Setting standards for the LSAT

A few years ago, when I was in law school, I tutored people on the LSAT. I told them that a 150 would get admission only to a lousy school and that a 140 would almost certainly be rejected everywhere.

Today, by contrast, a 150 will earn a large discount (deceptively called a "scholarship" in scamsters' jargon) from any of several dozen toilets. Forty-nine ABA-accredited law schools—almost one in four—have median LSAT scores of 150 or lower (often much lower). (I have omitted the three law schools in Puerto Rico for linguistic reasons: the low scores there probably reflect the fact that most students had to take the test in a non-native language.) And even a 140 is good enough for admission at many a toilet. At Appalachian and Arizona Summit, the LSAT score at the 25th percentile is 140; at Cooley, it is 138. I hesitate to estimate the floor for admission nowadays: the Univershitty of Texas, regarded as a "first-tier" institution by the standards of You Ass News (but as a fourth-tier institution by my outcome-based standards), has been known to admit people with scores in the upper 120s.

The limp-wristed ABA requires that applicants take the LSAT but doesn't set a minimum score. Unsurprisingly, law schools take full advantage of the hollow requirement by admitting applicants with scores that would make a garbage collector blanch. To understand just how frightfully bad the students at many toilets are, we need to examine the percentiles that correspond to the various LSAT scores. One convenient table is found here:

http://www.alphascore.com/resources/lsat-score-conversion/

Although the table is six years old, its percentiles are close to those of today. Here is an extract:

150: 44.3%
145: 26.1%
140: 13.4%
135: 5.6%

Thus a person scoring 150 outperforms only 44% of the people taking the test in the same administration. Remember that nearly a quarter of the accredited law schools have a median LSAT score of 150 or lower. That means that a quarter or more of the law schools drew most of their students from the bottom half of all people who took the LSAT.

Does that seem appropriate? Is the pool of people who sign up for the LSAT really so strong and distinguished that the great majority should be presumptively admissible, even at law schools far from the bottom?

Consider Cooley's data. At the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of its latest entering class, the LSAT scores were, respectively, 138, 141, and 147. Converted to percentiles according to the table cited above, those scores correspond to 9.6, 15.2, and 33.0. In other words, at least a quarter of the students in Cooley's latest entering class fall in the bottom 10% of all test takers.

How can that be right? Does the bottom 10% of registrants spill over ipso facto with so much lawyerly potential that Cooley, by far the largest law school in the US, can appropriately draw upon it for a quarter or more of its class?

Is there any score on the LSAT that even hints at inadmissibility? Apparently not in the view of the ABA and the scam schools that it enables and defends. The very act of registering for the LSAT must mark a person with such godlike excellence that the score fades into anticlimax.

Well, maybe money-grubbing scamsters like Frank Wu feel that "law school is for everyone", but I don't. Not every Tom, Dick, and Harry is cut out for the legal profession. We lawyers should insist on high standards, not no standards. If (as I believe) the LSAT should be required of everyone, surely there must be some reasonable limit below which a candidate is at least presumptively inadmissible. I'd set the floor at the 80th percentile, which corresponds to a score of 160; but even the 70th percentile (157) or the 60th (154) would be a vast improvement—and would drive dozens of toilet schools out of business immediately. Perhaps each school should be allowed to admit a small percentage of students with lower LSAT scores, just to accommodate the common but unproven claims of brilliant applicants who Don't Do Well on Standardized Tests. But there should be some limit—and a damn sight higher than 120 (the lowest possible score).

I propose a slight reform that is triflingly easy to implement: get rid of the 120–180 scale and report the percentiles instead. Force Cooley to tell the world plainly that at least a quarter of its class scored in the bottom 10% on the LSAT. Make several so-called "first-tier" law schools admit to dipping well below the 60th percentile. Let prospective toileteers see just how horribly low their scores are. Straightforward percentiles in place of arbitrary scaled scores can cast much-needed light on shady admissions practices.