The GRE Is Taking Over Law Schools

If you have a law firm in Illinois, then you best get ready for a new batch of law students to be released after taking the GRE. Yes, you read that right; four of Illinois law schools are taking the GRE in lieu of the LSAT for admission.

For you that are unaware of what the “GRE” is. It is the alternative to the exam, they are taking to get into law school. However, the buck does not stop there. The GRE is rapidly gaining acceptance throughout the whole country. The full list is as follow.

• Harvard
• Columbia
• St. John’s
• Brooklyn
• Northwestern
• Arizona
• Georgetown
• Hawaii
• Washington University in St. Louis
• Wake Forest
• Cardozo School of Law
• Texas A&M
• BYU
• John Marshall Law School
• Florida State
• Pace
• UCLA Law and the University of Chicago

With a list of such prestigious Law schools climbing aboard, let’s look into the benefits of this test. While the GRE is an alternative test, most schools still require that the law students take the LSAT, but a few do not. According to the Kaplan test pres page, the ones on this list do, along with 190+ other schools.

So what is the point in taking the GRE at all? According to experts, the GRE is a sort of pretest that most schools look at as “preparing” for the LSAT. As we went through school, our teachers gave us a pretest before the real tests.

The test scores of our real tests were always higher if we took the pretest than if we didn’t. So that is a great benefit to the GRE. So the GRE is not the final authority at all. In fact, like the pretests in grade school, this “pretest” is a great way for law professors to deal with areas that the students are not strong. Our guess, this will make for some bright students within the next generation of lawyers. You can’t beat that one with a stick, right?
 

The American Bar Association

According to the “Above the Law” blog, a change as drastic as this has not even gotten the Bar associations full attention as of yet. They haven’t given an approval or a rejection of the GRE. With that being said, according to experts, the test is in the “Beta” stage. As you already know, the Bar Association likes to stick to the proven traditions that make being a lawyer great.

So we do not expect to get a comment about this one any time soon. As most of us will agree, older tradition is oftentimes better than the newer trends coming out these days. There are not a whole lot of exceptions to that rule.

What you can expect from the next generation of Law students

With all the studying that this next batch of law students will be doing, we can expect a better outcome. They won’t have time to do anything else with all these tests they are taking these days. That, my friends, will save on the cost of training by at least 30%

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While there is not a better way to train than “on the job” training, only time will tell as to how this will play out. With the GRE in its infancy, we should see results almost immediately