GRE Law Schools on the Rise

By William Vogeler, Esq. on November 20, 2017 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

So where did this wave -- law schools accepting the GRE instead of the LSAT -- come from?

It started last year with James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. The announcement rocked legal educators like sailors on a ship; they were unsteady but also excited about a change in the weather.

When Harvard Law School jumped in this year, the swell quickly picked up. With two more law schools diving in the same week, suddenly everybody wants to ride the GRE wave.

Wake Forest

Wake Forest University School of Law announced it will accept the GRE beginning in the fall of 2018. Dean Suzanne Reynolds said the school wants more students from diverse disciplines.

"As the college of Wake Forest University attracts more and more students with STEM backgrounds and interests, the law school should be prepared ... for an increasingly educationally diverse student body, with students who want to pursue a law degree, perhaps in combination with another graduate degree," she told the Winston-Salem Journal.

The university is reportedly one of the first three law schools -- along with Arizona's Rogers College of Law and Hawaii's Richardson Law School -- in the country to have studied the GRE for law schools. The study showed that GRE scores were predictive of first-year law school grades and students' overall success.

With Texas A&M University School of Law's announcement this week, the tally of law schools accepting the GRE is up to ten.

Texas A&M

Texas A&M said it will accept the GRE beginning next fall. Dean Thomas Mitchell said the law school wants to be more attractive to "highly qualified students who have diverse educational backgrounds and interests, including students from fields such as engineering and science."

The law school is the first in Texas to accept the GRE for admission. But as trends go, it will not likely be the last.

In New York, Columbia University School of Law and then St. John's University School of Law joined the GRE club. According to reports, nearly 150 law schools sided with Arizona's Rogers College of Law when it became the first.

"The floodgates seem to be widening a bit, but there's still uncertainty about what happens next," said Russell Schaffer with Kaplan Test Prep.

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