If not MCAT, why LSAT?

Last week all the scuttlebutt was about medical schools that are removing the MCAT as an admission requirement. Right here at home, McGill just axed the standardized test as a mandatory part of an application.

I’ve never written the MCAT, but from my understanding, it does, in fact, test things that one would probably need to know for medical school, like biological sciences. I know I like my doctor to know about biological sciences, personally.

So if medical schools are starting to ease up on requirements for a standardized test that appears to at least have some relevance to the future subject matter at hand, why are Canadian law schools so wedded to a standardized test that has nothing to do with the law? All of the English common law schools in the country have it as a mandatory requirement, and while the LSAT isn’t mandatory for the French schools, some do require applicants to disclose their score if the test was written and many use it as a factor in admissions.

Can anyone present a really strong argument for it as a requirement? I do see the value for admissions officers, to be sure. Potential law students come from literally every corner of the undergraduate academic world, and the LSAT is a ready-made, tried-and-tested way of assigning those thousands of people, with their varied backgrounds, a standard by which to judge them against one another.

But the trick comes, as always, with the word “standardized.” The LSAT is not immune to problems that come along with all such tests, like predictive abilities for law school performance that are mediocre and apparent bias against certain ethnic groups.

Yet it’s well-known among law school applicants that many Canadian schools sort their applications into piles by LSAT score and simply axe off those below a certain percentile. How many brilliant future lawyers are lost below that line, who, for one reason or another, simply can’t handle the LSAT?

It seems to me that there’s some room here for a Canadian law school to set itself apart by announcing a new, more holistic approach to admissions by waiving the LSAT requirement and perhaps doing something like having admissions interviews, which no Canadian law school does, instead, on top of using references and personal statements and extra-curriculars and undergraduate performance. If not for a whole entering class, then perhaps schools could set aside a certain portion of first-year seats for applicants that do not require the LSAT, like the University of Michigan law school did in 2008.

Is there anything about the LSAT that makes it sacrosanct?