Students with these college majors had the highest LSAT scores
Law school applicants who identified their college major as criminal justice, pre-law or law didn’t fare as well on the LSAT as those who studied nonlaw disciplines such as the classics and art history.
That’s the finding of Pepperdine University School of Law professor Derek Muller, who studied data from the Law School Admission Council on 2013 law school applicants. TaxProf Blog notes his findings, released on Muller’s blog Excess of Democracy.
The prospective students self-identified their majors from 142 choices and were allowed to pick more than one. Muller eliminated majors listed by fewer than 150 students and found the best prospective law students, in terms of both GPA and LSAT score, were classics majors.
The top 10 majors, by LSAT score, were:
1) Classics
2) Policy studies
3) International relations
4) Art history
5) Mathematics
6) Philosophy
7) International studies
8) Government, service
9) Economics
10) Biology, specialized
The worst major for LSAT scores was criminal justice. It was followed by social work, business management and business administration, pre-law and law. Muller’s full list is here.
Muller cautions that causation should not be implied by the scores. Some students in the majors may be selecting other careers such as medicine or business.
