The LSAT Should Not be a Factor in Law School Admissions

1. The LSAT does not test for the skills necessary to be an innovative, successful lawyer.

• No synthesis, writing, or speaking requirement.
• The Test is multiple choice that rewards elimination and guessing as much as comprehension and analysis.
  %red% How is elimination different from comprehension and analysis?
• The test is highly structured, a confined environmental anachronistic to the real world
• The test is time limited, rewarding those who read quickly
• Promotes individual work, rather than collaboration

2. The result of LSAT based admissions is a less diverse, less interesting, and less accomplished student body.

• The Test itself is quite learnable, thus assessing thinks like (1) prudence (2) leisure time (3) wealth and (4) planning, rather than critical thinking
• Working within a “confined universe of knowledge” leads to intellectually conservative thinking and the standardization of problem solving.

3. Why the LSAT lives on

• Makes it easy for admissions officers
• It is a huge industry
• The US News Rankings
• It is a stepping stone to being a corporate drone, so the big firms like it
• Prisoner’s Dilemma Among Law Schools
• No one with any power has any incentive to change it.
  • Students are just tourists at their schools, their professors are increasingly academics, not teachers.
  • The schools on top won’t shake the status quo, those underneath have to play the game and hope for crumbs.

If your argument is that the LSAT should not be a FACTOR in law school admissions, you should also talk about the other factors that law schools use (grades, essays, recommendations, resume-experiences, pedigrees). Maybe you want to interview someone in admissions and ask them how much WEIGHT they assign to each of these factors.

You should also account somewherefor the fact that LSAT scores successfully predict 1L grades (i.e. within a given university's entering 1L class). That may just be a sign that the 1L curriculum and/or its testing system has a lot of the flaws of the LSAT. But it's worth mentioning that "a given university's entering 1L class" is a good way to control certain variables (although I don't know what they are.) (maybe the classes aren' tdiverse)

If you plan to pursue this paper idea, I'd like to talk to you, because I really can't imagine how it can be written.

-- AdamCarlis - 24 Mar 2008

Like the comment above, there is a study of a strong correlation between the LSAT scores and 1L grades. Yet another study (done by Michigan University, I think. Professor Heller told us about it in class) found that law school grades have no correlation whatsoever to anything (money, partnership, etc.) down the life. You could probably search for them if you are interested. If those are true, you can develope the idea that the skills you need to score high on the LSAT and the skills you need to succeed in law school in terms of grades overlap, but both do not really have any relationship to how good of a lawyer you will be. Just a thought.

-- JayunKoo - 27 Mar 2008