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"U.S. News and World Report" featured Law Professor Emily Gold Waldman in "10 Key Differences Between the LSAT and GRE"
Since 2016, when the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law announced that it would stop requiring applicants to submit LSAT scores and allow applicants to submit GRE scores instead, 20 other law schools have done the same, including Harvard Law School.
Though the LSAT is still required for admission to most J.D. programs, the willingness of some law schools to embrace the GRE has given applicants to those law schools a choice about which graduate school entrance exam they wish to take.
Emily Gold Waldman, associate dean for faculty development and strategic planning at Pace University's Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, N.Y., says that her school recently decided to accept the GRE both in order to give J.D. applicants more flexibility and to broaden its J.D. applicant pool to include people who might be deterred by an LSAT requirement.
Waldman says that one group of aspiring lawyers her school is hoping to attract with its GRE-friendly policy are those who are currently attending graduate school or those who recently earned a graduate degree. Because these students would typically have a GRE score already, if they can apply to law school using that score without prepping for and paying for the LSAT, that makes the J.D. application process for those students faster, cheaper and easier.
"By saying that we'll accept their GRE scores, we are saving them money, because they don't have to take another test," she says. "We're saving them time, because they don't need to prepare for another test and take off from work to take the test."
Waldman says one pivotal factor that convinced leaders at Pace University to accept the GRE was a study comparing how accurate LSAT and GRE scores were at predicting first-year law school grades, which suggested that both types of tests were reliable indicators of a person's ability to pass demanding first-year J.D. courses. That study was published by the Educational Testing Service, commonly known as ETS, which is the nonprofit organization that designs and administers the GRE.
"We've empirically confirmed that the GRE test is a valid and reliable tool for informing law schools' admissions decisions," David Payne, vice president and COO of global education at ETS, said in a press release about the GRE law school validity study.
However, the results of this study are disputed by the Law School Admissions Council, or LSAC, which is the nonprofit organization that creates the LSAT. On its website, the LSAC states that the GRE was "not designed for law school admission and is not valid or reliable for this purpose."
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