Lessons From Law School’s GRE Experiment: Harvard Law School Speaks Out

The list of law schools accepting the GRE in lieu of the traditional law school admissions exam, the LSAT, is only growing. As it currently stands, over 20 law schools will accept the GRE in admissions decisions and according to a Kaplan survey, a full 25 percent of law schools have plans in the works to accept the GRE.

The University of Arizona may have been the first law school to decide that the LSAT was optional, but when Harvard Law followed suit, well, that was really a signal to the rest of legal academia that the era of the GRE had begun. Once Harvard decided the LSAT wasn’t strictly necessary to get a J.D., other schools began to pile on.

Now the first crop of law students who got in sans LSAT have made their way to law schools around the country. The question on everyone’s mind is — what are those students like? Since Harvard is the law school that truly got the party started, Karen Sloan of Law.com spoke to the Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Admissions Jessica Soban at Harvard Law to see how it’s going. According to Sloan, the program gets an “enthusiastic thumbs up” from the Harvard admin. Soban noted some interesting characteristics about the admittedly small sample of GRE admissions:

“We had a lot of theories going in about what populations might find this to be an interesting option. What we found was exactly that. Our GRE pool of applicants was more likely to be international, and more likely to have significant work experience. They were more likely to have a graduate degree. They were more likely to have a STEM background, and they were more likely to come from an underrepresented racial group.”

Due to the small sample size, Soban was unwilling to say too much about their GRE population, but she did note that, despite soaring applications this year, GRE applicants had a comparable acceptance rate to those who applied with the LSAT.

It seems as though the GRE has passed its first, all important test.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Lessons From Law School’s GRE Experiment: Harvard Law School Speaks Out curated from Above the Law