Law and Education
LSAT as one of the most important requirements for admission to Law School
The LSAT plays an important part of the admission process to law schools in the United States, Canada and other countries. This test measures acquired reading and verbal reasoning skills that can be used by institutions as a key factor in assessing applicants.
As for the test format, it consists of five 35-minute sections of multiple-choice questions. Four of the five sections contribute to the test taker’s score. These sections include one Reading Comprehension section, one Analytical Reasoning section, and two Logical Reasoning sections. The unscored section, commonly referred to as the variable section, typically is used to pretest new test questions or to preequate new test forms. The placement of this section will vary. Identification of the unscored section is not available until you receive your score report. Copies of your writing sample are sent to all law schools to which you apply.
The LSAT is made to evaluate skills that are considered indispensable for a future lawyer. They are: complex texts` reading and comprehension; information`s organization, the ability to draw reasonable inferences from it; critical thinking; the analysis and evaluation of other people`s reasoning.
There are three multiple-choice question types in the LSAT: Reading comprehension questions, Analytical reasoning questions, Logical reasoning questions.
The standards requires every law school to use the LSAT or a comparable test in assessing every applicant for admission. But the standard has been criticized on many grounds. Some are technical and relate to drafting. Others concern its impact, especially as impeding student body diversity and encouraging costly competition on prestige. The standard focuses on student success in law school, rather than success after graduation. It is thus concerned only with the law school as an academic enterprise and implicitly holds schools accountable only for student achievement up to graduation. In this respect it treats a law school much like an undergraduate college. It is not surprising that the ACT and SAT may work as well as the LSAT in assessing capability for academic success in law school.
But a law school is not simply a post-graduate version of an undergraduate college, and cannot be concerned only with student intellectual growth. A law school exists to serve as a path to a job or career, and no law school can remain in business if it is not reasonably successful in helping move its graduates into satisfying jobs and careers.
Contrary to the fears of some, eliminating the standard would not signal an end to concern with academic ability or academic performance. Rather, it would signal that law schools and the law school accreditation system understand the full range of purposes and values underlying modern legal education.
The nature of law school education
The object of legal education and training is the formation of lawyers. The intellectual core of this process is to develop "legal mind". The …
