How U of A Law Faculty Came Up with an LSAT Alternative

The Law School Admission Test – more commonly known as the LSAT – is so well known that it has made a name for itself in popular culture. 

Prospective law students spend months preparing for the test, take it in one sitting over several hours, then agonize until their scores come back several weeks later.

But several studies have found that the LSAT, like other standardized tests, has significant disparities in mean scores by race and ethnicity. A 2019 study using data provided by the company that runs the LSAT confirmed that the average score for Black students who took the LSAT was 142 out of 180; the average score for Asian and White students was 153.

A law-school admissions program created by experts in the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law has emerged as a widely acknowledged new test for determining whether students are ready for law school, without the disparities of the LSAT. 

The program, JD-Next, was licensed by Aspen Publishing, one of the leading legal education publishers in the country, last year. It's now used at 57 of the 196 law schools in the United States, with more law schools joining every few months by applying for approval from the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.

"Fundamentally taking on the landscape of J.D. (Juris Doctor) admissions" has been a longstanding personal goal for Marc L. Miller, dean and Ralph W. Bilby Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law.

"There are some problems in legal education and the profession that have literally been the subject of discussion for my entire life and my entire professional career. Diversity and access to the profession for people who aren't wealthy – both for access to legal services and access to legal education – are very high on that list," said Miller, a scholar of criminal law and environmental law who helped create JD-Next. "The changes on those issues have been very gradual, or sometimes haven't happened at all, and to me, that calls for significant change."

Many of those gradual changes, just like JD-Next, began at the U of A. In 2014, the College of Law established the country's first Bachelor of Arts in Law, which remains a popular course of study to prepare students for law school or other legal-related fields.

And in 2016, the U of A's law school became the first in the U.S. to use the Graduate Record Examinations, or GRE, as an alternative entrance exam to the LSAT. Harvard Law School followed a year later, and the American Bar Association, which accredits U.S. law schools, approved the use of the GRE for all U.S. law schools several years later. Now, more that 115 law schools accept the GRE as an alternative to the LSAT.

During the process to approve the use the GRE, Miller and his colleagues were often asked why they didn't simply create a new admissions test in the first place. It would have been too complex and expensive and it would take too long at the time, Miller said, to create a test that measured up to the stringent standards of validity and reliability that the American Bar Association requires for admissions tests.

But by 2019, Miller and his colleagues had secured more than $1.2 million in grants to do just that. Funders included the AccessLex Institute, an organization that helps students access law school, and the ETS Institute, an affiliate of the organization that develops and administers the GRE and other tests.

Christopher Robertson, the law school's former associate dean for research, served as the founding principal investigator for the grant before joining the faculty at Boston University. Jess Findley, the law school's director for bar and academic success, served as principal investigator. A research team in the College of Education also helped develop the program.

Unlike the LSAT, which students prepare for in expensive commercial courses or on their own over several months and take in one sitting, JD-Next is built around an eight-week course that teaches foundational skills such as basic legal analysis and how to effectively read cases. The course ends with an 80-question exam and an essay – and it is the exam that provides the valid and reliable basis for predicting success in law degree programs, and therefore an independent basis for J.D. admissions.

Much of the JD-Next coursework was nearly ready to go when law school experts began designing the program. Curriculum and lecture videos from the college's bachelor's in law program informed or were used in the JD-Next course materials. 

Over the next several years, thousands of students from law schools across the country enrolled in JD-Next, and their schools agreed to participate in data collection to assess how well the program prepared them for law school – in other words, whether the test was a valid and reliable predictor of their law school performance in accordance with American Bar Association testing standards. 

Analysis of that data, now published in peer-reviewed studies, found that JD-Next was valid and reliable. A separate study found that the JD-Next course improved average GPAs of first-year law students – regardless of their race – by .20 points. A student with a GPA of 3.4, for example, would improve to 3.6.

A study has found that the JD-Next course improved average GPAs of first-year law students – regardless of their race – by .20 points.

With a significant national demand from students for JD-Next, and widespread interest from law schools, college leaders realized that scaling the program and running a high-stakes national admissions exam would require very different expertise, Miller said. The right home turned out to be with Aspen Publishing, a leading legal education publishing company whose materials have been helping students become lawyers for decades. 

The university licensed JD-Next to Aspen last year, making the program widely available to thousands of prospective law students in the U.S.

"JD-Next is perfectly aligned with our mission at Aspen," said Joe Terry, vice president and publisher at Aspen Publishing. "We empower people to achieve educational and professional success by connecting them with trusted, proven content and tools. That's true of our iconic casebooks and study aids, and it is true of JD-Next. Too, our values have always ensured that inclusivity is at the center of all we do. JD-Next is unique. It is very good at opening doors, revealing aptitude, and preparing students for success in law school.  It has been a wonderful first year and we're looking forward to a very bright future."

The team worked with Tech Launch Arizona, the U of A unit dedicated to commercializing university innovations, on the licensing agreement with Aspen.

"JD-Next is an excellent demonstration of how U of A researchers can develop solutions that truly make a difference in the world," said Doug Hockstad, associate vice president of Tech Launch Arizona. "Aspen Publishing saw the potential for impact JD-Next could have, including social impact, and are leveraging their resources and market presence to bring it to the world. They've been a great partner, and we look forward to a long, successful relationship."

The progress made with JD-Next – as well as other milestones, such as launching the first-of-its-kind bachelor's in law program and using the GRE for admissions – exemplify the college's work to upend longstanding barriers to legal education, Miller said.

"We are – and I'm proud that we are – widely perceived as the most innovative law school in the country. But that's a community thing," he said. "Nothing big happens because one person has an idea or speaks out. Large teams are involved in all of these innovations, and this is a community that's been willing to push and make changes."