Kaplan Test Prep’s survey shows more schools are warming up to the idea of accepting the GRE in addition to the LSAT to increase application rates.
According to the responses of 128 law schools across the United States, 25 percent say it’s an admissions policy they plan to implement, up from just 14 percent in Kaplan’s 2016 survey. Forty-five percent say they have no plans to begin accepting the GRE, a drop from 56 percent who ruled it out in last year’s survey. Thirty percent are not sure, the same as in 2016.
“Law schools received significantly fewer law school applications than they’re historically used to,” said Jeff Thomas, Kaplan Test Prep’s executive director of pre-law programs.
“Law schools need to either drop the size of their incoming classes to maintain their academic standards or to lower those standards to maintain their historic class sizes.”
In 2012, about 170,000 LSATs were administered, and in 2016, that number dropped to about 100,000. Thomas said many are hoping to increase numbers by accepting the GRE.
“The legal job market is indeed returning,” Thomas said. “However the applicants haven’t returned to law school the way they historically were. That’s why the GRE is looking like an attractive option for some schools to try to increase applicants.”
Harvard University, Northwestern University, Georgetown University, University of Arizona, University of Hawaii and Washington University in St. Louis are the only schools that currently accept the GRE for their law programs.
“The LSAT is regarded as a very difficult standardized test, given on only four occasions a year. It is custom built for law school admissions, it’s a challenging exam,” Thomas said.
“The GRE is also a challenging exam in a different way, however, it’s a computer based test given on almost every day of the year and it’s also used for a wide variety of graduate school programs.”
Dean of the LSU Law Center Thomas Galligan said the school could potentially follow this trend.
“If the test is going to be a positive factor in predicting success for law school then we ought to be able to use the test,”
Galligan said. “I think we want to make sure, for our prospective student body, that it’s going to be a valid and reliable predictor of success.”
Law schools are hoping to attract students from a wide variety of backgrounds by accepting the GRE.
“When I came to law school I took the GRE too,” Galligan said. “There’s a whole lot of people out there who are unsure whether they want to go to graduate school or some other discipline or law school and so they have to take two tests and if they could just take one test it would be a better thing for everybody.”