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Bar Admissions Questions Pertaining to Mental Health, School/Criminal History, and Financial Issues
No full textThis chart is a compilation of the questions asked on bar admission questions pertaining to mental health, school/criminal history, and finances. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list. Given the wide variety of questions that fall into those categories, this chart only includes those subject areas that may be of the greatest interest to students. This chart is updated biannually
Preventing Attrition: Critical Interventions to Close the Racial Gap in Non-Transfer Attrition
No full textLaw schools are losing students of color to non-transfer attrition at a rate nearly 19% higher than that of white students. This racial disparity is unacceptable, and law schools must take concrete steps to eliminate it. In order to do so, law schools will have to take action both inside and outside of the classroom. Faculty must be more directly engaged in the teaching of metacognitive and academic skills. Student Affairs Offices must work with Academic Affairs Offices to develop programs that foster and sense of belonging, and assist students with navigating the challenges of law schools. Finally, the entire law school community must work to address the mental health and substance abuse issues that are far too prevalent in the legal academy and the legal profession. It is only by treating each student as an individual capable of growth and academic success, that law schools will be able to close the attrition gap.
Part I of this article addresses interventions that faculty can undertake to help students improve their own learning process. Part II focuses on enhancing the law school community for student success. Part III addresses the pervasive problem of mental health and substance abuse concerns among law students and legal professionals, which also leads some law students to leave law school
What Law Must Lawyers Know?
No full textWhat constitutes the body of legal knowledge that every lawyer must possess? I used to know, or think I did, but no longer. I suspect no one else knows either. This difficult question is not just an intriguing theoretical matter but also an urgent, practical problem. Licensing regulators assume that minimal competence in any profession requires certain fundamental knowledge, skills, and abilities. Bar examiners must determine what knowledge, skills, and abilities are necessary for minimum competence as an attorney and then design tests and other requirements to attempt to align licensure with minimum competence. Today’s tangled attorney licensing puzzle cannot be solved without better answers to this foundational question: what law must every lawyer know
A Preliminary Study Looking Beyond LSAT and LGPA: Factors During the Bar Study Period That May Affect Bar Exam Passage
No full textMost research on bar passage has focused on relationships between LSAT scores, law school academic performance and bar exam performance. To date, little attention has been given to the relationships between student bar exam preparation and their bar exam performance. This research looks at an under-studied area: the time between graduation and the bar exam. It uses a self-report survey to help identify study methods, non-cognitive skills, and other potential factors that may relate to bar passage. The study makes some preliminary observations about potential factors relating to bar passage including: examinees’ essay question practice methods, their motivation and self-confidence levels, the way examinees use study groups, and their expectations about the amount of substantive material and how long it will take to learn that material. It suggests ways the data may be further developed and used to help identify potential interventions. It also notes that because bar pass barriers may be school- specific, schools should consider using the survey, or some version thereof, to identify bar study period risk factors for their own students in order to identify the interventions that would be most helpful for their graduates. The Appendix includes the survey questions
Diversity Drift
No full textDiversity may be under attack in the age of Trump, but higher education in America has its own diversity problem. If mission statements and strategic plans offer any guidance, many of America’s colleges and universities actively value diversity. Yet even as calls for diversity grow, these calls far too often lack a clear and coherent normative anchor. Institutions often seek “diversity” without first having done the work to define, precisely, why they want diversity, or to identify, concretely, what sorts of diversity will get them there. As a result, universities have become susceptible to diversity drift, whereby good intentions invite unintended—and at times, perverse—consequences. Seemingly innocuous language (as simpleas calls to hire and admit “diverse people”),for instance, risks reifying whiteness as an institutional baseline against which students and faculty of color are rendered perpetual outsiders. And untethered to history, context, and power, calls for diversity can fall victim to false equivalencies that deny any principled distinction between those who would #TakeAKnee to honor Black lives and those who travel the college circuit to mock, demean, and insult
Current Volume Summaries by Region, Race/Ethnicity, Gender Identity & LSAT Score
No full textData are for applicants and applications to all academic terms.
Because ABA applicant and application counts are derived from law school report requests made via ACES², any problems associated with this data from an individual law school will be included in the current volume counts until the underlying problem is corrected by the school.
Regional applicant counts represent the total number of candidates from each region (based on the candidate’s state of permanent residence) who have applied to at least one ABA law school. Applicants who have no state of permanent residence on our files or whose permanent residence is outside the United States are included in the “other” category of the regional counts, as well as in the total applicant count.
Regional application counts represent the total number of applications to all ABA law schools in each region.
The comparison of these counts from this year to last year may be impacted by a number of factors, such as changes in law school application deadlines or policies, changes in the timing of processing report requests to LSAC, increased usage of electronic applications, etc. Early in the year, when the total volumes are relatively low, minor changes in these factors may have a significant impact in the percent changes between years. A count of the number of ABA schools showing an application difference of 40% or more is reported as a measure, in part, of this volatility. As the application year progresses we should expect to see fewer and fewer schools falling into this category, indicating that the volatility caused by these factors is being reduced as total volumes increase
You Can\u27t Change What You Can\u27t See: Interrupting Racial and Gender Bias in the Legal Profession
No full textThe first part of this research report details four main patterns of gender bias, which validate theories that women lawyers long have believed and feelings they long have held. Prove-It-Again describes the need for women and people of color to work harder to prove themselves. Tightrope illustrates the narrower range of behavior expected of and deemed appropriate for women and people of color, with both groups more likely than white men being treated with disrespect. Maternal Wall describes the well-documented bias against mothers, and finally, Tug of War represents the conflict between members of disadvantaged groups that may result from bias in the environment.
The second part of the research report offers two cutting-edge toolkits, one for law firms and one for in-house departments, containing information for how to interrupt bias in hiring, assignments, performance evaluations, compensation, and sponsorship. Based upon the evidence derived from our research, these bias interrupters are small, simple, and incremental steps that tweak basic business systems and yet produce measurable change. They change the systems, not people