<p>With this being so, why would anyone major in a law guided major like political science?</p>
<p>It seems like it would be way more worthwhile to major in something like engineering or math because you could have the possibility of applying to law school and doing well, or going into one of the many other fields related to those majors (math, engineering) and getting paid just as well. </p>
<p>Sorry if this is worded weird, not sure if i got my question across.</p>
<p>Causation is complicated in this scenario. </p>
<p>The first thing to note is how averages change when you add people. A school might have an average SAT score (out of 1600) of 1100; it gets more students to take the test, and the average drops to 1050. That doesn’t mean that the kids got dumber; it just means that the new people who took the test were, on the average, lower scorers than their counterparts. </p>
<p>So you may be seeing this effect because more of the “bottom” of poli sci people take the LSAT.</p>
<p>You could also see that pattern because people who major in physics may be better at time-crunched, multiple-choice exams.</p>
<p>Even if there were causation, the few extra LSAT points would be swamped out by the GPA-destroying effects of some of those majors.</p>
<p>Maybe because that is what one wants to study. Is it that novel an idea that someone pick a major based on preference rather than some perceived future utility for a test score? I mean, if large swaths of people picked math based engineering because it would pay well, then it wouldn’t pay well and many people would hate their job.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s what they wanted to study? I can attest to the fact that lots of people who like political science and philosophy are not the same types of people who like math and engineering. Some people still go to college to study what they like and not just what will make them a lot of money after graduation, you know?</p>
<p>A lot of it is self-selection. Those math/eng majors who score high on the LSAT are a really small subset of the total population of math/eng majors. (And in particular, eng since their GPA’s tend to be too low to get into a decent LS.) That small subset also also tends to do well in lit/hume work.</p>
<p>This is analogous to reviewing med school acceptances by major: music majors tend to lead the pack, on a % basis. (I’ll let you figure out why that might be the case.)</p>
<p>I’ve seen this list before. I found it interesting that Government majors have higher average scores than Political Science majors. They are basically the exact same thing - but some colleges call the major Government while others call it Poli Sci. However, those few colleges that call the major Government tend to be very selective, which is why I think the average LSAT scores are higher.</p>
<p>I expect the correlation between SAT scores and LSAT scores to be much higher than the correlation with major, which if true would imply that there was more of an impact of the test-taking ability of the student going in to college rather than what the student learned in college through taking courses in the major. I expect that the SAT score of the average physics/math major to higher than the SAT score of the average poli sci major.</p>
<p>If you google “SAT scores by major,” all sorts of interesting results pop up; mainly, they show that the highest scorers go into mathematics, physical sciences, or double majors. This may be the phenomenon you are seeing here.</p>