LSAT

Admission to law schools usually depends heavily on a combination of prior academic performance, as reflected in college grades, and LSAT scores. A massive study of admission to all law schools in 1991 by the Law School Admission Council (Linda F. Wightman, Women in Legal Education: A Comparison of the Law School Performance and Law School Experiences of Women and Men , Law School Admission Council Research Report Series, 1996) discovered that, regardless of major, undergraduate grades overpredict the law school performance of females compared to that of males, as shown in the top figure. By contrast, women scoring the same as men on the LSAT recieve on average the same first year grades in law school, as shown in the bottom figure. Perhaps one reason that this test fares so well in the validity trials is that law school performance itself is, as currently constructed, essentially a form of test taking behavior.

Undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores


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