The Value of the LSAT

I've always been very anti-standardized testing. Despite the fact that I did well enough on the SAT and LSAT to get into most of my top choice colleges and law schools, I never saw the value in standardized tests. It seemed to be a measure of how well one could memorize vocabulary words or learn stupid tips and tricks taught by Kaplan or the Princeton Review.

The LSAT in particular bothered me coming into law school. I felt that law schools placed too great an emphasis on this 3 hour exam, often rejecting highly qualified students who don't test well. Why do law schools place such a heavy emphasis on the LSAT? Although the party line seems to be the claim that the LSAT is an excellent predictor of law school success (most anecdotal evidence that I have shows that your LSAT score in no way predicts how you will rank within your entering law school class), some say it is all a part of the law school rankings game. GPAs and LSAT scores apparently account for a large percentage of a school's score used to rank law schools in U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings of graduate programs. I have another theory.

Unless you go to school in Washington state, you're probably going to have to take the Multi-State Bar Exam (also known as the MBE) as part of your bar exam. It appears that a good 25% of prepping for the MBE is doing exactly what I believe the SAT and LSAT tests on: ability to memorize stupid tricks. During bar/bri's video lectures, the professor always pauses, breaking from his outline and hypotheticals to announce yet another thing to watch out for on the MBE. "If you see specific performance as an answer, it's probably the wrong answer" or "Watch for terms like . . . "

So there you have it. The value of the LSAT is (quite possibly) a predictor of your ability to play the MBE by memorizing the five hundred tips and tricks that bar/bri will no doubt continue to throw at students prepping for the bar exam.