GRE calculator does the math

Listen to this article

With a growing number of law schools accepting the Graduate Record Exam in lieu of the Law School Admissions Test, surely there is an easy way for admissions committees to equate GRE scores with LSAT scores.

According to the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE, there is. The ETS announced recently that it has devised a tool to help schools predict what a GRE-taker would have gotten on the LSAT.

ETS Vice President David Payne said in a news release that the tool, a simple calculator, will help schools better understand and interpret GRE scores “in the context of LSAT” scores to “better inform their admissions decisions.”

He added that the GRE can help institutions achieve their admissions goals because more than a million people, from a broad range of relevant backgrounds, take the test annually.

The GRE Comparison Tool for Law Schools can be found at ets.org/gre/law/comparison and is as user-friendly as it gets. To get a predicted LSAT score, a user inputs the GRE-taker’s Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning scores into the calculator, instantly populating the LSAT prediction.

According to ETS, the predicted scores were calculated using statistical analyses of the test scores of 1,587 admitted law school students from 21 law schools who took both the GRE General Test and the LSAT.

In 2015, the University of Arizona’s law school became the nation’s first, along with Wake Forest and Hawaii, to conduct validation studies in collaboration with the ETS. All three schools found that GRE scores are a valid predictor of law school success.

Cary Cluck, Arizona’s assistant dean for admissions, believes the comparison tool does give admissions personnel more insight into evaluating applicants.

“Our testing of the tool is consistent with our own standards for comparing GRE and LSAT scores, and the results from the tool give us very helpful additional data,” Cluck said. “Business schools have for years relied on a similar GRE comparison tool.”

Neither of South Carolina’s law schools currently accept the GRE. Charleston School of Law dean Andy Abrams said that his school has not considered using the GRE, while Robert Wilcox, dean of the University of South Carolina School of Law, said USC is not willing to risk accreditation by veering from the LSAT.