Archive for the ‘Law Schools’ Category

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Notes on the Legal Education at the Crossroads, v. 3.0 Conference

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Last week, I attended the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference at Denver University.  A useful conference, with a lot of demonstrations.

There was much more coverage of student assessment than institutional assessment.  That is, most of the sessions focused on ways to assess student performance other than through the standard one-shot end of semester final exam.  The classic law school model is an example of summative assessment with no formative assessment.  The conference provided a useful counterweight to that model by discussing options for formative assessment (i.e., assessment that occurs while the learning process is going on).

But the other half of the equation is assessing on an institution-wide basis what the individual student assessments tell you about the learning that is or is not going on.  There were sessions devoted to the topic of institutional assessment, but–at least the ones I attended–ended up with a student assessment focus.

Jeff Rensberger

Posted in Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching | No Comments »

Diversity Benefits of Best Practices

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Educating Lawyers:  Preparation for the Profession(Sullivan, et. al. 2007) and Best Pratices for Legal Education:  A Vision and a Road Map (Stuckey, et. al. 2007) both advocate major reforms of legal education.  In a new article, Leading Change in Legal Education – Educating Lawyers and Best Practices: Good News for Diversity, 31 Seattle L. Rev. 775 (2009) (SSRN), Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (New Mexico) argues that the reforms would particularly benefit minority students:

The books both contemplate a move from the current model of large classes taught through modified Socratic dialogue to a sequenced set of course and experiences that build on basic analytical skill and provide opportunities for real life and simulated practice experience.  Assessment would become more outcome-based with genuine opportunities for students to receive constructive feedback on their skill development as it evolves.  * * *  …[W]hile those changes would benefit all future lawyers …, the changes would be particularly welcome for students of color and members of groups which are under-represented in law school.

Id. at 776 (footnotes omitted).

Gary Rosin

Posted in Assessment, Law Schools, Student Learning | No Comments »

What Happens to Bar ‘Never-Passers?”

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Jane Yakowitz (UCLA, Empirical Research Group) has posted on SSRN an interesting working paper, The Marooned Law School Graduates: An Empirical Investigation of Law School Graduates that Fail the Bar Exam, that looks at various sources with a view to establishing was happens to “never-passers”–law graduates who never pass the Bar exam.

Gary Rosin

Posted in Bar Exam, Law Schools | No Comments »

Components of US News 2010 Rankings (III)

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Tom Bell has posted the third installment of How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got that Way.  In this post, he focuses on schools ranked 41-51, 94-100, and the bottom 8 (according to his model).  What I would liked to have seen, instead, are schools on either side of the major breaks:  2oth, 50th, 100th, Tier 3/Tier 4. If peer reputation is the biggest influence on rankings, what moved schools above these lines?

Gary Rosin

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LSATs by Majors, 2007-2008

Monday, August 31st, 2009

In a working paper on SSRN, LSAT Scores of Economics Majors: The 2008-2009 Class Update, Michael Nieswiadomy (North Texas, Economics) looks at average 2007-2008 LSAT scores by undergraduate major.  The table below is from Table 2 of the paper (p. 6), which lists a total of 29 majors with at least 450 LSAT takers in 2007-2008:

Top 10 Majors by 2007-2008 LSAT Average


Rank
Major		 Average
Score		 No. of
Students
1 Physics/Math 160.0 577
2 Economics 157.4 3,047
3 Philosophy/Theology 157.4 2,581
4 International Relations 156.5 1,520
5 Engineering 156.2 2,197
6 Government/Service 156.1 578
7 Chemistry 156.1 632
8 History 155.9 4,169
9 Interdisciplinary Studies 155.5 652
10 Foreign Languages 155.3 1,084

Note:  Majors with at least 450 takers.

The paper does not tell us whether (or when) the differences in means are statistically significant.  In terms of practical significance, is the average engineeering major (156.2) that much stronger than the average Government/Service or Chemistry major (156.1)? 

In terms of getting into law school, consider the distribution of the 75th and 25th LSAT percentiles of the Fall 2008 entering law-school classes (as reported in the 2010 Official Guide).  An average Physics/Math major, with a 160.0, would have fallen in the top

  • quarter (75th percentile) at 60% of law schools, and
  • three quarters (25th percentile) at 85% of law-schools.  

Certainly, the average Physics/Math student has a good chance of getting into law school, but not necessarily one of the top 50 law schools. 

It also would be interesting to know how widely the scores vary within each major (the standard deviation).

Gary Rosin

 

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Journal Reputation and Moving Up

Friday, August 28th, 2009

In Signaling Value of Law Reviews, I noted an article by Al Brophy (North Carolina) cautioning that scholarship should be judged on its own merits.  Paul Caron notes an empirical study of “the theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect),” that controls for article quality.  In The Impact Factor’s Matthew Effect:  A Natural Experiment in Bibliometrics, Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingras conclude

The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality.

So, it’s not just a matter of the quality of the paper, but also of its placement.  It follows that an author’s academic reputation is also enhanced by placement.  Thus, the urge to “trade-up” in placement of articles.  Presumably, a law school’s peer reputation follows (with a lag?) that of its faculty.  Earlier, I discussed Jeff Lipshaw’s (Suffolk) thoughts on the penchant of ambitious young professors to “move up the food chain to a law school with a higher ranking.

Given the strong influence of peer reputation in the US News law-school rankings, should lower-tier law-schools try to move up in the rankings by using pay-for-placement bonuses to young professors that might be just moving through?  Or does their ability to do that–or their earlier association with a school–also enhance the peer reputation of that school?

Gary Rosin

Posted in Law Professors, Law Schools, Rankings, Scholarship | No Comments »

Teaching and Law School

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Over on TaxProf, Paul Caron notes in What’s Wrong with Law Schoola comment by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (UC-Irvine) that his professors at Harvard weren’t interested in their students.  Caron notes that the faculty at his son’s college voted down a proposal to reduce the teaching load, and wonders if has ever done that.

With the  talk about alternative outcomes and assessment measures, it will be interesting to watch what happens.  Will those be limited to clinics, or will all of the law professoriate have to start worrying about whether students are actually learning?

Gary Rosin

Posted in Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching | No Comments »

The Signaling Value of Law Reviews

Monday, August 24th, 2009

I haven’t looked at this yet, but this new article looks interesting:  Alfred L. Brophy, The Signaling Value of Law Reviews:  An Exploration of Citations and Prestige,  36 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 229-243 (2009)(SSRN).  His conclusion is that

the results here suggest that we should we wary of judgments about quality based on place of publication. We should also be wary of judgments about quality of scholarship based on number of citations and we should, therefore, continue to evaluate scholarship through close reads of it.

Gary Rosin

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Components of US News Law-School Rankings (II)

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Tom Bell (Chapman) has another installment of his the components of US News law-school rankings: How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 2.  In this installments, he stacks the components of the top 22 schools in a bar-graph.  Stip to come:  top 41-51, top 94-100 and bottom 8.

Gary Rosin

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Ambition and Rankings?

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Jeff Lipshaw has an interesting comment on the rankings game, Ambition and Rankings:  “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”.  He begins by noting a WSJ article by Eric Felten, who is of the view that “the rankings are really about getting ahead.”  He then notes an discussion with a colleague about the Big Law School game–moving up to more prestigious law schools.  He continues

Yes, I think the rankings do have something to do with our subjective views of getting ahead, and I do think there’s something about the legal profession that makes OUR rankings so powerful.  I used the phrase “progressing up the food chain” with my colleague, and in what industries or professions is the food chain as quantitative as the legal profession?  * * *

* * *

… there’s a lot of self-selection in the process of becoming a lawyer, and even more in becoming a big law firm lawyer or a law professor.  I suspect the first element of that self-selection is a particular orientation to progressing up the food chain….  There ain’t that much to distinguish us…. There are only dozens and not thousands of law schools.  * * * In other words, it’s easy to see a well-defined food chain in the relatively small, homogeneous, and closed legal community.  

Most of the blogging about law-school rankings focuses on the top law schools, and sometimes as far down as the top 100.  Perhaps that’s because they are the only schools individually ranked, but I don’t think so.  I’m not sure that professors at top law schools really care about what happens on the other side of the Great Divide in the legal academy (Tiers 3 and 4).  If nothing else, the concerns of the lower-ranked schools are not the concerns of the elite. 

For example, during the debate about ABA Interpretation 301-6 and minimum law-school Bar passage standards, the blawgosphere was largely (entirely?) silent.  Was that because the elite law schools, and even the top 100, don’t worry about the Bar?  Yes, the occasional Top 100 Dean gets toppled when Bar passage rates slip.  But the top law schools don’t measure themselves by the proportion of the graduates that can meet the minimum standards to be come a lawyer.  That’s taken as a given.

Gary Rosin

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