Law School To Accept GREs In Order To Corner The Market On Mediocrities

People with good GRE scores will continue on their path. People with bad GRE scores will get caught in the law school trap.

dunceNowadays, the only barriers to a legal education are the ability to fill out a financial aid form and the ability to fill out the LSAT. You don’t even have to “take” the damn thing, JUST FILL IT OUT. Law schools are so desperate to fill seats that anybody can get in. The “brain drain” from law schools is real, and, like climate change, the only people who deny it are the very dumb or those who care more about their profit margins than a sustainable ecosystem.

At least the LSAT separates out the people who have done some basic research into legal education from those who think a J.D. and a Ph.D. in “law” are the same thing. But, evidently, that bar was just a little too high for some law schools. The University of Arizona Rogers College of Law has decided to accept GRE scores in lieu of LSAT scores for new applicants who choose that option. We’ve previously talked about Wake Forest Law looking into the same arrangement.

That’s the University of Arizona, folks. We’re not talking about some InfiLaw diploma mill like Arizona Desiccation or Arizona Summit (only one of those names is a joke). We’re talking about a relatively respected state law school that is now inviting in people who couldn’t even be bothered to take the LSAT.

Arizona is emphasizing a study by Educational Testing Services that suggests that the GRE is just as “reliable” of a predictor of law school success as the LSAT. But there are a couple of problems with that point:

A) Educational Testing Services administers the GRE. I mean, if you ask me, “Hey Elie, is reading Above the Law in college a good predictor of Law School success?,” I’m going to find a way to say, “Yes, gimmie money now.”

B) WHO THE F**K CARES if the GRE is just as relevant as the LSAT? The GRE is not a good predictor of whether the people who take it want to go to law school, because if they did, THEY’D BE TAKING THE LSAT. The point of the LSAT is to set up a minimal barrier to entry in the hopes that those who end up in law school are at least somewhat serious about pursuing legal education and have the basic logic and reading comprehension skills to achieve that goal.

Make no mistake about what is going on here. Now, not only will Arizona take pretty much everybody who is able to score above “illiterate” on the LSAT, they’ll also take the people who took the GREs but were too stupid to get into their first choice graduate program they wanted when they signed up for the damn test.

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People with good GRE scores will continue on their path. People with bad GRE scores will get caught in the law school trap. Watching Arizona do this is like watching the moment when a bear decides, “Why would I head to the salmon stream when there’s all this human garbage people have literally just been throwing away.”

And in the bargain, Arizona will have an opportunity to hide the crappy LSAT scores of its admitted students from U.S. News by matriculating a class of students with no LSAT scores at all.

Other than that, NO CONCERNS, ARIZONA. I’m glad the law school machine has found a whole other way to prop up its business model without offering students the kind of price sensitivity and value proposition that would make law students actually want to go to law school.

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