Students and the public routinely consult various published college rankings to assess the quality of colleges and universities and easily compare different schools. However, many institutions have responded to the rankings in ways that benefit neither the schools nor their students. In "Engines of Anxiety," sociologists Wendy Espeland…

This article is a brief account of the use of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) by staff of the Law School Admission Council in the 1990 development of redesigned specifications for the Reading Comprehension section of the Law School Admission Test. Summary item statistics for the…

While the nature and causes of university grade inflation have been extensively studied, little empirical research on the consequence of this phenomenon is currently available. The present study uses data for 48 US law schools to analyze admission decisions in 1995, 2000, and 2007, a period during which university grade inflation appears to have…

The literature on student academic success of law students is limited to mostly single institution studies, and as such, a nationwide, multi-institutional empirical study of the factors that predict student academic success is greatly needed by higher education scholars, law school admission officers, faculty, and administrators. This dissertation…

As director of the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic at the Columbia University Law School, law professor Conrad Johnson knows that digital technology has the power to highlight and amplify social justice concerns and to enable people to take direct action. Under Johnson's leadership, the clinic has developed and maintained the Columbia-hosted…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the evidence on whether grade inflation has led to an increasing emphasis on standardized test scores as a criterion for law school admissions. Design/methodology/approach: Fit probabilistic models to admissions data for American law schools during the mid to late 1990s, a period during which…

Preparation for and admission to law school is challenging for many students. For a number of years law schools have used criteria for admission that included school rankings and testing. Schools have been ranked by "The U. S. News and World Report" magazine and potential students have been tested with the Law School Admission Test…

Women's lower scores on standardized admissions tests were examined from the perspective of consequential validity using data from the Law School Admissions Test. Data do not show that women disproportionately remove themselves from the applicant pool and do not suggest that a consequence of lower scores is application to less prestigious schools.…

This study focuses on the relationship between the personality characteristics of entering law students and academic success in law school. The subjects (137) were entering law school students at Pepperdine University School of Law. Students were administered the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) as a measure of their temperament and…

The nonprofit corporation that performs standardized testing for law school admission has in recent years produced $100 million in profits. For minority groups who tend to score poorly on the test, the question is why the corporation refuses to dedicate some of its wealth to commissioning an independent study of whether test results correlate with…

Graphs and charts pertaining to testing in affirmative action are presented. Data concern the following: the predictive validity of College Board admissions tests using freshman grade point average as the criterion; validity coefficients of undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) alone, Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores, and undergraduate…

Legal education is in a mid-life crisis, with prosperity in the past, doubt in the present, and problems ahead: economic hard times, a declining student pool, dissatisfaction with traditional legal education, and economic and technological changes in the practice. It is time to reconsider what lies ahead in admissions. (MSE)

The context in which higher education admissions tests are used, both intended, validated uses and misuses, are examined. Possible legal problems of misuse are discussed in light of a recent court decision, Sharif v. New York State Education Department. Focus is on three tests: the Scholastic Assessment Test, Graduate Record Examinations, and the…

Should law schools decide to consider other than traditional academic student characteristics as admission criteria, the Law School Admission Council should undertake an extensive research program to design new instruments measuring a broad and perhaps more relevant range of applicant characteristics and skills. (MSE)

The Law School at North Carolina Central University faced the dual problem of improving student performance on the bar examination while maintaining a large percentage of black students. The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) was found to be the single best predictor of student performance on the bar examination. However, if only the students…