Law School Admissions Test Prep Course

Adam Johnson is the lead instructor for test preparation workshops at UTSA. Adam has over 20 years of experience teaching standardized test preparation classes.

After teaching for several years for a leading test-preparation company, Adam taught English and test-preparation in Valencia, Spain. He has consistently scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests including perfect scores on the GRE and LSAT.

He's not only an expert on the tests that he teaches, but also a devoted and energetic instructor who can communicate strategies to help others improve their scores.

Lowry: Why the SAT is an inconvenient test

The long era of the dominance of the SAT in college admissions is coming to an end.

The test is increasingly being shelved not because it failed but because it succeeded in all the wrong ways.

According to a survey from an anti-testing outfit, more than 80% of four-year colleges won't require standardized tests for admissions this coming fall. Many have made the tests optional, and some won't consider them at all. In a swath of academia, the pandemic expedient of dropping the tests has seamlessly transitioned to a permanent change.

If this isn't a leap forward for fairness or rationality, it is another ringing victory for the equity of "diversity, equity and inclusion" fame. With homework now on the chopping block for not being equitable enough — kids with involved parents tend to actually do their homework — it shouldn't be a surprise that the SAT is being shown the door.

The SAT, with its signature four-option multiple-choice answers, isn't perfect. As a mass-administered, easy-to-grade, objective test, though, it's hard to beat.

Despite progressive denialism, it has been established that the SAT and ACT predict academic performance.

As the renegade academic Freddie deBoer points out, there is a correlation between family income and SAT scores, but it doesn't account for most of the divergence in scores.

Nonetheless, other metrics that schools consider in the admissions process are just as susceptible, if not more, to socioeconomic factors.

As the writer and scientist Erik Hoel puts it, "On the one side there is the litany of activities, academic successes, and school pedigrees that make up the bulk of a good college application, and the massive amounts of wealth and parental involvement that implies from essentially diapers onwards, and, on the other side, there's a $20 Kaplan SAT prep book and getting your butt in a chair to go through example problems."

MIT, which can't fool around thanks to its demanding math requirements, has bucked the trend toward minimizing or dumping the SAT. The dean of admissions explained in 2022 why the school was bringing back the SAT requirement after the pandemic: "Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics — alongside other factors."

The deeper problem with the SAT, of course, is that it doesn't produce the racial outcomes that many of the people who run institutions of higher education, especially elite ones, want.

The test is a conveyor belt for Asian Americans into top colleges in numbers that college administrators find embarrassing and inconvenient. So, they have an affirmation-action regime designed to keep those numbers down, and fine-tune the racial balance of their student bodies to their liking.

This is where the SAT is unwelcome in another way. As a measure of preparedness with hard numbers attached, it provides incontrovertible evidence of the racial bias against Asian Americans.

With a potential loss in the Supreme Court's big affirmative action case looming, colleges and universities are already finding a way to finagle out of the decision. Without the SAT, they can continue to get the racial results they want without as obvious a paper trail.

In Agatha Christie terms, the crime will no longer be carried out with a candlestick but small, untraceable doses of arsenic.

If it's harder to find the best future students, or at least the best future students who haven't been building their resumes toward an impressive college application from a very young age, so be it.

You can have the twisted notion of equity that now prevails throughout our elite culture, or you can have a test that demonstrates academic talent regardless of race, but you can't have both. Academia is making its choice.

Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief of National Review. 

Colleges and universities moving away from standardized tests in admissions decisions

More than eight out of every 10 colleges and universities that award bachelor’s degrees no longer require or do not consider standardized tests in admissions decisions, according to a national survey released Wednesday.

The latest tally from FairTest, an Arlington, Mass., group that has long been critical of the SAT and ACT standardized tests, comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected later this month to issue what could be a historic ruling on the use of affirmative action in deciding who gets into college.

Many experts say they anticipate the court and its 6-3 conservative majority will rule against the continued use of race in admissions decisions, overturning decades of legal precedent dating to the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, a landmark ruling that allowed the use of race in admissions decisions.

FairTest said 1,783 institutions, or about 78% of the colleges and universities in the United States, have already extended test-optional policies through at least fall 2024 in advance of the pending Supreme Court decision. Critics have said the tests create a disadvantage for several groups, including first-generation and minority students.

“Admissions offices increasingly recognize that test requirements, given their negative disparate impact on Black and Latinx applicants, are race-conscious factors, which can create unfair barriers to access higher education,” said FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder. “They also know that standardized exams are, at best, weak predictors of academic success and largely unrelated to college-ready skills and knowledge.”

If the Supreme Court bars affirmative action in admissions decisions, Feder said, “We expect that very few schools will continue to require the ACT or SAT. And it is likely that many more graduate programs will eliminate requirements for exams such as the GRE, GMAT, LSAT and GMAT.”

FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer said a shift away from test usage, while not a perfect solution, is a workable one.

“Test-optional policies are a proven, race-neutral way to enhance campus diversity while maintaining academic quality,” he said in a release accompanying the survey.

In this region, the University of Pittsburgh and its branches at Greensburg, Johnstown, Bradford and Titusville are test-optional through at least fall 2025. So are Penn State University campuses. Carnegie Mellon University is test-optional through 2024, according to its website.

Others in Western Pennsylvania with optional policies include Duquesne University, according to spokesman Gabriel Welsch. So are a number of State System of Higher Education campuses, as well as many private colleges.

A decades-old trend toward less reliance on standardized tests accelerated with the pandemic, given campus closures that made it difficult to schedule gatherings where studens took the test. It further scrambled what had already become a soft student market for higher education.

In March 2020, FairTest identified 1,075 schools that had ACT- or SAT-optional policies.

In the survey released Wednesday, FairTest said 1,904 colleges and universities had optional policies for fall 2023.

In November, the Supreme Court heard arguments in cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private college, and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest public institution. They were filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions, which asserted both schools were “engaged in unfair, polarizing, and illegal racial discrimination in their admissions policies.”

As of the fall, nine states prohibited public colleges and universities from considering race in admissions decisions: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.

Bill Schackner is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Bill by email at bschackner@triblive.com or via Twitter .