LSATs and Letter Grades: Telling, or Useless?

Tory Blue
Oct 9, 2008 7:55 AM CST

I did not prepare at all for LSAT and had gone out partying the night before exam and still felt a little drunk when I took them (certainly had too much fun in college!)... scored in 97th percentile.  Guys sitting next to me had spent hundreds on LSAT review courses and swotting for months over the whole thing (and even tried to make me feel worried that I hadn’t prepared!)... I didn’t see their names on the list of grads accepted at Ivy League schools.  These tests are a joke, but what a huge money-spinner for the Testing Services and Preparation Courses! If you’re a good test taker and paper writer, you can get decent scores on standardized tests and get through an undergraduate degree program with ease, which proves that they do not provide much insight into the scholarly ability, character or innate quality of potential law students. Even later in my legal career, all these twenty-somethings worried about their pensions and health plans only to go on to a life-long career of the most tedious and mundane legal practice.  Hate to say it, but it’s all about fear that keeps people worried and in reign—first as students squandering their youth worried about grades, test scores, and meaningless college nonsense—and then later about ridiculous jobs and self-important careers.  The institutions eliminating the petty distinctions of grades have finally caught on to the notion that genuine quality should be cultivated in scholars and not merely quantified by having students jumping like trained dogs through a series of hoops.  The terminally insecure who have a NEED to compete and be evaluated will no doubt disagree with me.

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JME
Oct 10, 2008 4:07 AM CST

Wouldn’t know.  I did okay on my LSAT, not as high as I wanted, but certainly in the top 25% of what the law school I wanted was accepting.  My undergrad grades were fine.  I stumbled in law school, barely making it the first year, but after many years away from school, I had to regain study skills (they are different for school vs work).  Each semester was better than the semester before, I wouldn’t have known that without grading.  When I look for an intern or associate, though, I don’t look at grades, I look at externals.  Fact is, if they are passing, they are probably competent.  I want to know what else they do besides school.  I have chosen to hire only those who have been members of one or both of two specific organizations while in school, and I don’t announce those.

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Rogelio Lasso
Oct 10, 2008 4:31 AM CST

Even LSAC, the organization that prepares and administers the LSAT admits that it is a relatively poor predictor of the only thing it seeks to predict: performance in the first year of law school.  Although law schools know the LSAT is not particularly effective, they are unlikley to abandon it as long as U.S. News rankings are heavily influenced by the LSAT scores of incoming students.  The alternative would be to review each law school application individually but with schools receiving as many as 10 applications for each position, that would require a tremendous time investment on the part of admissions committees and that is also unlikely to happen.  The result is that the overwhelming number of law school applicants are admitted based almost exclusively on their LSAT scores so committees read a very small number of “grey” files. 
And then, there is the preposterous grading on a curve requirement instituted in most if not all law schools.  This is pedagogically absured and it is done primarily to rank students to make it easier for employers.  With law schools being so unprincipled, is it any wonder law students and lawyers are so cynical.

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Ellen Barshevsky
Oct 10, 2008 4:57 AM CST

I think grades are GOOD and that LSAT scores are good also.

When you work hard, you can get good grades, and I think this apply to LSAT.

I never studied for the LSAT, and didn’t do to badly.  I did NOT think I was smart enough for Harvard or Stamford, but my boyfriend was here, and I figured I better stay closeby.

It was GOOD.  You have to go to school where you want to work.  I also wanted to stay alot closer to my family.  They are here too.

So if you want to get a good job, work hard in school, and ask for GRADES.  This way, you will NOT be lumped together with all the dumies out there with pass/fail.

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JME
Oct 10, 2008 5:08 AM CST

There is no reason why, in reference to #6 above, that the professors can’t continue grading as they have always done, and the grades then converted by the registrar to pass/fail before posting.  since grading is anonymous (at least at my school) it won’t affect anything.  As for Ellen,  if you wrote like you write in these comments, you wouldn’t have made it past the first year in ANY law school.  Learn to spell, girl!  So did you stay near Harvard or near STAMFORD? or are you really a law student or attorney, or just a poser?

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2L
Oct 10, 2008 5:35 AM CST

I couldn’t agree more with JD.  I have plenty of friends who are, as one of my old bosses would say, “test bunnies,” and I am not.  For both the LSAT and even back to the SATs, despite being in the top fifth of my class or higher, I would score in the 60th percentile on the standardized tests.  Granted, not horrible and got me into decent schools (coupled with my grades), but not what I knew I was capable of in another context.

In terms of the grades in law school, the one test one grade policy normally implemented is problematic.  I did reasonably well my first semester, but my second semester I got sick a month before finals, missed five of the six allotted classes in two of my courses, and was still recovering during finals.  My grades reflected that and I fell 20 percentage points in the rankings.  Had I not gotten sick, I would have kept my position and maybe even have graded onto one of the journals.  JD’s comment that the grade you get on the exam is how well you can score “on that exam, from that professor, on that day” is the best way to put it, especially since each professor will want something different.  I see so many of my friends using Legal Lines or Emanuel’s or some other aid, but that isn’t going to help you write what this professor wants on this exam.

Do I have a solution?  Unfortunately as flawed as this system is, I don’t really have a better solution.  The LSAT is unfortunately the only equalizing factor we have because the A that someone gets from Harvard is different than the A that someone gets from UMass, but at the same time a 175 from a test bunny probably doesn’t mean as much as a 155 from someone who studied for two years.  So for admission purposes, a combination of both needs to be used, which from my understanding many places do, but there is a baseline cut-off for LSAT scores, which I don’t think is right (what if they got a 148 but have a 3.5 from a top-ranked school?)

The solution for grades in law school, in terms of having the grade be more accurate, I can only think would be to offer midterms to have more scores to base the final grade on, but that would only cause more stress, especially during the already-stressful 1L year (especially during first semester when it takes until about midterms to figure out what you are doing).

So, yes, the system is terribly flawed, but in the grand scheme of things, eliminating the LSAT and grades really isn’t the answer.  Unfortunately, they are the best thing we have right now.  For job interviews, I would hope that potential employers would look at all my internships in the field instead of the poor grade I got in the subject area due to illness, but that is why we have career centers and resumes.  In terms of measuring who should stay and who should be asked to leave, grades are really the only answer.  If we’re worried about people being able to graduate, that ability to graduate are going to be based on grades, not on what summer internships or semester field placements you have.  It’s unfortunately a measure of your ability to get through law school, not how good of a lawyer you’re going to be when you’re out.

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Tiger
Oct 10, 2008 6:13 AM CST

To a great extent, the legal profession is responsible for the focus on standardized testing in school admissions.  Given more applicants than spaces available in most undergraduate and graduate programs, schools absolutely have to have an objective, non-suspect basis for rejecting the candidates for whom there is no room.

Are there great legal minds who might not get accepted to law school because of poor LSAT scores?  Sure. Are there rote memorization savants who will get a good undergraduate GPA and LSAT score, but who will make poor attorneys? Sure.

However, no system that attempts to judge the potential of individuals on an objective basis (or subjective for that matter) will ever be more than partially effective.  No one is a perfect judge of character.  At least GPA and LSAT create some objective criteria to look at.

Having served on the admissions committee at my alma mater, the numerical equation that LSAC provides merely allowed us to sort the students into broad groupings.  Every individual application dossier was then review in detail and determinations were made based upon the total package.  However, a poor combined LSAC index was a major factor in those who did not get admitted.

As for letter grades in law school, who really cares.  There needs to be some way to provide feedback and letter grades are something we are programmed from grade school to understand.  Frankly, law school GPA and class rank only matter for the first job and Ivy League credentials only matter if you want to work for one of the big name firms.  Once you get out and start practicing, that is all forgotten.

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Richard R Gerken
Oct 10, 2008 6:33 AM CST

I’ve been through it all, the LSAT, law school grades, a coporate law carreer and now an adjunct professor of Business Law in an MBA program.  Frankly, I believe in testing and grades as reasonable measurements of performance. Most of my students are balancing jobs, family and education so I see dedication, hard work and a desire to suceed. Most of them achieve in the A to B range.  I think dropping LSAT and grades will lead to more subjectivity.  By the way, I was a lousy standard test taker who worked hard to achieve.

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silencedogood
Oct 10, 2008 6:35 AM CST

These measures by Harvard, Yale, and Michigan are throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  There are valid criticisms about the way grades are currently handled in most law schools, but that does not mean that the reactionary switching to a “no grade” system is the best, or even a better, alternative.  In fact it is the exact opposite of meaningful reform.

The underlying purpose of grades is to measure the student’s absorbtion and understanding of the course material.  The current system is broken at most schools because there is only a single exam which is then graded based on a curve.  That means if the student has an “off” day for any valid reason their score will be unrepresentative to varying degrees.  In the case of a curve, if every student scores extremely high on an exam then the difference between an A and C may be the difference between 100% and 97% (which I have seen happen personally).  Despite these flaws, this form of grading gives some information however imperfect and more information is always better than less in predicting outcomes.

Eliminating grades altogether is change in exactly the wrong direction.  It reduces the amount of information and datapoints available to gauge a law student’s likely performance.  So instead prospective employers must focus on information which is much less instructive such as the particular institution (perhaps insulating that school from competitive pressures), organization membership, and perhaps race (as it has been, at least plausibly, argued that this is covert affirmative action). 

While that may not be that big a deal if we are talking about a Harvard grad and someone in the bottom tier of schools, what about comparisons between graded and ungraded top tier schools? 

What is needed to reform grading systems is not less data points, its more.  As the frequency of measuring a student’s performance increases, so too will its reliability.  more frequent exams give the professor to test a wider range of the student’s skills.  Rather than only answering one or two essay question at the end of the year students could be assigned research papers, oral arguments in class, or even practical application initiatives in the community as well as the more traditional exam questions.  More frequent exams would average out the risk of having any “off” day, and as the semester progresses the student, if performing poorly, would also have advance warning that either their study methods or work ethic requires a rethink.  The combination of each of these benefits should produce better lawyers as a result as well as reduce the unnecessary anxiety of law school exams which, frankly, causes many law students to crack. 

I had a single class like this in law school and it was the best one I’ve ever taken.  I suspect this approach has not been adopted because it requires more work and more accountability by not just students, but faculty and the institution overall.  With Harvard’s endowment it certainly isn’t the money.

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Dan
Oct 10, 2008 6:43 AM CST

By the way, I agree with silencedogood, and I have another possible solution to add that works for my alma mater:

STOP RANKING THE STUDENTS.  If law schools are worried so much about competitiveness, just stop providing ranks and GPA’s - my school has neither.

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Edwin Barmaidsky
Oct 10, 2008 6:59 AM CST

LSATs and grades unfairly discriminate against MEN.  Everyone knows girls are smarter that boys, and they always get better GRADES, also because they study more while boys are often distracted.  Obviously, it is the FEMALE LAW PROFESSORS AND ADMINISTRATORS who like girls better than boys who keep this DISCRIMINATION alive.  We BOYS need to STAND UP to this FEMALE ESTABLISHMENT so we can get a fair chance, too.  Let’s go form an ACTION PLAN over a couple of beers.

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Terry Williamson
Oct 10, 2008 7:14 AM CST

Both LSAT and good grades are important.  Doing better in one or the other can help.  I nearly got into med school with a 2.1 undergrad average because I nailed the med boards.  Later in grad school, I had a 3.6 average for my Ph.D., which made it easy to get into law school later.

The trend towards not giving grades is very disturbing.  As the managing member of a law firm, why would I want to hire someone from Stanford, Harvard or Yale who has a D average?  That’s what passing is.  I’d rather hire someone with a B average from a lesser school any day.

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crazy eddie
Oct 10, 2008 7:20 AM CST

I have two issues: (1) the LSAT and (2) grades. 

(1) the LSAT didn’t do a good job of predicting performance in my case b/c I did really well on it and yet really stumbled on 1L grades.  (I was under the mistaken impression that professors were actually supposed to teach - how naive.  Law professors are the most useless and evil people on the face of the earth.  The reason they only give 1 exam per semester is b/c they are too lazy to grade more exams than that.  They get some kind of jollies by grilling some poor 1L on minor details about In re Peerless—a case they have gone over every year for 15 years—and none of those details are on the final exam.  Perhaps I digress.) 

(2) Notwithstanding #1, I eventually figured out how to take a law school exam (I had to quit thinking and start memorizing outlines) and did well - really well by the time the 3 year rolled around.  If I was so dumb, why did I smoke my supposedly superior classmates in the last years of law school?  Problem is, b/c my poor IL grades were averaged in my overall GPA and rank were shit.  So future employers etc. are basically judging me for having a bad year as a 1L, which was over 10 years ago!  Interviewers acted like they were hiring people to take law school exams… 

So in sum, (1) LSAT is not a good predictor of 1L performance and (2) 1L performance is not a good predictor of 3L or future legal performance. 

Solution—they need to abolish all law schools and just let the bar reviews teach the law.  1 year of bar review + exam + 2 year apprenticeships would = way better lawyers
Problem is the law professors and other leaches don’t care about making better lawyers, they just want to suckle the teat of this corrupt legal education system for their own benefit.

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Clay
Oct 10, 2008 7:30 AM CST

There is a statistical correlation between LSAT score and law school grades, and also between undergrad grades and law school grades.  That is why they use those measures.

And to answer the question: neither is the case.  Grades are a fundamentally fair way to rank students’ performance, but it takes a lot of work and dedication on the professor’s part to fairly assign grades.  My experience in a top-20 law school is that the profs generally did not read the exams closely.  So grades were basically assigned through a lottery system, or based on arbitrary criteria (like who ran their mouth in class).  We should expect a little more diligence from professors, and not scrap the whole grade system.

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CS
Oct 10, 2008 7:36 AM CST

“How do we measure people then, by race, good looks, football talent?”

You read their writing samples. You contact their references. You do a phone interview. You assign them a memorandum to write, to see how well they do on research and writing. You give them a record to look at and have them deliver a direct examination, or a closing argument to you based on it. In short: expend a little effort to actually find out how competent they are, as opposed to merely glancing at a number assigned to them based on exams that bear no relation to actual law practice. After all, what are you hiring them to do: regurgitate rules from memory over the course of three hour periods; or do research, writing, and litigation work?

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Southern Attorney
Oct 10, 2008 7:50 AM CST

I received a 147 on my LSAT but graduated in the top 10% of my class.  I am now a corporate attorney in a very large firm in DC.  Obviously, LSATs are worthless!

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SJ
Oct 10, 2008 7:52 AM CST

Two perspectives here:  one as a former hiring partner for an AmLaw top 10 firm; one as a law school professor.  As a hiring partner, I found law school grades of critical importance in assessing talent.  No insult intended, but people have to be smart enough to do the work and hard-working and disciplined enough to get the job done.  Grades are the single best indicator I had on those attributes.  On the law faculty side, our quantitative assessment is that the single best predictor of bar passage is law school GPA.  Above a certain threshold, bar passage is extremely likely.  Below that threshold, passage probabilities are poor.  When I meet with students about how things are going in law school, knowing where they stand vis-a-vis that threshold enables me to counsel them more effectively.  Regarding the LSAT, regardless of what I think of the test, the US News uses it in a BIG way to rank us as law schools, so we can’t ignore it and have to use that as one of our targets.  LSAT is also highly predictive of law school performance, and therefore ultimately bar passage.

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Clay
Oct 10, 2008 8:08 AM CST

“I received a 147 on my LSAT but graduated in the top 10% of my class.  I am now a corporate attorney in a very large firm in DC.  Obviously, LSATs are worthless! “

I drove to work using only my feet this morning, but I did not crash or run anyone over.  I am now safe and sound at my desk.  Obviously, laws against driving with your feet are worthless!

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Ellen, please, no caps
Oct 10, 2008 8:12 AM CST

Users:  report Ellen’s all cap postings as abusive, as well as her non-substantive rants.  Maybe then “she” will only post lucid comments.  Or better yet, ABA will ban her

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Stevie
Oct 10, 2008 8:20 AM CST

I think this article is focusing on the wrong stuff, the sytem that is outdated is the law school system in general.  All these articles focus on the top 20 schools, which is fine, but in reality there are too many people going to law school period.  There is no reason that everyone should pay the same thing for an education when the return is so vastly different.  I am not dumb enough to think that my second tier school education should have me making Big Law type money, but in the end what I am making now is less than I was making out of undergrad 10 years ago.  As are the salaries of nearly all my friends.  I don’t want anyone to get the violin out for me, but it seems that the whole system is based on making money, from the LSAT, to 120K for a second tier education, to having to take the MPRE, to having to take the bar exam for each state you want to practice.  It is all falls under the veil of “Professional regulation” but we are all lawyers here who have passed a bar exam, there is nothing about that exam that will dictate how you do as a lawyer, it is almost a hazing ritual and a painful right of passage.  The fact that you have to take a new one for every state you practice until, or if, you can gain reciprocity is further proof of the money making machine that has become the education and licensing of lawyers.

As for the actual article, I think that you need the LSAT to attempt to even out the varying levlels of undergraduate educations.  I don’t really think it is the best idea, but it is a necessary evil.  The no grades policy makes sense at those schools that are using it, because every single person that graduates there is going to get a good job.  When one complains about the difference between 180K and 150K in a job due to your “ranking” you need to revlauate your life.

The ABA should cut the number of law schools period to make it harder to become a lawyer.

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Adam
Oct 10, 2008 8:26 AM CST

Re: LSAT - in order to achieve a good score, you must have strong reading comprehension skills.  Period.  Reading comrehension is a fundementally important quality in any good lawyer regardless of practice area.  So there’s that.

Re: Grades - the great thing about dropping grades is that only the Ivy’s and other super-elite schools are going to do it.  The cool thing is that those who go to such schools, who already have a super advantage in the job market, just got an even bigger one, as they now need not worry about class-rank.  So much for meritocracy.  The rest of us schleps, even those who went to very good but not “elite” schools, will still have to suffer the cruicable of first and second year law school/class rank.  So, way to go Harvard, Yale, etc.  For all you legacy students out there, the perks just keep getting better and better.  Good for you.

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Stevie
Oct 10, 2008 8:31 AM CST

I agree with #40, I mean the entire compeitiive nature of law school is about making money, there is no way that the big law type work associates do would be interesting if the pay wasn’t so high.  I do agree that grades might be a decent indicator of recuitment for big law though, people who are in the library for 15 hours a day in law school will have no problem xeroxing 7 days a week for 15 hours a day!

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Stevie
Oct 10, 2008 8:39 AM CST

Not high enough to get a big law job that is for sure!  Ha ha ha

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Steve
Oct 10, 2008 9:02 AM CST

LSAT scores largely measure how smart you are, and law school grades largely measure how smart and how conscientious you are.  Not surprisingly, the vast bulk of the populace don’t like them particularly.  But they are a whole lot less subjective than the alternative ways in which students can be assessed.

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eddie winslow
Oct 10, 2008 9:20 AM CST

Both are important.  But, I’d also like to note that smart employers should rely heavily on applicants’ unedited writing samples.  If someone has produced 3 or 4 great writing samples on their own, chances are they will continue to perform well.  The proof is in the pudding.  Actually looking at someone’s work is a great way to compare applicants on different grade scales from different schools.  I came from a lower ranked school (with good grades) but was told I got my current job because my writing samples were much, much better than those submitted by applicants from top schools.

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