By Karen Sloan

Nov 11 (Reuters) - The American Bar Association has established a path for law schools to admit some or all of their new students without the Law School Admission Test or other “valid and reliable” admissions test.

The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar on Friday voted to create a new variance process by which individual law schools may apply for permission to bypass the existing admission test requirement for up to 100% of their incoming classes for a period of three to five years.

The new variance is the latest development in a longstanding debate over whether the ABA should continue to require law schools to use the LSAT or another standardized test such as the GRE in admissions.

The council in 2022 proposed removing the test requirement from the ABA’s law school standards on the grounds that it constrains law schools from experimenting and that no other accreditor of professional degree programs requires the use of standardized admission tests, even though many professional programs such as medical schools opt to use them.

The proposals' supporters argued it would save applicants the cost of studying for and taking the LSAT and would improve law student diversity, noting persistent racial scores gaps on the exam. A 2019 study found the average score for Black LSAT takers was 142 out of a possible 180, compared with 153 for white and Asian test takers.

The Law School Admission Council, which develops that LSAT, has attributed score gaps to larger racial disparities within the education system and not to bias within the test.

The ABA’s House of Delegates rejected that proposal in early 2023 after many law deans raised concerns that eliminating the test requirement would make admissions offices more dependent on subjective measures such as the prestige of an applicant’s college — which could disadvantage minority applicants. Critics, including LSAT maker the Law School Admission Council, also warned about a dearth of data on how the change would impact schools and student outcomes.

The council then created a working group to determine how to proceed. That group came up with the new variance process as a compromise that would enable schools to experiment in a controlled manner and allow the ABA to gather crucial data, said Nova Southeastern University Law Dean Beto Juárez, chair of the working group.

Schools that obtain a variance would share data with the ABA, which is partnering with AccessLex Institute to analyze the numbers to look at issues such as whether applicants increase and whether the demographics of those applying and enrolling change, and how students admitted without a test score fare on the bar exam, Juárez told the council.

The Law School Admission Council said it supports law schools “being able to experiment in a responsible way to expand access” to legal education, in a Monday statement.

The current ABA standards allow schools to admit up to 10% of their classes without a standardized test score, and a handful of law schools already have small-scale admissions programs that bypass the rule. But the new variance process would be significantly larger in scale.

The new variance does not require House of Delegates approval because it is not part of the law school accreditation standards.

Read More:

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ABA votes to end law schools' LSAT requirement, but not until 2025

(Reporting by Karen Sloan)

((Karen.Sloan@thomsonreuters.com;))