According to Connecticut Law Tribune, the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) will be sticking around as a standard ticket to gain admission into law school.
The American Bar Association’s Standards Review Committee, which has been reviewing the law school accreditation requirements, created in 2011, an uproar when some members tried to persuade dropping the exam as a criteria for law schools to use in determining whether a person should attend law school.
Even with the recent decline in law school applications, law schools have announced that they need to cut class sizes because they want to put resources into making graduates practice ready, and to do that, it may only be done with a few students really serious about being lawyers rather than those who want to go to law school because they have not figured out what they want to do with life. Schools such as Northwestern University and University of California Hastings have decreased their admissions.
To improve on law school admissions, potential law students need to improve on their LSAT scores. One company that is helping students improve their scores is TestMax Inc., which has come out with an app called LSATMax, filled with logic games. The CEO at TestMax, Inc., Mehran Ebadolahi, who previously instructed students in preparing for the LSAT, describes the LSAT as follow: “The LSAT is unique as a standardized test because it is testing a way of thinking as opposed to mastery of a specific subject matter.”
Ebadolahi believes the LSAT is important because “it is without question, the most important factor in the law school admissions process. Combine that with the recent news that a top-14 school (Northwestern) is cutting its class due to ‘a lack of qualified applicants’ and the importance of this exam should be glaringly obvious.”
LSATMax provides law student applicants with a strategy that emphasizes practice and patience. Ebadolahi described studying for the LSAT: “The idea that every student can maximize his or her LSAT score during a 2- or 3-month class is very misleading. Every student is different and a good LSAT score is subjective. So figure out the LSAT score you need to gain admission into the law school of your dreams and do not take the LSAT until you are consistently scoring within that range on your practice LSATs. This is why LSATMax comes with lifetime access and support. Law school is a huge investment of your time and money so there is absolutely no reason to settle.”
Support for not requiring the LSAT has been shelved over time. Currently, the ABA’s Council of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has possibly endorsed keeping the LSAT around, according to Connecticut Law Tribune.
Studying for the LSAT may be like studying for the bar exam when a person graduates from law school. Most bar exams in the United States have a multiple choice section that requires a person looking to be an attorney to explain why he or she decided on one answer choice as opposed to not choosing another answer. To improve on LSAT scores, a person may want to try to explain each question to a friend in order to evaluate why the person decided to go with the answer and why the test taker didn’t choose the other possibilities. The LSAT involves reasoning and reading comprehension which is something a law student does a lot of.
According to the Connecticut Law Tribune, the American Bar Association’s Standards Review Committee’s suggestion to keep the LSAT as part of law school admissions is still open to public comment. There may be public hearings on the matter in 2014.