Law Schools

Got Good Grades? You Might Not Even Have To Bother With The LSAT Anymore!

Probably still worth taking the LSAT.

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Overjoyed graduate student holding bundles of money

Now you can use the money in your prep course fund for food!

Preparing for the LSAT is a rite of passage for most lawyers. And while they’ve (thankfully) gotten rid of the Logic Games, it can still be pretty challenging. But, if you want to be a lawyer, it is just one of those things have to do. Was, rather. Moving forward, there’s going to be a little more wiggle room. Reuters has coverage:

The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar on Friday voted to create a new variance process by which individual law schools may apply for permission to bypass the existing admission test requirement for up to 100% of their incoming classes for a period of three to five years.

The prospect of incoming students bypassing test reqs isn’t unheard of — current ABA standards allow for up to a 10th of a law school’s admitted students to bypass the test — but the difference in scale is newsworthy.

The LSAT wasn’t a perfect sieving mechanism, but there was a pretty solid sense that the reason a 4.0 GPA student didn’t get into their dream school had something to do with their LSAT score. If the bypass were to be implemented on a larger scale, there’s no clear answer on what the consequence would be. That’s also part of the point:

The council in 2022 proposed removing the test requirement from the ABA’s law school standards on the grounds that it constrains law schools from experimenting and that no other accreditor of professional degree programs requires the use of standardized admission tests, even though many professional programs such as medical schools opt to use them.

The application process may not ultimately change much. Aspiring doctors still submit their MCAT scores even if they aren’t technically required. The strong cultural expectation could be enough, with the same going for aspiring lawyers and the LSAT.

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No LSAT To Get Into Law School? ABA Opens Door To Bypass Standardized Test [Reuters]

Earlier: Looks Like Logic Games Really Did Gatekeep The LSAT

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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