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Paul L. Caron
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Saturday, November 26, 2022

Law School Admissions Without LSATs, Race, And Rankings

Wall Street Journal Editorial, Law Schools Without LSATs:

The American Bar Association’s move to discard objective tests won’t enhance diversity.

The flight from merit continues across America, and it’s spreading fast in the legal profession. An arm of the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools, voted on Nov. 18 to end the requirement that prospective law students take the Law School Admission Test. ...

The vote is pending approval from the ABA House of Delegates in February. If adopted, it would make standardized testing optional in preparation for a career that demands a lot of standardized knowledge.

The LSAT has long been a target of diversity advocates who argue that the use of the test has limited minority enrollment in law schools because the test questions are allegedly biased in favor of white test takers. Detractors also object to the LSAT because affluent students often pay thousands of dollars to prepare for the test that is supposed to predict their first-year law school performance.

The ABA decision is best understood as an attempt to get ahead of a possible Supreme Court decision against the use of racial preferences in school admissions. By making the LSAT optional, schools will be able to admit the students they want without lowering the average LSAT score that is one measure of elite status. But the schools need the ABA to move first.

The irony is that giving up the LSAT is likely to harm students from less privileged backgrounds. In September, 60 law school deans—including Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Loyola University Chicago Dean Michèle Alexandre and Boston University’s Angela Onwuachi-Willig—wrote the ABA to oppose making the admissions test optional on grounds that it would damage diversity. ...

Without an LSAT, untested law students will arrive at law school less prepared for the material, as well as less experienced with a rigorous testing format when they have to pass the bar exam in a few years. That is, if critics don’t next target the bar exam for elimination.

Bloomberg Law Op-Ed:  Ending Standardized Law School Tests Could Diminish Diversity, by Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, UC-Berkeley) & Daniel Tokaji (Dean, Wisconsin):

The American Bar Association is considering a major change in legal education: eliminating the longstanding requirement that applicants for law school take a valid and reliable admissions test like the Law School Admissions Test. This change would be effective with the law school class entering in 2026. ...

Although this proposal is well-intentioned, it would be premature to take this action without careful research on how it will affect law school admissions. This is especially important with regard to diversity.

It is for this reason that we were among 60 law school deans—each with a steadfast record of supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion—who recently joined together to express our strong opposition to the ABA proposal. We are deeply concerned that its adoption would harm efforts to diversify legal education and ultimately the legal profession. ...

Properly used, standardized tests, such as the LSAT, are extremely helpful in assessing whether applicants are likely to succeed in law school and gain admission to the bar. They can also be a tool for enhancing the diversity of our incoming classes.

Research consistently shows that the LSAT can help identify students who are capable of succeeding in law school, even though their grades or other credentials alone might not so indicate. That includes students who come from less-advantaged backgrounds and underrepresented groups, as well as non-traditional or second-career students.

If law schools abandon the LSAT or other validated tests in their admissions processes, something else will take its place. It is quite possible—we think probable—that greater emphasis will be put on GPA, written or verbal recommendations, the reputation of undergraduate institutions, admissions officers’ familiarity with those institutions, or other subjective factors that are more subject to privilege and bias than test scores.

National Review, Law-School Admissions’ Perfect Storm:

Between the breakdown of the preeminent U.S. News & World Report’s ranking system and the Supreme Court’s possibly being on the verge of issuing a long-overdue ruling banning race-conscious admissions, law schools are staring down their biggest disruption in decades. Now, amidst all this uncertainty, the American Bar Association plans to stop requiring law schools to use the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). The latest shakeup is the culmination of a broader push in academia to forsake standardized testing to facilitate diversity in university enrollment. So what does this mean for the legal academy? Nothing good.

Abandoning the LSAT is incredibly ill-advised. Standardized tests are among the least discriminatory institutions in American society. The LSAT is one of the places where skin color, income, and zip code matter the least. No matter where you come from or who you are, you can take the LSAT, free from prejudice.

New York Sun, The Unranking of American Law Schools:

In a sudden move, a herd of top law schools puts progressive politics over prestige.

The implosion of the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings is the latest sign that the world of legal education is in a state of upheaval. The stampede of prestigious schools away from the rankings has alternatively been seen as a loosening of outdated metrics that stand in the way of progress or a headlong repudiation of merit on the part of those training future officers of the court. ...

The implosion of the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings is the latest sign that the world of legal education is in a state of upheaval. The stampede of prestigious schools away from the rankings has alternatively been seen as a loosening of outdated metrics that stand in the way of progress or a headlong repudiation of merit on the part of those training future officers of the court.

The founder of Above the Law, David Lat, tells the Sun that the law schools that have abandoned the rankings are eager to “make changes” to how they evaluate applicants without “worrying about the consequences.” Ditching the metrics will give schools “leeway at the margins” to take whom they like — say, a novelist whose creative talent wasn’t captured by the LSAT.

The flight from the rankings takes place against the backdrop of a pair of cases before the Supreme Court, whose disposition could reorder the admissions landscape. Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina and SFFA v. Harvard, argued last month, turn on whether the use of race in admissions violates either federal law or the Constitution or both.

Reuters, Law Schools Face 'Biggest Jolt' in Decades With LSAT Rule Change, U.S. News Exodus:

More than half of the 14 top-ranked law schools in the United States have said over the past six days that they will no longer participate in U.S. News & World Report’s influential rankings, including those at Yale, Harvard and Stanford universities.

But that is just one of several changes set to reshape law school admissions in the coming years, in what legal educators are calling an unprecedented moment.

On Friday, the American Bar Association moved ahead with a plan to stop requiring law schools to use the Law School Admission Test or other standardized test when admitting students.

And the U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to strike down affirmative action at colleges and universities across the country after hearing several challenges to race-conscious admissions policies last month.

“This is the biggest jolt I’ve had in the 40 years I’ve been at this,” Georgetown University Law Center admissions dean Andrew Cornblatt said of the combined changes. ...

After Georgetown broke with U.S. News last week, Cornblatt said he feels slightly less pressure to maintain certain LSAT and GPA benchmarks when making decisions.

Other changes will take longer. A ruling on the affirmative action challenge before the Supreme Court is not expected until June. And the ABA's standardized testing requirement will remain until 2025, assuming its House of Delegates signs off on the change in February.

TaxProf Blog coverage of LSAT optional:

U.S. News coverage:

Boycott

U.S. News Response to Boycott

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2022/11/law-school-admissions-without-lsats-race-and-rankings.html

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