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Under Pressure: How Incorporating Time-Pressured Performance Tests Prepares Students for the Bar Exam and Practice
No full text“Houston, we have a problem.” In 1970, an explosion on board the Apollo 13 spacecraft’s flight to the moon damaged the air filtration system, causing carbon monoxide to build up in the cabin. The astronauts on board would be dead in mere hours if the system could not be fixed or replaced. NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, Texas called for engineers, scientists, and technicians to work with a set of materials identical to those on the spacecraft to build a filtration system under extreme time pressure. The result may have been ugly, inelegant, and far from perfect, but it saved the astronauts’ life. The Apollo 13 situation may be a dramatic example of problem solving, creativity, and completing a task under extreme time pressure with life or death consequences; however, lawyers also work in stressful environments, under time pressure, while juggling multiple tasks involving life, liberty, or millions of dollars. How do recent law school graduates perform when facing a time-sensitive task when the stakes are high, when they are accustomed from law school of having several weeks or more, with feedback along the way, to complete that type of assignment?
To prepare students for the bar exam and teach them the fundamental lawyering skills needed for legal practice, legal education should incorporate, into the law school curriculum, performance tests consisting of time-pressured assessments. While time-pressured performance assessments may push students out of their comfort zone, they are realistic to legal practice and necessary to help students develop the competencies needed for success on the bar exam and high-stakes legal practice, such as rapid cognitive processing, application, synthesis, and effective articulation. This Article offers such an initiative to help law students, law schools, and the legal profession. At a time of declining bar passage rates, the adoption of the Uniform Bar Exam, a majority of jurisdictions incorporating a Multistate Performance Test component, a competitive legal job market, and an expectation of practice-ready law graduates, the time is urgent to adequately prepare law students
Less Talk, More Action: How Law Schools Can Counteract Racial Bias of LSAT Scores in the Admissions Process
No full textRacial bias exists within the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and can be viewed through racial and ethnic score gaps. The racial score gap was initially discovered five decades ago and continues to be true today. White test-takers consistently and overwhelmingly score higher than minority test-takers. This article is a call to action for the law school community to officially acknowledge the racial bias of the LSAT – a standardized test for law school acceptance – against minority applicants. This article encourages law school admission committees to deemphasize reliance on LSAT scores and develop new methods to justly assess the skills of every law school applicant. Consequently, by decreasing the weight of LSAT scores in the admissions process, entities such as U.S. News and World Report will need to restructure their methodology for ranking best law schools. By making procedural adjustments, law schools can bring equity to the admissions process, which would lead to a more diverse legal profession
The Aid Gap
Get PDFGender gaps in wages and wealth are well-known, but another gender gap has escaped attention. This gap – which we call the “aid gap” – arises from the widespread practice of merit scholarship negotiation and directly affects law students and lawyers. In this Essay, we identify and explain the aid gap; describe its causes and consequences; and advocate for regulatory intervention to eliminate, or at least minimize, it
Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: A Status Report
No full textThis report examines over 200 indicators, looking at who gains access to a host of educational environments and experiences, and how these trajectories differ, by race and ethnicity. In addition, invited scholarly essays provide further context around race and ethnicity in higher education that data alone cannot tell. Download the full report or individual chapters, below
Examining Gender and Race Intersectionality in Public Law School Admissions and Enrollment: A Multi-Institutional Analysis
No full textIn many ways law schools are gatekeepers to positions of influence or power in U.S. society, including state and federal judicial systems, legislative and executive branches of government, and a variety of industries. Law schools help prepare social leaders who may advocate for greater gender and racial equity and justice in our society in ways that are unique from undergraduate programs, master’s programs, medical schools, and even research doctoral programs. Although scholars have long sought to address the underrepresentation of women or racial minorities in law schools and the legal profession, they tend to examine gender and race separately. This study focuses on law school admissions and enrollment among women of color, particularly Black and Hispanic women. It is important to improve access for underrepresented women of color to law schools as an equity issue within legal education and for the preparation of civic leaders. Additionally, this study is important for considering whether law schools achieve the educational benefits of diversity. Based on our findings, we argue that women of color are underrepresented, at least in part, because they are less likely than White men to be admitted to 25 public law schools—not less likely to enroll after being admitted. Unlike underrepresented women of color, Black and Hispanic men were more likely than White men to be admitted to public law schools. However, Black and Hispanic men were less likely to enroll, conditional on admission, than White men. Toward the end of the paper, we discuss the limitations of the study and implications for diversifying legal education
LSSSE Public Reporting Tool
No full textThe LSSSE Public Reporting Tool is a robust, interactive data analytics tool that provides access to aggregate LSSSE data. With this tool you can explore LSSSE results by student and institutional characteristics and map longitudinal trends. Survey questions are grouped into useful categories to assist in data analysis. The tool also includes the capability to create custom reports with a wide-range of data visualization options. Once your analysis is complete you can download your reports into Excel, PowerPoint or PDF
A New Minority? International JD Students in US Law Schools
No full textThis Article reveals the significance of a new and growing minority group within US law schools - international students in the Juris Doctor (JD) program. While international students have received some attention in legal education scholarship, it mostly has been focused on their participation in the context of programs specially designed for this demographic (e.g. post-graduate programs like the LLM and SJD). Drawing from interview data with fifty-eight international JD students across seventeen graduating US law schools, our research reveals the rising importance of international students as actors within a more mainstream institutional context. Particularly, in examining the ways these students navigate their law school environments, we find that although international status often impacts identity and participation, not all students encounter its impact similarly. While some students use the identity to their advantage, others cannot escape negative implications, even with effort. This is consistent with other scholarship on minority students, and adds to a growing literature that uses their socialization experiences to better understand professional stratification. To unpack these different ways of “being international,” we borrow from Goffman’s theorization of stigma to suggest illustrative variations in the ways international students experience their environments. In doing so, we offer an introductory landscape to better understand this growing population and hope this enables new insights to theorize about other kinds of minority experience