I agree with you completely on this. I only play the LSAT game because i have to. I think applications should be measured on the following criteria:
40% GPA (undergrad or GRAD degree)
10% difficulty of program
10% quality of undergrad institution (each school could have their own criteria here)
40% lsat OR 40% work experience, PS, LOR, essay component (separate from PS).
Whereby law schools split their entrance class into an LSAT component (100 people) and a work experience component (100 people) and you can get in either way, with neither the LSAT affecting the work experience entrance class and vice versa.
That way, you can get a mix of all types of people with different strengths. Shrug...might not be perfect but sounds a hell of a lot better than the system they have now.
Matt
There're reasons the LSAT is weighted as heavily as it is, which I'm sure we're probably all aware of. Not only is it the single across the board measure of comparison between applicants, but it also has by far the highest correlation with success in law school. Presumably, success in law school correlates with success as a lawyer. Even if it didn't though, the actual GPA/LSAT formula they use still tells law schools which applicants are likely to do well within their own system, which is what they're after anyway. The weighting percentages aren't just picked out of the blue.
As an aside, I'd be interested to find out exactly how optimized this formula is, though, and what it's optimized for. The fact that they're using it suggests that it's the best one, but who knows? If a school admitted a class exclusively off of LSAT scores, would their 1L grades be higher or lower than those of a regular class? I suspect it would depend heavily on the school and the overall level of applicants. If Yale just took the top 200 scores it received, it would probably wind up with a fair number of extremely bright but not especially great students. A mid-tier school would probably get a better class on the whole though, eliminating a lot of the mediocre LSAT applicants who have relatively high GPA's from unimpressive places.
As for LOR's, PS, etc., the schools seem right in giving very little weight to these, turning them into formalities more than anything. The fact that you can spend several weeks and write a decent 500 word essay, or impress a teacher or two along the way, doesn't really speak to one's ability to do well in law school or as a lawyer. They're more just safeguards to make sure the school doesn't take any real screwups: if someone can't manage to get a single halfway decent LOR, there's probably something wrong with him/her.
Work experience is neither here nor there, I think. If you did a stellar job as a paralegal, logically that should help your app in a big way. But then should people who've spent the past several years doing something completely unrelated to law (say, firefighting) be penalized in comparison?