The most recent ABA Journal reports on the decision by the ABA to continue the de facto requirement of the LSAT for law school admission:
In March, the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar reached a preliminary decision to retain the current version of Standard 503 of the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, including the admission test requirement.
The article further explains:
[I]t appears likely that the national accreditation standards for law schools will retain the requirement that applicants take an admission test. For all intents and purposes, that means the LSAT.
The ABA Journal is merely pointing out the reality that the LSAT has become the de facto requirement of Rule 503, which merely states that applicants take "a valid and reliable admission test." But is it really inevitable that the LSAT is the only possible "valid and reliable admissions test"?
I have long thought that the LSAT has reigned not because of any unique virtue (although I think it has many virtues), but because of inertia in developing an alternative test. Indeed, I have always believed that a short multiple-choice test on a narrow, discrete, substantive area of law could predict law school and bar exam success as well or better than the LSAT. The idea would be that prospective law students could study real legal principles on a narrow, discrete topic and then take a substantive law test based on that narrow topic, just like a mini law school experience. Until now, I had no evidence other than intuition that such a test would predict much of anything.
Recently, however, I found this short article from the National Conference of Bar Examiners. It turns out that there is in fact a short, widely-available multiple-choice test on a narrow, discrete, substantive area of law that predicts bar examination scores about as well as the LSAT. That test is, believe it or not, the humble MPRE. Yes, the MPRE, a test that few law students take seriously or study for extensively, correlates at 0.58 with MBE score, slightly edging out the LSAT (at 0.57) and easily defeating the undergraduate GPA (at 0.36). That means that a two-hour multiple-choice test that many law students spend less than 20 hours studying for predicts bar performance better than your four years of undergraduate education.
One might say that there's nothing terribly surprising about the fact that a bar exam designed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (the MPRE) would correlate with a bar exam designed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (the MBE). Actually, there is some significance to this fact. Unlike the MBE, the MPRE doesn't require thousands of hours of law school study as preparation. A person who has never taken a law school class could pass the MPRE and indeed many law students study less than 20 hours for the exam without having taken the relevant law school course. Yet the MPRE predicts bar exam outcomes with uncanny accuracy. This suggests that a prospective student could study for and take a test like the MPRE and know about as well his or her prospects for law school and the bar exam as if he or she had taken the LSAT.
I realize that it is unlikely that law schools will start using the MPRE for admissions any time soon, and I'm not suggesting they do so (despite the somewhat misleading blog post title). But it does provide the "proof of concept" for alternatively designed admissions tests that could test a narrow, substantive law topic that prospective law students could actually study for. This opens the door to a range of possible law school admission tests, possibly designed by law schools themselves, that could provide alternatives to the LSAT. As a side benefit, law school applicants could actually learn something while studying for their admissions test beyond how many different ways six people could be arranged at a round table according to certain highly implausible rules.
Whether such alternatives are needed or not is a subject of vigorous debate. But many people do see a need for alternatives, and one wonders whether an admission test of that sort might better identify students who would perform well in law school but do not perform well on the LSAT. In particular, having at least some valid and reliable alternative to the LSAT might help provide a path to law school for under-represented candidates who would perform well in law school and on the bar exam, but who would struggle with the LSAT.
This is far from a proposal-- just a tentative idea that might have some promise. I look forward to hearing thoughts about such an admission test...
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