The announcement that the ABA is considering making the LSAT voluntary has sparked much attention, including on this blog and in a new story in the National Law Journal (subsc. req.). And Michigan figures prominently in the national reporting. Why? One reason is that since 2009 seven law schools have been granted waivers from the mandatory LSAT requirement, and the University of Michigan Law School is one of the seven. (U of M Law School limits the LSAT-free application option to Michigan juniors.) Michigan's assistant dean of admissions, Sarah Zearfoss, told NLJ that while the LSAT might help students get a handle on their admissions chances at various law schools, students often mistakenly view a school's median LSAT score as a far more rigid cutoff than it actually is.
Michigan's Cooley Law School is also deeply involved in the LSAT debate. Associate Dean John Nussbaumer has become an outspoken critic of the LSAT nationally, taking particular issue with the impact of reliance on the LSAT on diversity admissions. He and Christopher Johnson Jr., Associate Professor and Graduate Program Corporate Law and Finance Director at Cooley, analyzed ten years of law school application data and concluded that blacks had a "shutout" rate of 60%, receiving no law school acceptance. Hispanics had a shutout rate of 45%; whites had a shutout rate of 31%.
