Garrett Coleman '25
Managing Editor
On November 1, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) announced that it would pull its free prep course offerings from Khan Academy and transition them over to the subscription-based LSAC LawHub.[1]This decision came after some broader restructuring of the legal gatekeeping test in October of this year, which saw the removal of the logic games section.[2] While many of us may want to put LSAC in the past as an uncomfortable hurdle, it is important to remember how pivotal their role is in shaping the legal field. Many of our future colleagues will be products of LSAC’s restrictions, so I think its practices merit continued consideration. And as a group of people uniquely adept at the LSAT, its changes are at least somewhat interesting.
I am happy to criticize a standardized testing apparatus because I am one of the decreasing few who think they still have merit. Having students from a variety of undergraduate institutions sit for a single exam that requires no background knowledge is a good thing. It helps to separate those who have genuine legal potential from those who benefited from better academic opportunities—though, I admit, no test could do this in full. But that goal is undermined when LSAC is allowed to raise profitable barriers throughout the application process. The LSAT itself costs $222. If you want to apply to law schools with your score, that will be an additional $200. But if you want to actually apply to a particular school—as opposed to having some CAS report floating in the ether?—that will be another $45 per school, not including the specific application fee. And I have a hard time believing that they are pricing at cost, given that their 2021 net assets totaled $270 million.[3] Even with all this cash, there have been widespread reports of terrible remote LSAT experiences after LSAC went from ProctorU to Prometric.[4]
During undergrad, when helping other pre-law students with their LSAT preparation, I always loved how simple the ideal prep plan was. In my experience, Khan Academy paired with Mike Kim’s The LSAT Trainer was an effective combination for many students. The videos covered every basic problem type and were free, with some accompanying practice tests.
LSAC would respond to my criticisms by touting their fee waiver structure, in which independent students earning below 300% of the federal poverty level can receive these services for free, including the LawHub subscription. For that, I commend them. But the fee waiver system still leaves out plenty of people who earn slightly more but are still wary about spending hundreds of dollars for the subscription and accompanying prep courses.
Those of you who know me are aware that I am not a “vive la révolution” type. LSAC’s officials are entitled to fair compensation because they do provide a unique product that undergoes extensive testing. And I believe that such a product is quite helpful to law schools who want to develop the best lawyers possible. But those good results are predicated on wide availability of opportunity. If large swaths of the population are functionally excluded from adequate preparation, then it is not really a test for merit. Further, law schools and lawyers should not allow LSAC to abuse their position and extract money from aspiring law students. This is because LSAC does not actually provide a valuable good in and of itself. It is a service to help us choose the next generation, and its opportunities should be spread as widely as possible.
The larger issue that underlies this entire concern, though, is that we have a profession built around credentialism when it is not necessary. Your LSAT determines what schools you can get into. Then, even if you want to work in mergers and acquisitions, your Torts grade will factor into what firms will hire you. And when you are actually practicing, the luster of your resume will affect how clients see you. This is true even though some have said that a “generally intelligent high-school student [could] pass the bar with a few months of preparation.”[5] Lawyers as influential as Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson did not even attend college before practicing law.
I doubt many people here will appreciate this perspective, since we have largely won the credentialism game. By virtue of having UVA School of Law on our resumes, we send hundreds to the lucrative Big Law firms. But if credentialism abates, there may be a future in which law students don’t have to enter heavy debt to pass a test that many others could prepare for.
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jxu6ad@virginia.edu
[1] Annmarie Levins, Khan Academy LSAT Test Prep Resources Coming to LSAC’s LawHub by June 2024, LSAC (Nov. 1, 2023) https://www.lsac.org/blog/khan-academy-lsat-test-prep-resources-coming-lsacs-lawhub-june-2024.
[2] Karen Sloan, Law School Admission Test to drop 'logic games' questions from exam, Reuters (Oct. 18, 2023) https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/law-school-admission-test-drop-logic-games-questions-exam-2023-10-18/.
[3] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/132998164.
[4] Doug Lederman, Problems With Law School Test Frustrate Thousands, Inside Higher Ed (Aug. 14, 2023) https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/graduate/2023/08/14/proctoring-issues-affect-thousands-taking-lsat.
[5] George Leef, Some Very Contrarian Thoughts on the LSAT, National Review (Oct. 12, 2022) https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/some-very-contrarian-thoughts-on-the-lsat-and-law-school/.