New law school admissions experiment would bypass the LSAT - Reuters.com
(Reuters) - Some aspiring attorneys might not have to take the Law School Admission Test to apply to law school in the future.
The Law School Admission Council — which administers the LSAT and maintains a centralized application system for law schools — said Wednesday that it is designing a program to enable would-be law students to apply without taking a standardized test.
The new program won’t undermine or replace the LSAT as the main pathway to apply to law school, said Council vice president of product development and business intelligence Kaitlynn Griffith. Most of the Council's annual revenue comes from fees associated with the LSAT and law school applications. The LSAT already faces competition from the Graduate Record Examination, which nearly 80 law schools now accept.
The program would let undergraduate students at participating colleges and universities complete a tailored curriculum before graduation, then be eligible to apply to law schools without an LSAT score.
The goal is to broaden the pipeline and pathways to law school, Griffith said.
“One of our founding principles on this was to look at diversity, equity and inclusion and say, ‘How can we be opening more doors into the legal profession?’” Griffith said.
The Council expects to pilot the program this fall with a number of partner undergraduate institutions. Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, is the first to commit, Griffith said. It is helping the Council design the new program alongside two other schools: Northeastern University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
Sarah Zearfoss, senior assistant dean at the University of Michigan Law School, is part of an 11-member committee advising on the program that also includes law school deans at Northwestern University, Howard University, Suffolk University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Zearfoss said the LSAT is a useful but imperfect tool to assess students. The new program could prepare students over time on the same skills tested by the LSAT, she said.
“It will broaden access to law school beyond the subset of applicants who score well on one very particular kind of test,” she said.
Griffith acknowledged the Council must convince the American Bar Association and law schools to accept applicants who complete its program, and said she expects pilot participants will take the LSAT to help test the program’s validity and reliability as an alternative. But she said she hopes the program will expand to more campuses after the pilot phase.
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source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/new-law-school-admissions-experiment-would-bypass-lsat-2022-03-16/
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