History of the LSAT

This is part I in a series on the History of the LSAT. The purpose of the series is to introduce the LSAT student to the foundational concepts of the exam in order to help them understand its purpose and in so doing master the test.

Standarized Testing and Law School

Beginning in the 1920’s, George D. Stoddard and Merton L. Ferson developed the first standardized test for admission to law school. In 1930, Yale created its own test as well. Both tests were designed to supplement several criteria in evaluating a candidates fitness for law school. The test would be used in addition to looking at a student’s academic record to determine the student’s aptitude for the legal profession.

These fathers of law school testing sought to create a test that when put along side the student’s desire to work in the legal profession and their ability to work as demonstrated by their academic record would be highly predictive of their competence in the legal profession.

These early law school standardized tests focused on exercises of synonyms and antonyms, verbal analogies, reading comprehension and recall.

These tests were not substantially different than the normal aptitude tests created by the Army to judge recruits prior to WWI.

Transitions:

In 1945, Frank Bowles, admissions director of the Columbia Law School contacted the president of the College Entrance Examination Board, John Stalnaker, suggesting the development of a new  and more developed standardized test to judge the fitness of law school candidates.

Bowles initial hopes for the LSAT were that it would

  • have a high predictive value of one’s capacity for law school
  • be highly reliable
  • be easy to interpret
  • have a low cost
  • be related to the legal field
  • be no more than 1-1.5 hours in length

In 1947 representatives from Columbia met with the testing organization. At that meeting was Columbia professor Willis Reese, who was the main professorial oversight of the original LSAT. The meeting sought to involve Harvard and Yale along with Columbia in the creation of the test, which they hoped would correlate strongly with the results of student grades in the first year of law school. This new test would cover

  • reading
  • analogies
  • syllogistic reasoning
  • & practical judgment

Shortly after the meeting, the group began contacting universities with law schools from around the country to help share in the financial cost of creating the first version of the LSAT.

A big win for the creation of the LSAT came when Harvard acknowledged its need for the LSAT. Because of the influx of war veterans who were applying to Harvard Law from schools all over the country, from which Harvard had no historical data, this new type of evaluative test couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

Thus at the foundation of the LSAT was the idea that the test could evaluate candidates on a standardized measure that would be common across test takers and not on variable measures like GPA or undergraduate studies which was not consistent nor even across candidates.

At the same time the LSAT was not intended to be the only metric used in judging fitness for law school. It was, like its predecessors, meant to be used in conjunction with other measures like GPA, extra curricular activities and references.

Source: William LaPiana, Professor,  New York Law School, at the LSAC Annual Meeting in 1998.