A press release on the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) website states that DOJ has entered into a consent decree with the Law School Admissions Council (“LSAC”) concerning LSAC’s flagging of the scores of students who get extra time when taking the LSAT, a mandatory law school admissions exam, as an accommodation of a disability. LSAC will now stop flagging such students’ scores and will require LSAC to pay $7.73 million in penalties and damages to students who applied for disability accommodations on the test.

The conventional wisdom among law school applicants holds that the substance of the LSAT — particularly the Analytical Reasoning or logic games section — is not terribly difficult. Rather, completing all of the questions in the time allotted is the greater challenge. Students who can claim a disability exemption that allows them an extra time therefore potentially have a tremendous advantage. Nobody is in favor of denying accommodations to students who truly need them. But there are already widespread reports that some students put forth questionable diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder to secure valuable extra time as a testing accommodation. Flagging the LSAT scores of students who received extra time discouraged law school applicants from making such dubious claims of disability. Now that this disincentive is gone, law schools can expect even more questionable disability claims from law school applicants.

Law school exams also often require students to work efficiently under tight time constraints. Not flagging test scores means that law schools will have less information about which candidates are most likely to succeed on time-pressured exams.