http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/harvard_accepts_gre_entrance_exam/
I would be interested in seeing the study. My daughter took both tests and the LSAT is much harder to score highly on the the GRE.
IMO students taking both tests would be a different cohort than students taking just the LSAT.
Call me a cynic, but I think this is a move by HLS to maintain their LSAT medians (and their US News ranking) in the face of a shrunken law school applicant pool, in which the pool of top LSAT scorers has shrunk even more rapidly than the overall applicant pool. This must be especially worrying for HLS because they need to fill an entering class roughly 3 times the size of Yale or Stanford, and schools only a notch below them are competing aggressively for top LSAT scores with large merit awards.
Accepting GRE scores in lieu of the LSAT probably does expand the applicant pool somewhat. But once Harvard does it, it becomes a legitimate move for other schools as well, so any advantage they gain may be temporary. Expanded access is a good thing. But perhaps the greatest benefit is that it begins to break the US News stranglehold on law school admissions, which has just about every law school slavishly devoted to median GPAs and LSAT scores out of fear that their US News ranking will slip if they deviate from a purely numbers-driven admissions formula.
What, expand law school access so that there will be more unemployed new lawyers? (I’m a cynic, too.)
^ I didn’t say expand the size of law schools. And I don’t think many HLS grads are unemployed, at least not for very long.
Agree with @bclintonk, but then I fully expect USNews to rank by LSAT and GRE (just as they use both SAT and ACT for undergrad rankings).
This does expand the pool for HLS and allow them to be more holistic in admissions, though.
If this were the use of GRE in lieu of MCAT for medical school application, I would be less cynical.
This appears to be similar to MBA application years ago when the overall popularity of MBA dropped, top elite MBA programs started to waive/lessen their work experience requirement for those newly college graduates with extremely high GMAT scores.
Bingo! This is no different than the undergrads that go ‘Test Optional’ in that the GRE is not part of the rankings.
Agree with the latter. What matters to HLS is the # of 173’s…HLS needs to accept nearly everyone of them to keep their medians.
But note that HLS just so happened to end up with a 172 median this past year. Coincidence with the new policy? Hmmmmm.