PERHAPS the most unnerving part about applying to a law school is the process of taking the LSAT - the Law School Admission Test that acts as the standardized measurement for every legitimate school in the country. Divided into three main sections, the test supposedly evaluates a potential student's ability to handle reading comprehension, analytical reasoning and logical reasoning. While one easily may equate the LSAT to the SAT and similar undergraduate entrance exams, one key difference stands between the two: the possibility for abject and eternal failure. While most undergraduate programs allow a student to submit his or her best SAT scores, most law schools average out all the scores a student may get from the LSAT. Every LSAT counts a great deal.
The LSAT's relevance has become more of a national issue in the wake of a federal judge's invalidation of an affirmative action admissions plan implemented at University of Michigan Law School. As part of its effort to make blacks and Hispanics constitute at least 10 percent of its enrollment, Michigan essentially counted the LSAT scores of minority applicants differently than those of white applicants. As a result, "whites generally had to score higher on the LSAT than minorities to be admitted" ("Law School Admission Council Aims to Quash Overreliance on LSAT," Wall Street Journal, March 29).
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In the midst of such controversy, the Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT, has embarked on efforts to reduce law schools' "historic overreliance" on the test. While any sane applicant should agree wholeheartedly with the desires of the council to reduce the importance of the test, one should be careful to maintain some sort of role for a standardized test in the admissions process.
LSAT scores pose an enticing temptation to any school wishing to increase its standing in the U.S. News and World Report school rankings. With an incoming class' scores accounting for 12.5 percent of a school's overall ranking, a school seeking to maintain or improve its position easily may make high scores a key component of a successful application. An admissions office may be extremely tempted to make a student's LSAT score a gateway factor. That is, a school may easily decide that all students with a combined LSAT and GPA below a certain level will not be admitted, those above a certain level will definitely be admitted and those in the middle will have a chance at being admitted. This methodology is dangerous on a number of levels.
Allowing the LSAT to act as a gatekeeper forces would-be law students to be judged on their ability to handle one three-hour, pressure-packed situation. Such a situation does not involve the integration of legalistic principles with fact patterns - a key element of law school - but instead involves remarkably uninteresting reading passages and mislabeled logic games. As stated previously, few schools allow a student to provide his or her best test score but instead average all of a student's scores. Consequently, one bad score literally can eliminate a student's chance of attending a school that doesn't give its degrees through the mail.
As the University of Michigan Law School affirmative action controversy has shown, an over-reliance on the test actually can hurt legitimate efforts to increase diversity. White students, for whatever reason, generally score better on the LSAT than minority students. If the scores count a great deal, admissions offices have to count the tests differently for white students than for non-white students in order to admit a remotely diverse student body. Counting an identical test differently for groups based solely on race has obvious problems. By de-emphasizing the importance of the LSAT, admissions offices might have greater freedom in legitimately taking factors like race, geographic background, religion and immigrant status into account.
While law schools should lessen their reliance on LSAT scores, they should not fall prey to eliminating national tests altogether. Despite a national test's already-mentioned problems, it does allow a school to look at a group of students from across the country and have an idea how those students perform when tested in identical conditions and on the same material. Considering a national test prevents a school from making non-academic factors too significant in the admissions process. In the past, such reliance on non-academic factors benefited rich white males. Today, a similarly dangerous over-reliance on non-academic considerations may limit the accessibility of qualified students to quality institutions.
Top law schools' use of the LSAT should be lessened. Perhaps as a compromise, students should be allowed to submit their best score for consideration. However, to ensure students may be compared on some sort of equivalent level, some form of national test should stay in effect.
(Seth Wood's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at swood@cavalierdaily.com.)
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