SO YESTERDAY, I POSTED ON LAW SCHOOLS’ DECISIONS TO ACCEPT THE GRE AS WELL AS THE LSAT AND ADDED: “I’m pretty sure this is just about getting more warm bodies while finagling the U.S. News rankings.”

But perhaps I was too cynical. A friend and former law dean writes:

A few points on the LSAT and GRE. First, the GRE is much, much easier to take – you could probably sign up tonight and take it within a few days somewhere near your home. The LSAT has just gone from 4 to a whopping 6 administrations per year. That’s much harder to take.

Second, many juniors take the GRE but relatively few take the LSAT (more commonly taken senior year). By targeting juniors with GRE scores at the appropriate level, law schools can reach a large pool of potential students. That’s perhaps its biggest value to schools.

Third, there are a few grad students at many universities who develop a late interest in law. Arizona, the first school to take the GRE, says most of the first group of GRE applicants were people already in PhD programs who decided they wanted to add a law degree. They might have taken the LSAT but why make them spend the time and money to do so?

Fourth, it is not much of a US News move since US News already added GRE scores (scaled to put percentiles at the same level as LSAT ones) into the median LSAT portion of the rankings last year (when AZ was the only school to take it). So the GRE scores “count” for the rankings. The only way it would help a school is if GRE scores were higher than the same person’s LSAT. Color me really, really skeptical about that – they are different tests (starting with math being on the GRE but not the LSAT) but scores are likely to be pretty correlated. We’ll know more when ETS releases its national validation study of the GRE for law schools but I doubt too many high GRE test scores would map onto low LSAT scores (or vice versa).

Well, okay. That makes sense, though this is an area where it’s hard to be too cynical. But maybe not impossible!