Law schools and their administrators all complain in public about the U.S. News and World Report rankings, but most of them follow them slavishly and even jiggle and re-jiggle their programs in order to move up wherever they can. Now U.S. News has stepped into a hornest nest by revising the weight it attaches to incoming LSAT scores, and the way it measures them.
This year’s edition of the much-maligned yet widely read list, released last week, reflected a change in methods that the magazine says is merely a way to ensure it’s getting accurate data. But one effect of the change is that lower test scores for incoming students now hurt schools’ rankings more than they did before.
For advocates of affirmative action and lawyer diversity, that’s a problem, because blacks score lower, on average, on the Law School Admission Test than do whites. (See table below.) The previous formula used by the magazine allowed schools to admit some students with lower scores without having a significant effect on a university’s ranking. The new method is “a formula for disaster,” says Darrell Jordan, a third-year law student at Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Houston, who last year was the chair of the diversity committee for the ABA’s law-student division.
No one is forcing law schools to sacrifice “diversity” to U.S. News rankings, because no one is forcing to pay any attention to the rankings at all. But then, no one is forcing them to pay attention to high test scores either. The problem is that they want to have their “diversity cake and eat it, too.
“The problem is that they want to have their “diversity cake and eat it, too.”
Doesn’t that comment suppose the importance of the US News ranking, which no one is “forced” to follow.
All schools should publish the lowest GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, SAT score of any admitted student. Think about what that statistics tells the world” “This is the lowest test score of someone that the admission board believes can succeed at our institution.”
If someone is in the lower third of LSAT scores and an admission board believes that the student can achieve, it obviously is not that elite of an institution.
“If someone is in the lower third of LSAT scores and an admission board believes that the student can achieve, it obviously is not that elite of an institution.”
or the LSAT not that elite of a test.
So Actus, are you advocating that schools abandon the use of standardized testing in admissions?
It’s not clear to me why the average score of someone taking the LSAT matters. Most top schools don’t admit “average” students. What matters is whether there is a suffiently large group of blacks who performed above that school’s target LSAT score.
If a law school wants to maintain high LSAT averages then it needs to fight harder to attract the top-performing blacks to its campus.
“So Actus, are you advocating that schools abandon the use of standardized testing in admissions?”
I’m advocating that people abandon the idea that a low scoring LSAT applicant doesn’t belong in an “elite” school.
Actus: If it doesn’t prove a good barometer for future performance and/or achievement, then what good is the test? Why not just advocate scraping it?
“Actus: If it doesn’t prove a good barometer for future performance and/or achievement, then what good is the test? Why not just advocate scraping it?”
Just because it has outliers doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have probitive value at other times, or even most times.
I have no idea what kind of a barometer for future performance it is. Or how we would measure that. Correlate to law school GPA? starting salary? salary 10 years into career? clerkships earned? articles published? Size of jury awards? Guilty / Not guilty verdicts in favor of your side?
actus:
I’m advocating that people abandon the idea that a low scoring LSAT applicant doesn’t belong in an “elite” school.
If the law schools followed your advice here, then everyone would have to adopt your practice of putting quotes around “elite.”
“If the law schools followed your advice here, then everyone would have to adopt your practice of putting quotes around “elite.””
Saying that a low scoring LSAT applicant might belong in an elite school is different than saying that any low scoring LSAT applicant belongs in an elite school.
That’s why its pretty idiotic to publish the lowest score of any admitted student. As it is they publish pretty good ranges, which are much more meaningfull.
Actus,
Instead of just a range, I would like to see the mean, Standard devision, and the range. My guess is that for most “elite” law schools the mean is not anywhere near the middle of the range and that too many students are more than two SD’s below the mean.
LSAC.org has the info you need, based on LSAT as well as college GPA. See the “Official Guide to ABA approved law schools” on the left.
Some of the information on the LSAC site is not nearly complete. They list 186 law schools, but if you search on the possible outcomes for the %Students employed after graduation, you only get 32 schools listed in all of the possible ranges (which do include 0-100%).