Pre-law advisors, the GRE, and U.S. News

Paul Caron (Pepperdine) reports that Wake Forest Law has become the 10th law school to accept the GRE. The law school will continue to accept the LSAT.  

Those ten law schools (in chronological order, from earliest adopter to most recent adopter) are:

• Arizona, 
• Harvard, 
• Northwestern, 
• Georgetown, 
• Hawaii, 
• Washington University, 
• Columbia, 
• St. John's,
• Texas A&M,
• Wake Forest

This shift to accepting the GRE at Wake Forest Law has, apparently, been in the works for over 18 months, and Christine Hurt (BYU) had a nice post on some of the early discussion. Around that time, in February of 2016, Arizona became the first law school to accept the GRE.

Like Christine Hurt, I think this move to including the GRE is probably a good thing, especially if the GRE is shown to be just as predictive as the LSAT. The GRE is offered much more frequently than the LSAT and some pre-law students will have already taken the GRE. Also, I am generally in favor of competition, and the LSAC/LSAT has had a monopoly on law school admissions tests for quite a long time.  

It looks like U.S. News is already converting GRE scores into comparable LSAT scores for ranking purposes. If U.S. News had not acted, this would have been a pretty big loophole for law schools to exploit. 

For pre-law advisors, like me, I think we should definitely let students know of the GRE option at some schools. The GRE may be an especially good option for students who are likely to go to graduate school, but are not yet entirely sure which direction they will go. It also may give students more options if the LSAT's limited testing dates do not work for them. Finally, I don't think the GRE has logic game questions, which some students really struggle with, and therefore students could avoid those questions with the GRE. On the downside, only about 5% of ABA-accredited schools currently accept the GRE. That said, I expect the number of law schools accepting the GRE to rise rapidly over the next few years.