In a surprising move, the American Bar Association has opened the door for law schools across the country to begin accepting applicants’ scores from Graduate Record Examinations. But whether the GRE will ever achieve anything close to equal footing with the more traditional Law School Admissions Test depends on a number of hard-to-predict factors, according to observers.

The Council of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar in November “voted to permit law schools to accept GRE test scores from applicants in lieu of an LSAT score under Standard 503,” according to the ABA’s summary of the council’s actions.