Is the rise of the GRE in law school admissions imminent? Forum

[Seanathon]

Hey guys, it seems as though some people think that the GRE will become more and more relevant in the coming cycles. With the way things look like they may be going, do you think it would be smart for people aiming to apply for the class of 2023 or later to start preparing for both the GRE and the LSAT? It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few cycles.

[dogger]

LSAT is still king I think and will be for a while.

Look at GMAT/GRE for MBA admissions as comparison. In MBA admissions, GMAT is valued more than GRE, so I think LSAT will remain more valuable than LSAT for law school admissions.

[jboog]

LSAT is still king I think and will be for a while.

Look at GMAT/GRE for MBA admissions as comparison. In MBA admissions, GMAT is valued more than GRE, so I think LSAT will remain more valuable than LSAT for law school admissions.

Respectfully, this is not really true about MBA programs anymore. There are a couple schools that explicitly state they prefer the GMAt over the GRE (Berkeley is one, there's one more I can't remember of the top of my head) Pretty much every top school says they are agnostic about one or the other. Harvard explicitly says they are "agnostic" on their website and every other top school has publicly stated something similar. I even spoke to an ADCOM at a top MBA program (think Uchicago/Northwestern/Wharton level) and he told me they don't care. Even said they use the ETS GRE to GMAT conversion that converts all GRE scores to GMAT scores to compare candidates. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule here, and I'd say it's better and more impressive to have a 770 GMAT vs a 338 GRE just because the quant on the GMAT is frankly tougher and the curve is steeper vs GRE, but it's probably only used in tiebreaker situations, especially since now schools report GRE AND GMAT scores. I could be wrong, but I don't know why schools would say they don't care if they really did, there's no incentive to lie here imo.

But comparing this to Law Schools isn't really fair because top MBA programs see the GMAT/GRE score as a "check the box"--or verifying you can score above a certain threshold--far more than Law Schools where numbers are king. I'll be interested to see how it shakes out over the next couple years as someone who is looking at applying to MBA/JD programs.

[BrometheusBob]

LSAT is still king I think and will be for a while.

Look at GMAT/GRE for MBA admissions as comparison. In MBA admissions, GMAT is valued more than GRE, so I think LSAT will remain more valuable than LSAT for law school admissions.

Respectfully, this is not really true about MBA programs anymore. There are a couple schools that explicitly state they prefer the GMAt over the GRE (Berkeley is one, there's one more I can't remember of the top of my head) Pretty much every top school says they are agnostic about one or the other. Harvard explicitly says they are "agnostic" on their website and every other top school has publicly stated something similar. I even spoke to an ADCOM at a top MBA program (think Uchicago/Northwestern/Wharton level) and he told me they don't care. Even said they use the ETS GRE to GMAT conversion that converts all GRE scores to GMAT scores to compare candidates. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule here, and I'd say it's better and more impressive to have a 770 GMAT vs a 338 GRE just because the quant on the GMAT is frankly tougher and the curve is steeper vs GRE, but it's probably only used in tiebreaker situations, especially since now schools report GRE AND GMAT scores. I could be wrong, but I don't know why schools would say they don't care if they really did, there's no incentive to lie here imo.

But comparing this to Law Schools isn't really fair because top MBA programs see the GMAT/GRE score as a "check the box"--or verifying you can score above a certain threshold--far more than Law Schools where numbers are king. I'll be interested to see how it shakes out over the next couple years as someone who is looking at applying to MBA/JD programs.

To be fair, the GMAT and GRE are in my opinion far more similar than the LSAT and GRE. I wouldn't expect people to score remarkably different on the GMAT than their GRE score indicates too many times. Just my opinion as someone who has taken the GRE and taken a practice GMAT test.

I do wish there was more firm information on the value of the LSAT over GRE in admissions. According to ETS' tool my GRE equates to 174 on the LSAT. But I imagine that actually taking the LSAT and scoring 174 would be far more impressive than my GRE score.

[NoBladesNoBows]

In my opinion taking the GRE will be a disadvantage. I took the GRE right at the end of undergrad with no prep and got 6/6 writing, and I think 780 on verbal 760 on math, those might be reversed idk this was over 5 years ago. If it was out of 700 it was 680/660 etc., so long ago I don't remember. After 3 months of intense daily study of LSAT I only got 172 (but that was significantly below PTs, so I truly believe I could have done better, but I know everyone says that).

Point is, GRE just has much less opportunity to display differences at the top of the scale, because it just isn't that difficult of a test compared to the LSAT. This might not matter at T1 and below law schools, but T14s (T13s?) want to see that differentiation at the top of the scale.

[Law 202x]

There are a couple things that make GRE to LSAT a poor refinement. Your GRE is based off of years of study. It's not directly for the GRE but it's the accumulated years of reading, problem solving, inference, and other skills that allow you to one day sit down and take a test and do really well. The LSAT is not such a test. There isn't really anything that most of us experience that prepares us for doing well on the LSAT and so there has to be translation so to speak by which you can compare studying (though indirectly) for the GRE with studying (directly) for the LSAT. In short, that conversion is really only good if you spend substantial time studying for the exact types of questions you will see on the test. And even then I would argue they're not comparable because LSAT test takers by and large are a much more intelligent group than that which takes the GRE. As such, a 95th percentile on your GRE may only be good for a 90th, or even an 80th or even lower on the LSAT, depending on where the distribution actually lies.

To generate a scoring range that I could reasonably predictably score within (which I did), I used formulae which input my race, sex, SAT, IQ, and some other variables I can't remember to derive a sort of confidence interval with which I established to my own satisfaction a high degree of probability that I would score within. The caveat is lower effort implies a chance of scoring even worse, exceptional effort implies scoring possibly even higher. All of my formulas establish a confidence interval of 161-163 which I hit, although my GRE said I should have made a 168. That is strong evidence that I did not prepare myself well and/or that my conjecture relating to the comparison of the testing groups, with the GRE cohort simply being inferior as students, has strong validity.

[Law 202x]

For example, to highlight one of my methods, instead of just doing GRE -> LSAT, my method looks more like this.

Input race/sex. I'm a white male. I can isolate the data regarding how white males perform on the GRE and then with a little math, compute an adjusted percentile rank based off only how white males performed on the GRE. With that information, I can basically do a transformation that mathematically takes the scale of performance among white males on the GRE and then projects it onto the interval of performance on the LSAT. This is a much more refined manner of translating GRE to LSAT that isn't simply just taking one number and algebraically translating it onto the other. If I am correct, this method should produce a value which is lower than that of the original GRE -> LSAT calculation. That by itself gives one value. Other methods generate other values and eventually you will be able to identify what value these values start to hone in on and which ones are extreme.

[Law 202x]

Another one, I simply say f: IQ -> LSAT, if you are familiar with function notation in algebra, and that generates a value. Another I can predict the IQ of LSAT testtakers and or a subset of LSAT testtakers and then create a formula that maps some IQ value onto the interval 120-180 (the LSAT interval).

[nixy]

There are a couple things that make GRE to LSAT a poor refinement. Your GRE is based off of years of study. It's not directly for the GRE but it's the accumulated years of reading, problem solving, inference, and other skills that allow you to one day sit down and take a test and do really well. The LSAT is not such a test.

Why isn’t the lsat a measure of years of reading, problem solving, and inference skills?

Also, on what basis do you say the pool that takes the GRE is less academically qualified than the pool that takes the LSAT (and do you think that pool would change if the LSAT weren’t required)?

[SFSpartan]

I don't think the GRE will become widely adopted as the law school admissions test de jure. Even if that does happen, the shift will likely take a significant period of time. Law is a pretty conservative profession and law schools, by and large, still operate much the same way that they did a century ago. Even where there have been changes (see, i.e. the behavior of most profs in re: cold calls), those changes took place over decades.