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Law School Sets Minimum LSAT Score Requirement For Admission

A law school in North Carolina law school is imposing a minimum LSAT score requirement for future applicants.
North Carolina Central University School of Law announced that it will be denying admission to any applicant who scores less than a 142 on the LSAT, the Herald Sun reports. The decision follows the American Bar Association’s crackdown of law schools with eased admission standards.
“We have always utilized a holistic approach to admissions, recognizing that each applicant is so much more than a number,” Phyliss Craig-Taylor, the law school’s dean, tells the ABA Journal. “In light of the communication from the ABA, we are digging into the analytics and examining our admissions process. With new standards and new interpretations being implemented, new strategies and approaches are necessary. We are confident that we are doing all that is required to be achieve student success.”
Heightened Scrutiny from ABA
The ABA has been cracking down on law schools it finds are admitting students who aren’t “capable of satisfactorily completing [a] program of legal education and being admitted to the bar,” according to the Herald Sun.
In January, NCCU School of Law received a public memorandum from the ABA Accreditation Committee stating that the law school was out of compliance with ABA standards. According to The Daily Tar Heel, low test scores and high attrition rates from the law school called for tighter scrutiny from the ABA.
Specifically, according to The Daily Tar Heel, the memorandum cited noncompliance with admissions standards such as high turnover rate of students after their first year, low bar passage rates, and low academic credentials of admitted students.
Changes Following ABA Crackdown
On top of setting a minimum LSAT requirement score, NCCU School of Law has also announced reducing first-year enrollments. However, in their February letter to the ABA, the school also pledged that there “is no set enrollment target for the incoming class of 2018,” so “the quality of the applicant pool will dictate the ultimate number enrolled.”
The average LSAT score for NCCU Law’s most recent class falls in the range of 136 to 142 with first-semester class GPAs ranging from 1.44 to 2.91. According to the Herald Sun, NCCU lets go of any first-year student who doesn’t maintain a minimum 2.0 by the end of the spring semester.