American Bar Association Reviving Effort to Eliminate LSAT Requirement
“It first attempted to get rid of the admission test rule in 2018 but backed off when it became clear that the House of Delegates would not go along with the plan.”
This is all about race. Proponents claim the LSAT is an unfair barrier for minorities. Critics say this will actually make things worse for minorities.
Reuters reports:
ABA will try yet again to eliminate LSAT rule
The section of the American Bar Association that oversees law schools on Friday revived its push to let schools go test-optional.
The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar overwhelmingly voted to resubmit a controversial proposal to end by 2025 the longstanding requirement that schools use the Law School Admission Test or other standardized test when admitting new students.
That decision comes less than two weeks after the ABA’s policymaking body rejected that change amid warnings that law student diversity would suffer.
“It’s important that we move ahead,” said councilmember Daniel Thies on Friday, adding that the admission test rule will continue to inhibit innovation if left in place.
The proposal to end the admissions test rule will return to the ABA’s House of Delegates in August—the same group that voted it down on Feb. 6. The legal education council can enact the change even if the House rejects it for a second time because the U.S. Department of Education recognizes that council as the official accreditor of law schools.
It first attempted to get rid of the admission test rule in 2018 but backed off when it became clear that the House of Delegates would not go along with the plan.
The proposal has divided the legal academy with no clear consensus this time around.
Opponents, including a group of 60 law school deans and the Law School Admission Council, which designs and administers the LSAT, warned that eliminating the test requirement would make admissions offices more dependent on subjective measures such as the prestige of an applicant’s college. That could disadvantage minority applicants, they say.
Those who want to get rid of the test requirement have argued that the LSAT is a barrier for minority would-be lawyers because on average they score below white test-takers, and because law schools rely too heavily on those scores. A 2019 study found the average score for Black LSAT takers was 142, compared to 153 for white and Asian test-takers.
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Comments
…. Cause we need more barely functional lawyers and more wokesters in the profession….?
Nowhere do the critics of the LSAT dispute that it is a good predictor of first-year law school academic performance and eventual bar passage rates. Yes, there are people who are bad test-takers and yes there are great lawyers who blew the bar exam on the first attempt (I worked for one of them years ago). However, the LSAT seems to have done a pretty good job of predicting success rates for large groups of people.
To toss the LSAT out is analogous to saying that insurance mortality tables don’t mean you will certainly die at “x” years of age based on your current age, race, sex, weight, and frequency of alcohol and tobacco usage. (Such tables can produce with a high degree of accuracy the average life expectancy of a group of people with a certain risk profile.)
Nowhere does anyone ask what needs to be done to improve the academic readiness of future LSAT test-takers.
Obviously the committee, suffering under the racism of low expectations, is saying that minorities are not smart enough to successfully compete in the LSAT. So … they are admitting that the LSAT is an accurate predictor of success in law school and the bar exams.
They want to do away with the LSAT so they can get a bunch of unprepared students admitted to law schools. Then, when the unprepared students fail, they can scream racism, call for standards to be lowered even further, and file lawsuits and complaints to which the school administrations will cave.
After eliminating the LSAT and admitting many students who wouldn’t have done well on the LSAT, they will find that these test-phobic students can’t do well on the bar exam either. The obvious next step will be to eliminate the bar exam, because it’s “racist.”
The ABA is hell-bent on reducing the credibility of the legal profession from it’s already low level…