Security Concerns Spur New Limits on Repeating the LSAT
New rules unveiled by the Law School Admission Council will restrict people from taking the LSAT more than three times in a year.
June 24, 2019 at 02:52 PM
5 minute read
The maker of the Law School Admission Test this month announced that it's reinstating limits on the number of times people may take the entrance exam, just two years after doing away with its previous limits.
Starting in September, aspiring lawyers may take the LSAT no more than three times in a testing year, which runs from June through May. Additionally, people may not take the exam more than five times during the current testing year and previous five testing years, combined. In all, people may take the LSAT up to seven times total. The new limits are forward-looking and any scores earned prior to the September administration do not count toward the totals.
Until late 2017, the Law School Admission Council limited people from taking the LSAT no more than three times over a two-year period. (Law schools receive each score earned, not just the highest one.) It did away with that rule during an expansion of testing dates. The LSAT used to be administered just four times a year, and will be given nine times this year.
Lily Knezevich, the senior vice president for learning and assessment at the council, said eliminating the limits in 2017 was not intended to spur more people to retake the LSAT. Rather, the council wasn't sure what would happen to the number of people taking the test again once people had more opportunities to retake, so it needed time to gather data. The council has always encouraged people to take the exam after extensive preparation, and only repeat if they truly felt they hadn't done their best, she said.
What the council found in the past year was a tiny fraction of people taking the LSAT again and again for no apparent reason—some who never even applied to a law school. This sparked security concerns, according to Knezevich.
“We want to prevent bad actors from abusing our policy,” she said. “We saw repeaters who were concerning to us—more than we expected—in some tiny minority of cases.”
The council projects that less than 1% of LSAT takers will be affected by the new testing limits. Anyone facing special circumstances around their testing may request special dispensation from the council to exceed the limit, Knezevich added.
Dave Killoran, chief executive officer of PowerScore Test Preparation, said those so-called bad actors are likely people looking to break into the LSAT prep industry or who are trying to scrape information about the exam itself. Banning those individuals would be a better solution than imposing limits of legitimate test takers, he said.
The expansion of the LSAT testing dates comes at a time when the law school-specific exam is under pressure from the GRE, which nearly 40 American Bar Association-accredited law schools now accept in addition to LSAT scores. The GRE is given on a rolling basis throughout the year, and people may take the GRE up to five times during any 12-month period.
Reaction to the new LSAT limits among test prep providers is mixed. Anthony Coloca, director of pre-law programs at Kaplan Test Prep, said the new policy shouldn't hurt anyone except “bad actors” who take the test for reasons other than getting into law school.
“At Kaplan we would never advise students to take the LSAT many times, as it does not reflect well on an application and costs the student each time,” he said.
But others said there are downsides to limiting the number of times people can take the test.
“Unfortunately, these are not good for test-takers,” said Steve Schwartz, an LSAT tutor who also blogs about the test. “Your LSAT score is the biggest factor in determining your financial aid. To impose this kind of limit privileges those who don't need the financial aid and leads others to take on massive loans for law school.”
The new limit will also put more stress on those taking the LSAT for the third time in a year, knowing it's their last shot during the cycle, he said.
Both Schwartz and Killoran said they believe part of the council's motivation for the new limit is to allow it to reuse more LSAT tests with a lower risk that repeaters will encounter the same questions. Schwartz said it cost an estimated $750,000 to develop each LSAT and that it makes sense the council would want to reuse tests now that there will be nine administrations each year.
“[The council] clearly intends to reuse LSATs over time. They already do so now, Killoran said. “If you had students who could take the LSAT repeatedly, then they could possibly see the same test more than once, which would be unfair. That's not something they can allow, and this policy effectively curtails that possibility.”
Knezevich declined to comment on whether the new limits were motivated by a desire to reuse old LSATs, saying the council, “has to be cautious of the people who try to strategize about how to get an unfair advantage on our test.”
Security concerns aside, Killoran said the new policy is unnecessarily restrictive. But the council made the right decision in not making the new limits retroactive, which would have been a “disaster,” for test takers, he said
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