Between the breakdown of the preeminent U.S. News & World Report’s ranking system and the Supreme Court’s possibly being on the verge of issuing a long-overdue ruling banning race-conscious admissions, law schools are staring down their biggest disruption in decades. Now, amidst all this uncertainty, the American Bar Association plans to stop requiring law schools to use the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). The latest shakeup is the culmination of a broader push in academia to forsake standardized testing to facilitate diversity in university enrollment. So what does this mean for the legal academy? Nothing good.
Abandoning the LSAT is incredibly ill-advised. Standardized tests are among the least discriminatory institutions in American society. The LSAT is one of the places where skin color, income, and zip code matter the least. No matter where you come from or who you are, you can take the LSAT, free from prejudice.
Of course, the test is not immaculately impartial. As with all standardized tests, wealthier applicants have an advantage because they can dedicate more hours to studying and more resources toward tutoring services. Unlike the other major standardized admissions exams, however, the LSAT is least susceptible to these criticisms.
The SAT, ACT, GRE, and MCAT are all knowledge-based tests. The LSAT is a logical-reasoning-based exam, testing skills rather than knowledge of legal concepts. This is an ostensible flaw because no skill directly applicable to the practice of law is being assessed, but it has one great advantage: a weaker relationship between the quality of one’s schooling and how prepared one is to take the test.
So sure, there are differences in the amount of time and money applicants can spend studying. Ideally, a standardized exam should be impossible to study for so no one has an inordinate advantage. But attempting to eradicate disparities across applicants’ original positions is a fool’s errand. At least on the LSAT, one’s educational background has far less bearing on how one will do on the test. So even if one concedes that cultivating diversity of background rather than diversity of thought among the student body is a worthwhile pursuit for law-school admissions directors, it’s unclear how eliminating this great equalizer will further that objective.