Another Law School Bows To The Inevitable And Accepts The GRE
The grueling LSAT will no longer be a shared rite of passage for all attorneys.
If you want to go to law school but don’t want to take the LSAT, the list of law schools you can attend has just grown by one. Now, in addition to Harvard, Northwestern, Georgetown, and Arizona, you can also take you talents to Honolulu.
Late last week the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law announced they would accept the GRE in lieu of the LSAT on a one-year trial basis, noting they’ve already done studies to validate the move:
The Law School faculty’s decision to pilot the GRE® General Test followed the Law School’s role as one of the first three law schools to have completed a validation study of the GRE® test in collaboration with Educational Testing Service. The 2016 Richardson data showed that GRE® scores were a better predictor of first-year law school grades than were undergraduate grades.
The Richardson pilot program analysis also noted that previous research had already shown that the GRE® General Test was a valid and reliable measure to predict academic performance in law school.
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A recent Kaplan Test Prep survey found 25 percent of law schools intend to accept the GRE as an entrance exam. Though the first study that looked at the validity of the GRE as an alternative to the LSAT was conducted by Arizona Law and joined by Wake Forest University School of Law and the University of Hawaii Law School, it wasn’t until Harvard Law made the move to accept anything other than the LSAT that a critical mass of law schools began to seriously consider the GRE as a law school entrance exam.
As more and more schools accept the GRE, it’s clear that the grueling LSAT will no longer be a shared rite of passage for all attorneys. Hawaii may be the fifth school to accept the GRE, but they surely won’t be the last.
Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).