The WSJ is outraged:
Applicants to the largest university system in the U.S. will now be judged entirely on how well they can flatter admissions bureaucracies with coached personal statements, as well as high school grade-point averages whose meanings are obscured by grade inflation. ...
The higher education business model was already under pressure before the coronavirus, and the recession may force deep cuts in the UC. The regents’ political move to compromise educational quality against faculty advice does not bode well for the future of a system that for decades was an engine of opportunity.
I must confess that this is not an issue I have followed closely and I'm certainly not prepared to assume it'll either be a disaster or a huge success.
Instead, I'm mostly curious as to whether the anti-standardized testing activists who successfully lobbied the Regents on undergraduate admissions testing will turn their attention to graduate and professional schools. Will the LSAT likewise be thrown out?
ASU has already dropped the LSAT. According to Inside Higher Ed, Oregon "may admit up to 10 percent of an entering class without requiring the LSAT from students in an undergraduate program of its own institution, who scored at or above the 85th percentile on the ACT or SAT and who are ranked in the top 10 percent of their undergraduate class through six semesters of academic work, or achieved a cumulative grade point average of 3.5 or above through six semesters of academic work."
And, of course, the coronavirus wreaked havoc on this Spring's testing.
I last looked at the data over 20 years ago, at which time it seemed to me that the LSAT did a reasonably good job of predicting first year law school grades but not ultimate class standing or bar exam passage. So, on the merits, it's not a hill on which I would be prepared to take a last stand.
Having said that, I can't imagine many law schools volunteering to abandon the LSAT as long as mean LSAT scores factor into US News rankings.
