In response to the searing criticism by Brian Tamanaha (Washington U.) of the Law School Admissions Council for not blowing the whistle on law schools that report inflated LSAT and GPA medians to goose their U.S. News ranking: LSAC emailed me this response from President Dan Bernstine:

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) is concerned about recent developments involving the reporting of Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores and undergraduate grade point average (UGPA). We take seriously our role and responsibility to be a positive force in legal education. Recently, some have suggested that LSAC should audit law school reporting of LSAT scores and UGPA. Some schools have asked us to do so.

This statement outlines LSAC’s response to these suggestions and requests. First, this type of auditing would be a complicated task. While it is true that we have LSAT scores and UGPAs for most law school matriculants, we do not have them for all matriculants. Some students at several schools are admitted under special programs for which students do not need to report LSAT scores and may never show up in LSAC records. Another significant problem is that the only information LSAC has about which students matriculate at particular schools comes from the schools themselves. Accordingly, if we provided some sort of auditing statement, it would confirm only that the school’s reported numbers are accurate for the students the school tells us are at the school. We are concerned, first, that this would not be a very useful confirmation and, second, that people might misinterpret it to mean more than it really does. There would be many other, similar issues if we were to begin to provide some sort of audit for law school reports.

Nevertheless, we are interested in supporting our law school members and the reputation of the law school community generally. We are working to determine whether we can set up procedures through which we would be able to confirm school-reported LSAT scores and UGPA in a reliable and responsible way. Unfortunately, this is going to take some time. We have told schools who have asked that we cannot provide confirmation of their numbers in time for this fall’s ABA reporting. We may be able to do so in future, but we will only do so if we can ensure that it can be done in a meaningful way.

Update: National Law Journal, Council Bends on Auditing Law Schools’ Reports About Student Test Scores