Law Schools, LSAT

Killing The LSAT Is A Bad Deal For Students

Removing the LSAT requirement is just the latest law school trick.

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Law schools are not dispensing with the LSAT to help you, they’re doing it to trick you. Instead of dropping $170 on a fee, plus whatever you spend on a prep course, to figure out if you might actually be good at law school, they want to strike down any barrier that might make you reconsider taking on $150,000 or more in debt. Oh, you’ll still have to take a massively important standardized test, it’s called the bar exam. But the school will have already gotten your money/debt obligations by the time you sit for it. The house wins the moment you step into the casino.

And those are just the surface problems. Those are just the obvious issues with law schools dropping the LSAT requirement. The news from the University of Iowa and SUNY Buffalo is actually even more nefariously designed to trick students when you start peeling back additional layers. This plan is actually a three-pronged attack on potential law students. BloombergBusiness reports:

Two law schools said this month that they would begin accepting applicants who have not taken the Law School Admissions Test, a move that may help curb weak interest and plunging enrollments in law schools across the country. The State University of New York-Buffalo Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law said they would admit students from their respective undergraduate colleges based on their grade point average and scores on standardized tests other than the LSAT.

Dear Iowa and especially SUNY students, please take the LSAT. Worst case scenario, you’ll do poorly and still get into a law school that is desperate for warm bodies. Best case: you do well and can go to a better law school.

That’s the second prong of the attack Iowa and SUNY are taking to their own students. By minimizing the LSAT, the schools are trying to reduce the chances that their own students “test out” into better law schools, or law schools that will offer them a significant discount in tuition based on strong LSAT scores. A good LSAT score empowers prospective students with options. Iowa and SUNY are encouraging students to disregard those options.

But what if you get a low score? That’s attack number three. Now Iowa and SUNY can admit students who otherwise have no business being in law school without taking a hit to their median LSAT scores and thus their U.S. News ranking. Understand, Iowa and SUNY can admit whoever they want, LSAT be damned. But if you take it and do poorly, oh well that might make the schools look bad in the rankings. WE CAN’T HAVE THAT. Iowa and SUNY would prefer to hide their worst test takers from their LSAT statistics, while still taking all of their money.

These law schools are trying to turn the purchase of legal education into an impulse buy. Don’t buy a prep course that costs a thousand bucks, instead spend $150,000 bucks on a lark. This is the law school version of the guy who tells you that he doesn’t use condoms because it “kills the mood.” The LSAT is a de-minimus prophylactic that, if used properly, can help protect students from harm. But Iowa and SUNY just want you to trust them.

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IT’S A TRAP. Barry Currier, managing director of accreditation and legal education at the American Bar Association, basically said so:

Currier says doing away with the test might draw people to a career in law who would otherwise go to business or medical school.

Think about that statement for a second. WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT? That’s the problem with law schools right there. Instead of making law school reasonable, affordable, and valuable to people who want to be lawyers, deans are concerned with drawing — suckering — people into law who don’t know what they want to do with their lives. “I wanted to be a doctor, but I went to law school because I didn’t have to take a test.” That’s who they’re trying to sell law school to! That’s freaking evil.

And let’s remember that law school is ALREADY the easiest professional school to get into. If you want to go to medical school, you have to start taking a pre-med course when you are a goddamn sophomore in college. If you want to go to business school, you often need to have professional work experience and be able to take a test that includes some math. But you can write your senior thesis on “Depictions Of Baskets Throughout History,” pop a good score on the LSAT, and get into the best law schools in the country. Law school is already the recycling bin for the useless humanities degrees of the world.

Notice how I’ve managed to defend taking the LSAT without defending the LSAT? Nothing would stop Iowa or SUNY from placing reduced importance on the LSAT, or even keeping the requirement but generally disregarding it in their admissions decisions. I would probably applaud a school that came out and said “you know what, we just don’t care about the LSAT.” The LSAT is only important because it’s a hoop, a standardized hoop, that helps students figure out how they stack up against the competition. It’s a “barrier,” the same way a manhole cover is a barrier that prevents you from falling down in a hole even if you aren’t paying attention. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.

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But if you can’t be bothered to spend $170 for a test, then you shouldn’t be allowed to borrow $150,000 for a degree. Anybody who tells you different is trying to sell you something.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock)

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