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Dear JY,
I love your website. The explanations for the logical games are carefully thought out and well presented. I wished I knew about your website before I spent $3000 on testprep material from Kaplan and Powerscore. Sage7 appears to have a far superior lesson plan for the LSAT.
So far, I have completed about 100 games and I plan on doing all 340 games. However, I am struggling with sufficiency/ necessary and formal logical concepts. Does the either the LSAT Ultimate or Premium cover these concepts in greater detail than what I can find in my Power Score books?
As an older research scientist (and patent analyst) with several graduate degrees and significant experience in academia, I find the process of law school admissions quite myopic and certainly not holistic; despite what some adcoms might say publicly. Lawyers I know say the process is flawed: “Just get the best scores possible and get into the most reputable (based on rankings) school possible; UT Austin law top 50% makes it much easier to get a job than a top 5% at Texas A&M.”
In your opinion, how heavily weighted is the LSAT score above anything else in your application?
After applying to several schools in 2010, I got the impression there is a minimal threshold of either an Index or LSAT score before they will review an application. I would predict they triage applications based on LSAT scores (e.g. 170s vs 160s vs 150s vs 140s stacks) until they fill up their class. In 2010, I was accepted at two private schools ranked about 80th and 120th with a 154 and about a 3.20 total GPA. However, I wasn't offered any financial aid. So, I decided not to attend because of the debt and the difficulty in finding a job from those schools.
Since then, I have worked for a patent litigation firm as a scientific adviser and passed the patent bar exam.
My goal is to get my LSAT score between the 25%-75% admissions profile of all my target schools (ranked 20-100) and then just let my applications fly.
Given the expense of law school, how associates are hired (based on class rank and perceived school reputation) and that only a few big firms which do IP work in the life sciences, I am only going to aim for law schools ranked between 20-100 (mostly 20-50). Otherwise, it might not be a prudent investment to attend a lesser ranked school (or at least until I can obtain the right LSAT score to get in the right school with financial aid). I predict I will need about a 160-165 before my application would be considered or even possibly read by these schools. In my opinion, a tier 3 or 4 school is not worth the 100-150 K in debt and the lack of job prospects.
Recently, I contacted a highly regarded admissions consultant and got into a rather contentious discussion about the relevance of the LSAT in the admissions process. Further, we talked how rankings influence a student's ability to get a job after graduation. In my opinion, this over-emphasis on LSAT scores seems rather silly and doctoral programs never place so much weight on one's GRE scores. She kept arguing that the LSAT is a good indicator of first year grades. As I laughed, I told her that's manure and certainly not worth $250 per hour.
I pointed out that the correlation coefficient between LSAT scores and first year grades is roughly 0.36 median with a margin of error between .12 to .56. The correlation coefficient between LSAT scores and the bar passage rate is even lower. Law school grades and bar passage rates seem to be more strongly correlated. As a scientist who has performed correlation analysis on medical data, any statistician will tell you that a correlation less than 0.40 is rather meaningless and that there is no relationship between the two events. Plus, the margin of error is rather large. The distinctions adcoms (and students) try to make about subtle scores differences is just flawed based on the LSAC statistics.
So why do administrative legal professionals make these conclusions about LSAT scores, law schools grades, rankings, and bar passage rates?
Are they just trying to protect their jobs and voice their support for the standardized test industry?
Don't they understand the LSAT is teachable with practice and favors rich students with a lot of money to pay for tutors and LSAT prep classes?
My boss, a partner, remarked to me about this: "the most qualitative profession chooses the most quantitative approach for admissions into the profession."
References:
http://www.lsac.org/jd/lsat/your-score/law-school-performance
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/09/law-school-gpa-.html
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-interpret-a-correlation-coefficient-r.html
(see the last section on interpreting coefficients)
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82 comments
I'm all for racial equality, I just think it is ridiculous that people would conduct research to prove that the LSAT is discriminatory based on race. I definitely believed the whole process of the LSAT is discriminatory based on economical status
I posted some earlier. But I can always dig up some more. I'm on my phone at the moment but if I get a chance later tonight I'll see what I can find.
Would you be willing to share this research? I have done some googling around and have not found anything that says the test is racially discriminatory -- only that asian/white people score higher.
Oh. He went there.
hard work pays off
@markariangeorge725 if 10 bucks for a preptest or $25 for a "10 actual lsat preptest" book is not accessible for people who want to go to law school then imagine being tens of thousands of dollars in debt (or maybe more) in debt after law school.
@markariangeorge725 I agree with a lot of what you say. More PTs should be free, and materials surrounding the fundamentals should be cheaply accessible (hence my continued support of 7Sage). People who create supplemental materials or who have expertise should obviously still be paid for their time and effort (meaning the system can never be truly equal for all as long as the test is learnable), but the baseline levels of available materials should definitely be higher than they currently are. The URM thing is also pretty unequivocally true (another example I like to bring up is non-Chinese/Japanese/Korean Asians). All of that is uncontroversial for me and really shouldn't be controversial at all.
My main target is the folks who use all that to suggest that LSAT should be heavily de-emphasized in favor of other soft factors like uGPA, volunteer experience, etc. when nobody ever examines the merit of those other factors. For example, uGPA seems to be the rallying point for everyone who thinks they're smart because they did well in college but can't score well on the LSAT, but if your complaint is that LSAT's predictive value is bad, uGPA's is abysmal. You can't criticize the LSAT for not being a good predictor, and then turn around and use other factors that are even worse predictors just because they make you feel better about yourself.
@2543.hopkins no they don't. Only Mexican and Puerto Rican Latinos. All others don't.
Problems with history: If you make the struggle more important, than the accomplishments take a back seat, and if you make the accomplishments more important, then it undermines the struggle
They do ... @974 am I right?
@wraith985-4026 the thing is that the LSAT can be made for accessible and affordable in very easy ways were as rebuilding the higher education establishment is much harder. Why is it that those that go through the super intense means testing for a free LSAT are only give 2 free preptest? 2! Is that really suppose to be enough? Come on. Preptest should be free or atleast a lot more should be given to those that pass a the exteme means test but LSAT would rather focus on profiting than evening the playing field. These are the practices I hope critiquing the system will change. And inspire others to bring out transformative programs like 7sage. I'm honestly not in favor of throwing out the lsat and am not even sure it should be given less wait but I don't think that someone who critiques the inherent unequal playing field it produces should be attacked.
Furthermore, URM status is truly out of touch with reality. How do Central Americans not receive URM status when they are also very oppressed? But you touched on some of the other ways it also is a blunt tool for a delicate task.
@wraith985-4026 dayumm... you're my hero
Dave I'm actually already working on one, carved in butter (because keto). Will that be adequate to honor your eminence?
+1000
Geesh! Thanks for the pick-me-up, Mike! :)
But, I think if I get a 170+, I will make a statue bust of my likeness as well and send it along with my applications.
Pacifico, your use of the term discrimination in this context is expansive and poorly applied. Technically, Law Schools and the LSAT discriminates on the basis of merit. Discrimination is only negative when irrelevant factors like race, gender, and social status, gets in the way of this evaluation but the fact that multiple circumstances and conditions are tied to these things which may or may not give you a boost is out of the scope of the LSAT exam. There are many circumstances aside from the big 3 mentioned above which can incidentally and unfairly give you an advantage over other people and the LSAT does its best to control for the most prominent but of course it can't be absolutely perfect. Nor is it unrealistic or next to impossible to allay these obstacles tbh because come on, there are far worse and more difficult things in life to deal with than to set some time and money aside to study for the LSAT exam. You're setting this up as if having adequate mental faculties is sufficient to doing well on the exam and the fact that this is not always the case for people is a clear indication of some form of discrimination but the fact of the matter is the LSAT like every standardized exam distributes its scoring system around how well you do relative to others so clearly, even if your threshold of some utopian idealized non-discrimination is met, the bar would only be set even higher so that, for example, a 160 would come to be equivalent to a 150, etc.
Isn't this just the case with everything in life? If you have more time to prepare for something then you're more likely to do better than others but is that plain and simple discrimination?
As for the inherently discriminatory system that the LSAT is rooted in - yes, 100%, no question. But that's already being corrected for with URMs getting a substantial break on their LSAT requirements and an automatic (and usually significant) 'soft' on their oh-so-holistically-reviewed applications that are definitely not subject to racial quotas (thanks, Grutter v Bollinger).
Is that a hamfisted and imprecise solution? Absolutely! It needs to be socioeconomic status, not just race, and that's only scratching the surface of fixing the problem. Do we need to fix it? Yes, absolutely! No quibbles from me there either. But given that all of those advantages talked about stem not from the test itself but rather from the society in which we all live in, it seems to me that a discussion of what has predictive value for a law school application is largely independent of a discussion about those systemic issues, because no factor currently escapes those influences. So even if you were to heavily weight uGPA, well, rich kids have tutors for that too. Internships? Rich kids have connections to secure them and the luxury of taking unpaid internships. Rec letters? Again, connections. And so forth. Absent a realistic way of fixing that system's foundations in the short term, I feel like the task should be to first figure out what provides the predictive value we're seeking, and then second to adjust the levels of those things for the various groups of folks it needs adjusting for.
Gonna play some devil's advocate here (i.e. purposely over-the-top semi-hostile tone incoming):
For those of you who advocate for a heavier weight on uGPA: I can theoretically buy that uGPA can be a measure of how hard you try at school to some extent, but
(1) I know from personal experience that you can have a reasonably high uGPA and be a complete academic deadbeat. I graduated with double majors, including departmental honors in my management science degree (the BS-granting version of econ - like, with forecasting and STATA and stuff). From my academic record, you'd think I was a star. And yet, I think my uGPA ended up being higher than the number of class sessions per class I would usually attend each quarter, and I was far from the only one like this in my friend circle. I was literally the worst student I've ever known, and I'm not proud of that. And yet, my uGPA was perfectly fine.
and
(2) it seems to me like everyone just accepts that since the current LSAT/GPA system isn't perfect, that some sort of more-holistic process that more heavily weights uGPA, work experience, and so forth is therefore guaranteed to be better.
Is it? Don't we need some reference points to compare if we're going to be slagging the LSAT? Does anyone know the correlation coefficient between uGPA and 1st year grades? uGPA and bar pass? Prior work experience and 1st year grades/bar pass? Volunteer experience and 1st year grades/bar pass?
EDIT: Per LSAC: Correlations between LSAT scores and first-year law school grades ranged from .12 to .56 (median is .36). The correlations between UGPA and first-year law grades ranged from .09 to .45 (median is .28). However, correlations between LSAT scores combined with undergraduate grade-point averages and first-year law school grades ranged from .30 to .62 (median is .48).
Sure, the LSAT isn't perfect. I don't think anyone claimed it was. The question I have is - what evidence is there that introducing those other factors makes things better instead of worse (or equivalent)? The LSAT might not achieve a statistically significant predictive value, but do any of those other things? In fact, it appears that uGPA on its own is substantially worse, and combining uGPA with LSAT (as schools currently do) is by far the best, and none of them even hits a median of 0.50. Even at best it's statistically insignificant, but if you think the LSAT alone is bad then uGPA is comical in comparison.
Given that, if we don't want LSAT in there, aren't we all just talking about what we subjectively 'feel' should be valued? And if we're going down that road, as an adcom, why should I care if you have a 4.0 in biochemistry if you can't parse anything but the most basic of English sentences? Why should I care if you are the president of your fraternity and demonstrated leadership skills up the wazoo if you don't know the most common forms of busted logic from a hole in the ground? 10 years of paralegal experience, but you can't summarize the main point of a 60-line passage for me? And if you're so adaptable and quick to learn, then why can't you prove it by adapting real quick and murdering the LSAT? Isn't this why we turn to statistics and other things to begin with? To prevent us from relying on the answers to questions like this with no good way to adequately capture the spectrum of response necessary to adequately answer?
In other words, are you advocating for a heavier weight on uGPA because you actually have stats to prove its superior predictive power versus the LSAT (or in conjunction with it), or are you doing it because it's another accomplishment you can point to in order to 'prove' that you deserve a seat even while the LSAT is busy kicking you in the head?
Having done some cursory thought on this just now, it also seems to me that this correlation coefficient is actually an awful way to measure the LSAT's value, because the way the system works you're sorted by your LSAT score and uGPA into a school that is literally full of your academic clones. Within that narrow band of aptitude, and with different professors/classes and other confounding variables factored in, of course there's going to be tons of variance.
The real question shouldn't be within any particular school, but rather across schools. If a 170 gets you into NYU, and a 160 gets you into Brooklyn Law, would THAT correlate to a performance gap if those students were given equivalent circumstances (taking the same classes with the same profs, same exams, etc), holding all else equal? My bet is yes, and I don't think it would be close in the aggregate. Of course, there's no realistic way to test this.
And this is what you get when I'm grumpy that I can't sleep.
My problem with the people arguing against the social-economic barriers placed against the LSAT are the name problems I have with the classic "pull your self up by the boot straps" conservatives. People, who have never been poor, passed hunger, not had a home, go out and tell poor people, often of color, that it is all up them to make something of themselves. They say that "hard work pays of" and "if you try, you can be whatever you want" but when they do they keep hitting walls they need to climb over by a very thin rope. And these people telling them to work hard are the same ones building the walls so that they can't get over. Many of these people were once poor too or otherwise disadvantaged and come with the attitude of, "If I did it why can't you? Loser."
Look, the inherently discriminatory nature of the Law School does not begin as test material for the LSAT. It begins at birth. It is a standardized test for gods sake. People who have attended good school, more often than not those that are rich (and more often than not those that are white), are taught how to perform better on standardize test since a young age. I didn't know what the SAT was until I was in community college. No teacher ever talked to me about it. Why would they? No body in my class was thinking about college anyway. The skills to succeed on the LSAT begin far before materials need to be bought. But if we are going to talk about materials, the freaking Preptests alone can cost you $300+ and taking the test? It's a f'ing privileged to be able to afford taking the test 3 times at $200 each for people needing to put food on the table. The truth is, most people considering taking the LSAT are already in a privileged position with a BA and homelessness and hunger are not as big of a deal as with the rest of the population but they still exist. And even getting to that place, for many people, is often a struggle met by SO many challenges that it is completely unfair to say that "it does not favor the rich."
It does. Most things with this country do, but the law school process even more. To say it doesn't is to lie. Yes, to say that this can't be overcome is also to lie but lets be real and put things in perspective. I agree with @974, we should use our energy to critique the inherently discriminatory systems in an effort to change them instead of attacking those who do the critiquing. No need to jump on the OP's comments about the process if they are true. They are true. I don't take from his comment on the system favoring the rich that those aren't rich shouldn't try, they should just be damn sure that it is going to be a lot harder. It is a lesson I've had to learn and the advice I give the high school kids I mentor. The American Crony-Capitalist Oligarchy is built on inherently racist, classist, and colonialist believes and the law school process does a lot to support this concentration of power and not just limits the access of many people to a legal education, it leads to the inaccessibility of many to people to have quality legal representation. Those at the bottom must work hard to break this barriers. Admitting to this is the first step in helping to break them down for others. Saying it is all about "hard work" is the opposite.
EDIT: Accidental half-finished post was here. Full post below (read if you dare).
@mike253 that video tells me there are a lot of aspects of my existence that I take for granted. Thank you for sharing.
I am glad someone understands the mathematical point that I am making. The main reason adcoms and test administrators give to justify the weight of LSAT scores in admissions is this correlation study by the LSAC. Some experts even try to make a correlation between LSAT scores and bar passage rates. Do law school administrators actually try to understand the details of these studies or do they merely accept the conclusions to justify their decisions?
Maybe the real reason behind this false narrative is that they don't want to say: "We weight LSAT scores significantly because we are overly concerned about our rankings in the US News and World Report (USNWR)." If the process was truly holistic w/o consideration of rankings, I would contend LSAT scores would carry considerably less weight. This fascination with rankings is beyond me; It actually says something about the quality of education one receives and the quality of the law graduate from that school? It seems to me that how well a student does in their classes and the background of their instructors has a lot more to say about the qualifications of a law school graduate, not what the USNWR has to say. We all know who is going to be ranked in the top 50 or that Yale is a better school than Arizona Summit Law School. Do we really need a poll to tell us this? Also, some schools might have a great area of expertise, like IP, that is less regarded in the overall rankings but does this indicate that a graduate from the lesser school is going to be less qualified as a patent attorney than a graduate from a higher ranked school. For example, a top 15% candidate from the University of Houston (a highly regarded IP program) vs a top 50% candidate from UT Austin? Who is more qualified? There are many partners who would only interview the UT Austin graduate for an associate position. Does anyone see the silliness of the rankings?
Of note, before the rankings in the 70s and 80s, many schools didn't require LSAT scores. My boss graduated from Case Western Law School at the top of his class and he wasn't required to take the LSAT. Another partner I know graduated from UT Austin in the 70s and he wasn't required to submit LSAT scores. The significance weight of LSAT scores coincidences with the evolution of the USNWR rankings. Hmm; sounds more holistic then?
My wife watches Scandal -- I follow LSAT threads --
At this point, I’m a bit lost as to what exactly the arguments and counterarguments are -- it seems like friends are arguing with one another, but also sharing the same opinion -- some of it is funny, some of it seems angry -- I don’t know what to think!
A couple of the themes are admittedly getting a bit old, but I’m still looking forward to what happens next.
BTW -- here’s a random video I thought you all might enjoy -- melodramatic for sure, but interesting (in relation to this discussion) nonetheless --
I think @wraith985-4026 does make a good observation that the LSAC's own statistics show a flimsy relationship between LSAT success and law school grades. If you read the website, you might also find it amusing that they actually claim a .36 to .48 median depending on how the numbers were crunched is a "strong predictor" of how well you'll do in law school based on your LSAT score (with 1.00 being a perfect, valid relationship). What it really boils down to, IMHO, is the LSAT is an efficient means for a bureaucracy (i.e. an admissions department) to quickly weed out a significant amount of people they don't have seats for.
For example, the school I intend to apply to uses a specific mathematical formula evaluating the LSAT and undergraduate GPA, with 92% on this formula being considered as minimum for admissions. No letters of recommendation are required, and personal statements have more to do with scholarships than being admitted. Does this 92% consider my life experiences and other, as the LSAC would describe, "unmeasurable factors" that might still make me an excellent JD candidate if I got 91%? No. All I can do is to roll with it and played the hand I was dealt. I will work to achieve the prerequisite 92% my school wants.
I'm not outright dismissing the LSAT as having some use in evaluating the skills used in law school, but I think we also need to recognize that admissions into law school is an unavoidably impersonal process, which is why the LSAT is a major factor in our admissions. What makes it worst, as many have already pointed out in this discussion, is that certain things (i.e. having money) can make the process easier for some people. So yes, it's good many of us recognized financial inequities do matter - it's not insurmountable, but it does matter. Preparing for the LSAT will demand more sacrifices from some people over others.
The financial barrier is certainly made worst by the fact that standardized test prep is a major business charging serious money. Because, again, let's face it, how many of us would do well on the LSAT without spending some money in order to be a competitive candidate?
7Sage is an oddity in this business that I am thankful for due to its affordability, and I do believe them when they say that part of their business model is to "liberate legal education" (free YouTube videos, partnership with Pre Pro Bono).
Anyway, I ended up rambling on longer than I would like. Back to my studying.
"If you dream big enough, anything can come true. Just kidding. Get back to work."
It's that the LSAT reinforces the inequities in the system, which makes both entities discriminatory. It is taking part in institutionalized discrimination whether they intended to or not is beside the point.