The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) has undergone significant changes over the past two decades--changes in its composition, administration, and score reporting--that may be affecting its reliability as a predictor of law school performance. In addition, US News has changed its weighting and treatment of LSAT scores, altering the incentives for law schools to prioritize the LSAT scores of applicants, though it is not clear many law schools have altered their admissions practice accordingly (at least not yet).
Derek Muller explores these changes and their implications in a long and highly informative post at Excess of Democracy. It begins:
The LSAT is an important predictor of law school success. It does a very good job of predicting who will perform well in law school. The higher your LSAT score, the higher your law school grades are likely to be. It is not perfectly correlated, but it is well correlated. When combined with your undergraduate grade point average (UGPA)—yes, regardless of your major, grade inflation, school disparities, and all that—it can even further predict law school success.
But the LSAT has changed over the years. As has its weight in the USNWR rankings. Many law school admissions practices, however, look at the LSAT like it's 2005—like the test scores resemble what they did back then, and like the USNWR rankings care about them like they did back then. A lot has changed in a generation.
