily completing a program of legal education and ultimately passing the bar.
The LSAT gets its predictive power from the fact that it tests only those skills that are essential to the study of law, as evidenced by a comprehensive 2018 survey in which nearly 500 law professors rated a variety of tasks in terms of their relevance to law school coursework. The tasks rated "highly important" by at least 75 percent of respondents — such as reading critically, identifying key facts, and applying general principles to specific cases — are the same ones test takers must perform in order to achieve a high LSAT score. In other words, the LSAT measures what law professors know is necessary for success in law school.
"The LSAT is not an administrative hurdle or an arbitrary way of ranking candidates," says Robin Singh, founder and CEO of TestMasters. "The reading and reasoning skills it tests are fundamental to practicing law, so the exam provides crucial feedback about whether someone is ready to pursue a legal career. Admitting people to law school before they've developed these skills is setting them up for failure."
Given how valuable the LSAT is for making informed admissions decisions, Singh maintains that the American Bar Association — the national accrediting agency for law schools — is undermining the vital role the test plays. Recently, the ABA weakened Standard 503 of its accreditation rules (which requires that applicants take a valid and reliable admissions test) by allowing schools to accept the GRE as a substitute for the LSAT. The GRE, however, is not a law-school-specific test; rather, it is a general barometer of a student's basic academic competence and was created to help colleges evaluate applicants to various master's degree programs in fields such as archaeology and linguistics.