Students looking to apply to law school may no longer need to take the LSAT starting in August.
The American Bar Association recently said accredited law schools can admit 10 percent of an entering class without requiring the LSAT.
The UF Levin College of Law Interim Dean George Dawson wrote in an email that the change will be considered when the faculty meets to evaluate its admissions.
“We will review data from prior years in order to assess the potential impact of such a change on our admissions policies and on our students,” Dawson said. “It’s still too early to predict whether the college might implement this change."
To be considered, a student must apply to a law program at the same institution as their undergraduate program or must be seeking a J.D. degree in combination with a degree of a different discipline, according to the ABA. A student must also have scored at or above the 85th percentile on the ACT or SAT.
Students with the combination of degrees must have scored at or above the 85th percentile on the GRE or GMAT, must be ranked in the top 10 percent of their undergraduate class or have a cumulative GPA of a 3.5 or above throughout six semesters of academic work.
“These requirements should ensure that highly qualified students will be admitted even if they have not taken the LSAT,” Dawson said.
ABA-approved law schools are currently allowed to request the use of other admission tests as alternatives to the LSAT. However, after 15 accredited schools sought this exception, the Standards Review Committee presented the Council with the revised interpretation.
In an ABA report to the House of Delegates, it is stated that in these cases, excusing applicants from submitting LSAT scores relieves those applicants from taking two separate graduate-level admission tests. If passed, Standard 503-3 will provide more guidance for law schools so there is no longer a need to request exceptions.
Incoming Levin College of Law student Elise Holtzman, 23, said because she spent so much time improving her LSAT score, a law school that does not require it would become less attractive to her.
“I don’t know if the LSAT is necessarily the best method of measuring a person’s ability to think logically,” Holtzman said. “But there has to be something.”
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 7/3/2014 under the headline "LSAT possibly waived for 10 percent of law school admits"]
