I’ve written that GRE-related law school admissions remain a small, but rising, cohort of all admissions. But tracking GRE admissions is notoriously hard, as I lay out in these posts—the ABA allows students to be admitted without LSAT scores under a number of scenarios, and (so far) it isn’t disclosing GRE-specific data.

USNWR, however, does collect that data for its rankings. It uses GRE analytical writing, quantitative, and verbal scores in its rankings. It appears it converts those into a composite score, then converts it to the percentile equivalent of the LSAT.

This doesn’t really make any sense for a host of reasons. The GRE doesn’t have a single composite score like the LSAT. While many law schools indicate that GRE scores are predictive of law school performance, it’s not clear all schools treat all GRE scores similarly. And while USNWR does this for, say, the ACT & SAT for colleges, there’s a “concordance table” specifically designed to explore the relationship between the two.

Its methodology, however, reveals that 32 law schools in 2019 reported GRE admissions, up from 16 in 2018. In part-time programs, the number rose from 4 to 10.

Again, it remains a small number of schools (about 15% of schools), and a small number of admissions even at those schools. A few schools have the bulk of GRE admissions. We continue to wait and see whether it will have any impact on law school’s ultimate outcomes, like employment and bar passage. Until then, it remains a factor (albeit probably more flawed than other factors) in USNWR.