A decision has recently been made that might seriously affect the way LSAT scores are considered by law schools.

It has been reported that in its June meeting, the Council of the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar voted to change the procedure which previously required law schools to report average LSAT scores of entering students. Instead, the ABA will now require law schools to report the highest LSAT score.

See: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2006/
06/aba_to_require_.html

Now strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with the admissions process at any law school. The change is simply a matter of one organization (a branch of the ABA) deciding to ask various law schools for a different type of information than before, perhaps for something as simple as accounting purposes.

However, there's a rub. Here, as elsewhere in life, it's enlightening to track the transfer money and power.

You've all seen the US News and World Report ranking of law schools. They claim to use a vast matrix of factors in ranking law schools, such as student/faculty ratios, bar passage rates, etc. But one important criterion has been student selectivity, especially the average LSAT scores of students (technically the 75 percent and 25 percent average scores, but still the average scores).

Now in a better world, you, the idealistic law school applicant, would not pay nearly so much attention to law school rankings. You would instead avail yourself of the wealth of information about a law school's ideological and cultural climate, about its faculty and other factors that will contribute to your success as a lawyer. But we don't live in such a world. In our world you (and unfortunately the firms who will eventually interview you after law school) are largely preoccupied with law school rankings, especially those in US News and World Report.

Law schools know this, and it is only reasonable to suppose that any law school would want a higher as opposed to a lower ranking. Because the LSAT scores of the incoming class are highly scrutinized in the ranking process, schools have an incentive to take an incoming class with the highest LSAT scores possible.

In a minute, we'll get back to how this might affect you. First, let's posit the following argument: (1) if law school's rankings are (in part, but in large part) determined by the LSAT scores of incoming classes (2) Law schools want a higher as opposed to a lower ranking and (3) The relevant LSAT score for ranking purposes is not your average score, but your highest score, then law schools have a strong motive to favor your highest score over your average score in the admissions process.

Consider the following two applicants:

Al has two LSAT scores: 140 and 160 (that's a 150 average, by the way)

Barbara has only one LSAT score and it's a 155.

Now, instead of assuming they are individuals, let's assume they comprise entire classes.

Before the ABA's change, most law schools had a policy of taking the student's average score (in part, perhaps, because that's what the ABA required them to report). So, all else being equal, they would prefer a class of Barbara's 155s. After all, their school would show up on rankings as having a higher LSAT average (155) than schools that accepted an entire class of Al's with an average LSAT score of 150.

Now however, the circumstances seem to have changed. According to the current rules, a school that accepted a class of Al's would have a higher reported LSAT score (160) than a school that accepted a class of Barbara's (155). All other things being equal, according to the new LSAT reporting criteria, the school that accepted a class of Al's would be ranked higher in US News and World Report. Thus, schools now have a strong motive to consider your highest LSAT score.

It's not just your friends at Blueprint, either. At least one law school admissions officer we spoke with seemed annoyed that her law school had already admitted much of their class, operating under the old reporting scheme when they might have done things differently had they known about this information sooner.

So how does this matter for you? The ABA change only matters if it affects your application. Everyone we spoke with said that changes would not occur until the 2007 application year. This means that if you've already applied this year, the old standard will be used. But in the fall, next year's application criteria will apparently change. Representatives we spoke with at the following law schools all said that they would be accepting the highest LSAT score in 2007:

Southwestern
Loyola
UC Berkeley
Columbia

Some schools claimed that there would be no change: notably UCLA. However, we heard reports from people who claimed to have been told different things by UCLA representatives when they called. In more than one instance, the admissions officers we called hadn't heard about the ABA ruling, asked us to hold while they verified it, and returned to the phones sounding surprised and saying things like "I guess we'll be taking the highest score from now on." In light of this, please take these reports with a grain of salt. This information is so recent that these representatives might not be fully informed of their institution's actual policies.




Representatives from Yale suggested that this would not change their policies at all. This representative echoed the sentiment that this was a change in reporting procedure and not in admissions. "One thing need have nothing to do with the other," the representative said. While this is true, Yale Law School has the luxury of adopting such a principled stance. Since they routinely get the best applicants in the country, whether they take into account a student's average or highest score, we'd wager that Yale will again have the highest reported LSAT average for their incoming students of any incoming law school class in the country.

A Harvard representative claimed that there has been no change in the HLS admissions policy, but that they would be meeting soon to discuss the change. He suggested calling back later this summer to verify their policy for 2007.

The University of Michigan Law School appears to be the first to have published a position on the ABA ruling. In the "JD FAQs" they write:

The LSDAS report for an applicant who has sat for the LSAT more than once will show every score or cancellation, as well as the average score. The ABA requires law schools to report score information based on an admitted student's highest score, and therefore, that is the score to which we give the most weight. We do, however, give great weight to the average score as well, because data provided by the Law School Admissions Council suggests that it has the greatest predictive utility. If you have a significant disparity between scores (six or more points), it would be very helpful to address any explanation for the difference in an optional essay or addendum.

See:
http://www.law.umich.edu/prospectivestudents
/Admissions/faq.htm#lsat

This represents a very plausible hybrid position. Multiple scores might be considered, but the greatest weight would be given to the highest score. We would not find it surprising if other schools followed suit. One reason law schools would consider an average score is that LSAC research has suggested that a student's average LSAT score has predictive value for law school performance.

See:
http://www.lsacnet.org/research/Validity-
of-Law-School-Admission-Test-Scores-for-
Repeaters-ES.htm

How will this affect your application?

It is not yet precisely clear what the upshot of the ABA ruling will be. If law schools consider only the highest score, it seems as if there would be no reason to ever cancel an LSAT. If that's the case, it is likely that more people would take the LSAT multiple times. On one hand, it's likely that more people would be applying with higher scores (since, by definition, any person's highest score is at least as high as his average score).

However, if fewer people cancel low scores, then the median raw score on future LSATs would tend to be lower. That would tend to suggest that the curve would be easier, since fewer correct answers will be required for a higher scaled score. But all of this is really idle speculation at this point.

The safest advice is the following. If you have any doubts about how this change might affect your application, call the law schools in which you are interested and ask if their policies will be changing in light of the ABA ruling and how this might affect your particular case.

If you already have two official LSAT scores with a large gap between them, it might be in your interest to delay your applications until next year. Again, we are not recommending that you do this and you should speak with representatives at law schools before making any decision.

Whatever the outcome, in the relatively mundane world of LSAT preparation and law school admission, the ABA decision has caused a good deal of commotion.

This article has been updated.