Other examples of legal activism include suits to remove campaign finance rules, strike down parts of the Voting Rights Act, allow states to ban abortion, and disallow states from enacting measures to stop COVID-19 spread.
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A lawyer representing a client in a dispute is by definition not neutral, since the lawyer is being paid to make the best possible case for the client, even if a neutral observer would consider the client’s side in the dispute to be a loser.
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Still don’t understand your point.
You can be an activist as a prosecutor, you can be an activist as a judge, you can be an activist as a public defender, and you can be an activist working at an investment bank explaining to your colleagues why a certain course of action is illegal- or NOT illegal, but will expose the institution to an enormous risk and therefore shouldn’t be done.
Why are you assuming that “activism” is it’s own special part of lawyering???
It’s ok. I don’t want to discuss this further. Sorry to leave the discussion midway.
Just curious how law schools plan to evaluate future applicants without using standardized test scores as a criterion. There are over 2000 4 year colleges in the US. Many universities offer up to different 80 undergraduate majors. Comparing the GPAs of political science, English literature, art history, and mechanical engineering majors is already nearly impossible among students attending the same school. Yale’s median GPA
for their latest matriculating class was 3.94. How much higher can it go?
How is it possible for these schools to objectively differentiate their future applicants?
No law school I am aware of has proposed evaluating applicants without using standardized test scores.
The ABA is not forcing law schools to stop using standardized testing. Instead they are not explicitly requiring law schools to use standardized testing in admissions, like they do not explicitly require law schools to use GPA/transcript in admissions. I am not aware of any law school that has said they plan to remove the testing requirement, just as I am not aware of any law school that has said they plan to remove the GPA/transcript requirement.
What makes you think they want to push it higher? They appear to want the freedom to select amongst applicants on a more “holistic” basis.
The same criticism of the SAT/ACT is used against the LSAT—it can be gamed, it advantages the wealthier students, it provides no predictive information of performance that can’t be garnered from other indicators ,etc,etc.
It’s a bit disingenuous to say that the ABA is not “forcing “ law schools to drop the LSAT It is allowing them to go test optional so they can hit their diversity goals without appearing to dilute their standards or creating evidence that can be used in a court case alleging race discrimination. Tanking USNews rankings is part of the effort to change the whole ecosystem that includes mathematical models
I would not be surprised to see the common data set for colleges and similar reports by law schools changed to drop or disguise GPAs and any other information that shows certain groups in an unfavorable light. The result will be less transparency and less accountability. Which ironically is where things were decades ago
It seems like the criticism against the LSAT is very similar to the criticism directed toward the ACT/SAT. If US law schools eventually follow the same pattern of their undergraduate counterparts and the test optional LSAT environment becomes as commonplace, could top tier law schools experience similar increases in applications?
I think it’s substantially more difficult to evaluate/compare undergraduates applying to law school versus high school students applying to undergraduate programs because potential law school applicants come from very diverse programs of study (e.g. basic science, liberal arts, fine arts, social sciences, engineering, business) in college than those in high school.
Yale University recently experienced a 40% in applications since it went test optional. If Yale Law School experiences a similar increase, how will its admissions office handle it? The median GPA is already at 3.94. They will have to reject a lot more applicants. How will they decide who to keep, especially if LSAT test results are not considered significant data points? My guess is that even with their push to recruit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds and their use of a more holistic evaluation process, their median GPA would necessarily have to go up. But even with a new median GPA as high as 4.0, that might not be enough.
I agree that evaluating applicants based on inflated or superficial GPAs without better knowledge of underlying courses and grading in law school admissions is problematic and flawed, but I’m not so sure that evaluating HS applicants for elite college undergraduate admissions is any easier. They have plenty of HS applicants with 4.0 UW GPAs (many of them are also inflated). AOs in undergraduate admissions are generally not specialized enough to properly evaluate the relative strengths of applicants academically based on HS transcripts alone. @ucbalumnus made a point contrasting the approaches of MIT and Caltech (which I agree with), but I’ll add another significant difference between the two schools in undergraduate admissions: Caltech uses far more faculty resources (relative to the number of applicants) to help evaluate applicants than MIT. Caltech claims that no one is admitted without having her/his full application reviewed and endorsed by a faculty member in a relevant field.
I’m no expert at this, but I feel the HS curriculum is relatively homogeneous, especially among the applicants to highly selective universities who actually have a realistic chance of getting admitted. With rare exception, they all took 4 years English, 4 years of math, 4 years of science, 4 years of a foreign language, and 3 years of history. They also took the same classes (honors or AP) within each subject:
In contrast, law school applicants have completely different curriculums because they represent so many different majors. How do you evaluate a 4.0 music major versus a 4.0 physics major vs a 4.0 political science major within the same university? Should the physics or engineering major get a bigger boost because these subjects are considered more difficult to get a top grade? How does being a great physics student relate to becoming a great lawyer? Maybe there is a better correlation for music majors, so music majors should be prioritized? Since colleges offer70-80 majors, does each major get its own weighting relative to its perceived difficulty and priority for the law school admissions office? How do you extrapolate these factors when comparing individual applicants among the various 2000+ 4-year universities? If the law school admissions office doesn’t make any attempt to account for these significant differences then their evaluation cannot be considered holistic.
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Many schools don’t complete the GPA field in the CDS. Those who do calculate it anyway they want to (there is no defined or ‘right’ way), and some institutional reporting departments calculate average GPA for the CDS in a different way than admission does for admissions purposes.
I’m assuming we’re comparing tippy-top law schools with tippy-top colleges. For tippy-top colleges, what differentiate applicants academically aren’t generally in the standard HS curricula. Different HS’s may have similar curricula but vastly different levels of rigor. Even AP courses are graded differently, so comparisons aren’t easy unless students take the standardized AP exams and report their scores.
Law schools do have another related issue that most elite colleges (other than possibly Caltech/MIT/HMC) don’t have. At most elite colleges, an academically weaker student, perhaps unlike her/his law school counterpart, can major in a less rigorous major and still easily graduate.
I don’t think that’s likely let alone necessary. Just like undergrad, they will give more weight to participation and leadership in relevant ECs (at least for those without something in their application that leads them to be considered “underrepresented” or “disadvantaged”). For example if I think about my kid, he was involved in the undergrad law journal, college democrats, local politics, etc. (Not that he plans to go to law school). And maybe like some academic jobs nowadays, you’ll have to write a personal statement explaining how your admission would benefit the goals of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Note also that some colleges don’t give A+ grades, so increasing the median GPA would only happen if fewer kids from those colleges were admitted.
I do agree with you that comparisons across colleges and majors are difficult. That means top law schools may end up depending more on college reputations and admitting more T20 undergrads at the expensive of star students from Podunk state. Again there are parallels with holistic review and preferences backfiring in undergrad admissions, where students from prep schools benefit compared to those from disadvantaged high schools, and wealthy URMs benefit compared to poor URMs
We often talk about highly selective law schools like Yale on this forum, but most law schools are far less selective. For example, in one recent year, Western Michigan’s admit rate was near 90%. Their median LSAT was 141 = 12th percentile, and 25th percentile score was 138 = 7th percentile. I think this is the type of law school that is most likely to remove the testing requirement, rather than Yale.
Yale Law has given no indication that they are interested in dropping testing requirements. The article mentions that they don’t like how USNWR rankings pressure law schools to max out stats in an effort to improve ranking, but this is completely different from wanting to remove standardized testing. If hypothetically Yale did drop LSAT then they would increase weighting of the remaining criteria (more than just GPA), and may add new additional criteria.
There are numerous major differences between SAT/ACT for undergrad admission and LSAT for law school admission. One is history and experience with test optional. ~1000 undergrad colleges were test optional prior to COVID. Some had been optional for decades. When COVID occurred, colleges had plenty of available resources to review what happens when a college goes test optional. Similarly employers are generally used to and well accepting of test optional colleges.
Law school differs. With the ABA requirement, test optional law schools were not allowed. No law schools and law school employers have experience with test optional. Law schools also have a history of emphasizing test scores in admission, far more than undergrad. LSAT is probably the most influential criteria in current law school admission. USNWR’s weightings are one of several factors that contribute to this situation. Switching to test optional is much bigger change.
That’s a lot of speculation about the reasons for the ABA decision. I expect there are several different contributing factors, which include things like feeling external pressure from being the only type of college/grad accreditation group that still mandates all colleges must require standardized testing.
Yale is not going to tank USNWR rankings. I believe Yale law has always been ranked #1 in USNWR, and I suspect USNWR will continue to rank them #1 since readers expect Yale to be ranked #1. If Yale is not ranked #1, some readers may feel USNWR’s formula is not accurate, reducing subscriptions and profitability for the organization. It’s a separate issue from the ABA no longer mandating that law schools must use standardized testing in admissions.
There is no common data set for law schools. The existing common data set for undergrad does not report GPA/scores of particular groups, such as scores by race. Colleges can also choose to not report or not make their CDS public. The CDS is largely a subset of federal reporting, which is less flexible. I very much doubt that the federal reporting is going to stop including performance stats.
Perhaps true, but it’s important to remembers that the CDS was originally conceived by USNews, Peterson and College Board. And those three remain on the CDS board today.
True, but also important to remember that the CDS is not required, no one outside of the schools vets the data, and there is no penalty for only completing a portion of the CDS or for inputting incorrect data.
I agree with the above that I doubt many highly rejective law schools will go LSAT optional (at least of the subset who don’t cooperate with USNWR), but we might see a number of less selective ones try TO and see how that goes.
A few years ago we would have doubted that they’d do test optional for SAT as well :-).
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Definitely could happen, but LSAT scores are used differently in admissions than SAT/ACT in undergrad admissions had been prior to the pandemic, where generally LSAT is much more important in the admissions decision…for many schools the primary criteria are GPA and LSAT score.
If highly rejective law schools go TO, perhaps (just spitballing) undergrad institution and/or major would become more important in the admissions decision, I’m sure posters can thing of other potential changes. Seems like ug GPA isn’t enough to make the admissions decision, but maybe it is.