The LSAT Should Not be a Factor in Law School Admissions

1. The LSAT does not test for the skills necessary to be an innovative, successful lawyer.

• No synthesis, writing, or speaking requirement.
• The Test is multiple choice that rewards elimination and guessing as much as comprehension and analysis.
  

• The test is highly structured, a confined environmental anachronistic to the real world
• The test is time limited, rewarding those who read quickly
• Promotes individual work, rather than collaboration

2. The result of LSAT based admissions is a less diverse, less interesting, and less accomplished student body.

• The Test itself is quite learnable, thus assessing thinks like (1) prudence (2) leisure time (3) wealth and (4) planning, rather than critical thinking
• Working within a “confined universe of knowledge” leads to intellectually conservative thinking and the standardization of problem solving.

3. Why the LSAT lives on

• Makes it easy for admissions officers
• It is a huge industry
• The US News Rankings
• It is a stepping stone to being a corporate drone, so the big firms like it
• Prisoner’s Dilemma Among Law Schools
• No one with any power has any incentive to change it.
  • Students are just tourists at their schools, their professors are increasingly academics, not teachers.
  • The schools on top won’t shake the status quo, those underneath have to play the game and hope for crumbs.

-- AdamCarlis - 24 Mar 2008

If your argument is that the LSAT should not be a FACTOR in law school admissions, you should also talk about the other factors that law schools use (grades, essays, recommendations, resume-experiences, pedigrees). Maybe you want to interview someone in admissions and ask them how much WEIGHT they assign to each of these factors.

You should also account somewherefor the fact that LSAT scores successfully predict 1L grades (i.e. within a given university's entering 1L class). That may just be a sign that the 1L curriculum and/or its testing system has a lot of the flaws of the LSAT. But it's worth mentioning that "a given university's entering 1L class" is a good way to control certain variables (although I don't know what they are.) (maybe the classes aren' tdiverse)

If you plan to pursue this paper idea, I'd like to talk to you, because I really can't imagine how it can be written.

-- AndrewGradman - 27 Mar 2008

Like the comment above, there is a study of a strong correlation between the LSAT scores and 1L grades. Yet another study (done by Michigan University, I think. Professor Heller told us about it in class) found that law school grades have no correlation whatsoever to anything (money, partnership, etc.) down the life. You could probably search for them if you are interested. If those are true, you can develope the idea that the skills you need to score high on the LSAT and the skills you need to succeed in law school in terms of grades overlap, but both do not really have any relationship to how good of a lawyer you will be. Just a thought.

-- JayunKoo - 27 Mar 2008

Someone should test 1L grades as a predictor of the quality/duration of your friendships with your law school classmates. (I meant to make a joke at expense of antisocial gunners, but actually it sounds like a worthy theory.)

(thirty minutes later) I was drifting off to sleep and had this awesome idea for a poll you could do. Anonymously, (maybe create a website and hand out the hyperlink on a scrap of paper) ask 2Ls and 3Ls, "On a scale of 0-100 [i.e. 120-180, weighted] how well do you think LSAT scores, in general, predict 1L grades?" Then, ask for their LSAT score and the average grade they got as 1Ls.

Ask the questions in THAT ORDER, and I predict that the LSAT score will be correlated, BOTH with their grades, AND ALSO with "How well they think LSAT scores correlate with grades" -- which is funny, because pretty much everyone has NO EVIDENCE for how LSATs and grades correlate, except for their own grades, plus, if they're as lazy and as vulnerable to urban legends as me, some vague notion that scientists say there is a good correlation. Meaning my theory, if validated, says that people are capable of amazing amounts of self-deception.

I did a google search to figure out the correlation, but when I stopped when I saw this link -- http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3735/is_200601/ai_n17179610/pg_1

-- AndrewGradman - 27 Mar 2008

I appreciate the comments. I am thinking about writing a significantly different paper, but I do want to address one point here. The correlation between LSAT and law school grades seems to be either (1) irrelevant or (2) confirming of the problems with the LSAT.

I think we all could write 1000 words on why the average law school exam fails to accurately measure either our own content knowledge or legal prowess. After my first exam I made a conscious decision to shut down the creative part of my brain and just write an answer. Embarrassingly, my grades on my second and third exams were higher. Being able to predict future exam results, if doing well on exams does not mean one will be a good lawyer, seems to be irrelevant. I imagine the correlation is due to the fact that the two things assess similar qualities (reading quickly, memory, intellectually conservative thinking).

-- AdamCarlis - 28 Mar 2008