Summary: The University of Arizona College of Law announced a few months ago of their intention to accept GRE scores but is receiving backlash that they hadn’t expected.
The recent decision by the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law to accept GRE test scores instead of only LSAT is causing an uproar. The Law School Admission Test makers are obviously upset about the school’s movement, contemplating the school’s membership in the Law School Admission Council.
Read Arizona Law Defends GRE Test Acceptance Policy to learn more.
Friday will be the deciding day of whether the school has violated their membership eligibility criteria by allowing the alternative tests to be accepted. The dean of the law school, Marc Miller, said in an interview, “We anticipated that [the council] wouldn’t welcome this with open arms. But we didn’t predict this particular action. This seems like a pretty bald way to punish us for innovating.”
Should the law school lose its membership, they would be removed as an option for law school applicants that apply to more than one school at once. Arizona announced in February that after an internal study to determine if the GRE was comparable in predicting the success of first year students as the LSAT does, that the test was reliable. Wake Forest University School of Law and the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law are also creating their own studies to decide if they will follow in Arizona’s footsteps.
The Council has pointed out to Arizona that in the bylaws members must require “that substantially all of its applicants for admission take the Law School Admission Test.”
Read UA Law First to Allow GRE Test Scores.
The school has countered that only a few applicants did not submit LSAT scores and revoking the school’s membership violates antitrust laws, “We do not believe we are out of compliance with the LSAC Bylaws, and we believe the LSAC Board of Trustees would be acting unwisely and perhaps illegally should they remove Arizona as a member of LSAC.”
There is a history of the ABA allowing law schools to admit a small number of the school’s undergraduates to their law school without taking the LSAT.
Photo: utpb.edu