Should I take the LSAT or the GRE for law school?
LSAT vs GRE for law school: the catch nobody mentions
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A large and growing number of ABA-approved law schools accept the GRE in place of the LSAT, including many of the best-known ones. For a certain kind of applicant that is genuinely useful. For most, the choice is less open than it looks.
The catch
Which means this: if you have already taken the LSAT and the school requires CAS, submitting a GRE score instead does not hide the LSAT score. It arrives on the same report. The GRE is an alternative for people who have not taken the LSAT — it is not an eraser for people who have.
That single fact resolves most of the versions of this question people actually ask. "I did badly on the LSAT, should I switch to the GRE" is usually answered by "the school will see the LSAT either way, so the real question is whether to retake it."
When the GRE genuinely makes sense
- You are applying to more than one kind of program — a joint degree, or law alongside a master's or PhD — and one test covers both.
- You have a strong GRE score already, from an application cycle for something else, and you have never sat the LSAT.
- Every school on your list accepts it, and you have confirmed that on each school's own page rather than from an aggregated list.
When the LSAT is the better bet
- Your list is not final. The LSAT is accepted everywhere; the GRE is not, and a school added in December can invalidate a decision made in June.
- Scholarship money matters to you. Merit awards are frequently driven by the score against a school's published LSAT medians, and how a GRE score is weighed against those is far less transparent.
- You are stronger at argument than at arithmetic. The GRE has a quantitative section; the LSAT has no math at all.
They are not the same test
The GRE is broad — vocabulary, quantitative reasoning, an analytical writing section. The LSAT is narrow and deep: argument analysis and dense reading, nothing else. Narrow is harder to coast through and easier to train for, which cuts both ways depending on how much time you have.
Sources
Counsel is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Law School Admission Council. LSAC publishes the authoritative description of the LSAT; where this page and LSAC disagree, LSAC is right.