Law School Grades Research Articles

The Association of Participation in a Summer Prelaw Training Program and First-Year Law School Students’ Grades

This study estimates the association of participation in a nine-week online educational program to prepare students for post-graduate (juris doctorate) education and law school grades. We collected registrar data from 17 U.S. law schools for participants and non-participants from the same year and a prior year. We compared first-semester law school grades between participating and non-participating students weighted by propensity scores. Course participation was associated with improved first-semester grades in a keyed course (Contracts Law) and overall grade point average. According to pre- and post-survey responses, a substantial portion of those who completed the program reported feeling more prepared for law school.

It’s Not Where You Start, It’s How You Finish: Predicting Law School and Bar Success

In this study, we examine the extent to which academic and student engagement factors explain law school grades and first-time bar exam performance. Applying fixed effects linear and logit modeling, our analysis leverages law student transcript data and responses to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) among students from a diverse group of 20 law schools to estimate academic performance and odds of bar passage. Most notably, we find that GPA improvement during law school is associated with greater odds of passing the bar exam, particularly among students who struggle the most during the first semester. Furthermore, while we find that LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA are predictive (p < 0.05) of both law school performance and bar success (as in previous research), these effects are quite modest. Based on these findings, we propose and discuss several recommendations. These should be helpful to higher education scholars and practitioners, particularly law school deans, administrators, faculty, and academic support staff.

It's Not Where You Start, it's How You Finish: Predicting Law School and Bar Success

The AccessLex/LSSSE Bar Exam Success Initiative is the first multi-institutional investigation into the factors that help predict law school academic and first-time bar exam performance. Mixed effects linear and logit modeling techniques are used to analyze pre-admission data; law school transcript data; and bar exam performance data for almost 5,000 Spring 2018 and 2019 graduates from 20 law schools that participated in this study. Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) response data were also analyzed for a subset of about 2,000 graduates. Our modeling techniques allowed us to localize the impact of the factors of interest, while also accounting for other factors. For example, our analyses of the impact of various student engagement factors on bar exam performance account for other potentially relevant factors such as law school grades. We find that: • LSAT score and undergraduate GPA (UGPA) are modestly associated with law school GPA (LGPA). LSAT score and first year (1L) LGPA yield the strongest association. Across our sample, a one-point increase in LSAT score is associated with a 0.04 increase in 1L LGPA. A one-tenth point increase in UGPA is associated with a 0.03 increase in LGPA (Figure 2). • LGPA is the strongest predictor of bar exam performance, even at the early stages of matriculation. For example, a one standard deviation increase in 1L LGPA is associated with a 402 percent increase in the odds of bar passage (Figure 3). • Positive growth in LGPA between the end of the first semester and graduation is associated with greater odds of passing the bar exam, particularly among graduates who struggled early on. Graduates with below average first-semester grades who experienced no LGPA growth had a 25 percent chance of passing the bar exam, compared to 43 percent among their peers who experienced average growth of about 0.17 grade points (Figure 5). • Graduates who spent more than 21 hours per week on responsibilities such as caring for dependents or working a non-law-related job had lower third year (3L) LGPAs and bar passage odds than their peers who spent 0 to 5 hours on these activities (Figure 12). • Graduates who worked in law-related jobs while in law school (Figure 9); graduates who felt that their law school experience contributed “very much” to their skills development (Figure 10); and graduates who regularly participated in class (Figure 11) were modestly more likely to pass the bar exam than other graduates. Collectively, our results suggest that academic and bar exam success are driven by what happens in law school, not just early on, but throughout the experience—and the greatest opportunities for impact exist among those who struggle the most early on.

The Validity of GRE® General Test Scores for Predicting Academic Performance at U.S. Law Schools

AbstractEducational Testing Service (ETS), working with 21 U.S. law schools, evaluated the predictive validity of the GRE® General Test using a sample of 1,587 current and graduated law students. Results indicated that the GRE is a strong, generalizably valid predictor of first‐year law school grades and that it provides useful information even when undergraduate grade point average already is available to predict those grades. This report also reviews the reliability of the GRE General Test that had been determined in prior research.

Positive Legal Education: Flourishing Law Students and Thriving Law Schools

There is a wellbeing crisis in the legal field and legal education may be the catalyst. Law students are the most dissatisfied, demoralized, and depressed of graduate student populations. The Socratic method is infamous for inducing anxiety in law students and law school grades are often determined by a single final exam at the end of a grueling semester. Law students cite competition, grades, and workload as major stressors, and if legal educators ignore their harmful impact, it will likely suppress learning and fuel illness. Law students start law school with strong mental health and high life satisfaction measures, and within the first year of law school experience a significant increase in anxiety and depression. The impairment in wellbeing continues beyond the first year of law school and into legal practice. A recent study surveyed 12,825 lawyers and discovered that 23% of licensed, employed attorneys identify as problem drinkers, 28% experience depression, and 19% suffer from anxiety. Lawyers rank 4th in suicides among professionals and many recent lawyer suicides are linked to depression. Something bad is happening to law students and the wellbeing crisis bleeds into legal practice. Lawyers are leaders in business, government, and the legal system, possessing the power to drive social progress, but they are not living up to that responsibility. Law school socializes students to extreme competition and punishing levels of stress which compromise both wellbeing and cognitive capacity. Lawyers shape policy, and when they are educated to believe that competitive enterprises are the most productive, they promote replicating them throughout society. Neuroscience and Positive Psychology research has established that when it comes to solving problems, cooperative endeavors outperform competitive initiatives. The American love affair with competition stifles creativity, hinders innovation, and thwarts social progress. Competition promotes antagonistic behavior, a combative mentality, and the eternal cycle of the never-ending feud, where all energies are spent on the battle with the opposition, and problems are rarely improved or solved. Progress toward a more equitable society will be enhanced when legal education entrepreneurs train lawyer leaders to be divergent thinkers whose focus is on problem-solving. This article proposes a new field of inquiry called Positive Legal Education that leverages research findings from Positive Psychology, neuroscience, and Positive Education to inspire innovation in legal education and curate a culture of wellbeing in the legal field. Section II of this Article describes the negative impact legal education has on law student wellbeing. Section III explains neuroscience research on habit learning, knowledge acquisition, and the impact of stress on cognition. Section IV details the five Positive Psychology elements required to achieve wellbeing. Section V demonstrates how wellbeing initiatives have improved academic performance and thriving in secondary and college education. Section VI illustrates how law student knowledge-base, legal skill acquisition, and professional identity development can be enhanced with discipline-specific growth mindset and self-efficacy training, and the shift from the grade curve to competency-based grading. Section VII depicts how lawyers can become transformational leaders. Section VIII covers four practices lawyers can undertake to deal with the harmful effects of stress. The article concludes with recommendations for scholars and legal education entrepreneurs who want to transform legal education.

What Predicts Law Student Success? A Longitudinal Study Correlating Law Student Applicant Data and Law School Outcomes

Despite the rise of “big data” empiricism, law school admission remains heavily impressionistic; admission decisions rely on anecdotes about recent students, idiosyncratic preferences for certain majors or jobs, or mainly the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Yet no predictors are well‐validated and studies of the LSAT or other factors fail to control for other factors. The lack of evidence for what actually predicts law school success is especially surprising since, after the 2010s downturn, law schools now compete for fewer applicants. We fill this gap with a two‐school, 1,400‐student, 2005–2011 longitudinal study. We coded nondigitized applicant data and used multivariate regression analysis to predict law school grades (LGPA) from many variables: LSAT; college grades (UGPA), quality, and major; UGPA trajectory; employment duration and type (legal, scientific, military, teaching, etc.); college leadership; prior graduate degree; criminal or disciplinary record; and variable interactions (e.g., high‐LSAT/low‐UGPA or vice‐versa). Our results include new findings about how to balance LSAT and UGPA, plus the first findings that college quality, major, work experience, and other traits are significant predictors of law student grades, controlling for other factors: (1) LSAT predicts more weakly, and UGPA more powerfully, than commonly assumed—and a high‐LSAT/low‐UGPA profile may predict worse than the opposite; (2) a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) or EAF (economics, accounting, finance) major is a significant plus, akin to three and a half to four extra LSAT points; (3) several years’ work experience is a significant plus, with teaching especially positive and military the weakest; (4) a criminal or disciplinary record is a significant minus, akin to seven and a half fewer LSAT points; and (5) long‐noted gender disparities seem to have abated, but racial disparities persist. Some predictors were interestingly nonlinear: college quality has decreasing returns; UGPA has increasing returns; a rising UGPA is a plus only for law students right out of college; and four to nine years of work is a “sweet spot.” Certain groups—those with military or public‐sector work, or a criminal/disciplinary record—have high LGPA variance, indicating a mix of high and low performers requiring close scrutiny. Many traditionally valued traits had no predictive value: typical prelaw majors (political science, history, etc.); legal or public‐sector work; or college leadership. These findings can help identify who can outperform traditional predictors like the LSAT. Several caveats are explained in the article, however, because statistical models cannot capture certain difficult‐to‐code key traits: some who project to have weak grades retain appealing lawyering or leadership potential; and many will over‐ or underperform any projection. Thus, admissions will always be both art and science—but perhaps with a bit more science.

The Impact of Individualized Feedback on Law Student Performance

For well over a century, first-year law students have typically not received any individualized feedback in their core classes other than their grades on final exams. Although critics have long assailed this pedagogical model, remarkably limited empirical evidence exists regarding the extent to which increased feedback improves law students' outcomes. This Article helps fill this gap by focusing on a natural experiment at the University of Minnesota Law School. The natural experiment arises from the assignment of first-year law students to one of several “sections,” each of which is taught by a common slate of professors. A random subset of these professors provides students with individualized feedback other than their final grades. Meanwhile, students in two different sections are occasionally grouped together in a first-year class. We find that in these double section classes, students in sections that have previously or concurrently had a professor who provides individualized feedback consistently outperform students in sections that have not received any such feedback. The effect is both statistically significant and hardly trivial in magnitude, approaching about 1/3 of a grade increment after controlling for students’ LSAT scores, undergraduate GPA, gender, race, and country of birth. This effect corresponds to a 3.7 point increase in students’ LSAT scores in our model. Additionally, the positive impact of feedback is stronger among students whose combined LSAT score and undergraduate GPA falls below the median at the University of Minnesota Law School. These findings substantially advance the literature on law school pedagogy, demonstrating that individualized feedback in a single class during the first-year of law school can improve law students' exam quality in all of their other classes. In light of the broader literature on the importance of formative feedback in effective teaching, these findings suggest that, at a minimum, law schools should systematically provide first-year law students with individualized feedback in at least one “core” doctrinal first-year class prior to final exams. Doing so would almost certainly have positive distributional consequences and improve the fairness of law school grades. It would also likely promote students’ acquisition of relevant legal skills. Finally, this reform would help implement the American Bar Association’s recent requirement that law schools utilize formative assessment methods in their curricula.

What Makes a Law Student Succeed or Fail? A Longitudinal Study Correlating Law Student Applicant Data and Law School Outcomes

Despite the rise of big data empiricism, law school admission remains heavily impressionistic; admission decisions based on anecdotes about recent students, idiosyncratic preferences for certain majors or jobs, or mainly the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Yet no predictors are well-validated; studies of the LSAT or other factors fail to control for college quality, major, work experience, etc. The lack of evidence of what actually predicts law school success is especially surprising after the 2010s downturn left schools competing for fewer applicants and left potential students less sure of law school as a path to future success. We aim to fill this gap with a two-school, 1400-student, 2005-2012 longitudinal study. After coding non-digitized applicant data, we used multivariate regression analysis to predict law school grades (LGPA) from many variables: LSAT; college grades (UGPA), quality, and major; UGPA trajectory; employment duration and type (legal, scientific, military, teaching, etc.); college leadership; prior graduate degree; criminal or discipline record; and variable interactions (e.g., high-LSAT/low-UGPA or vice-versa).Our results include not only new findings about how to balance LSAT and UGPA, but the first findings that college quality, major, work experience, and other traits are significant predictors: (1) controlling for other variables, LSAT predicts more weakly, and UGPA more powerfully, than commonly assumed – and a high-LSAT/low-UGPA profile may predict worse than the opposite; (2) a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) or EAF (economics, accounting, finance) major is a significant plus, akin to 3½-4 extra LSAT points; (3) several years' work experience is a significant plus, with teaching especially positive and military the weakest; (4) a criminal or disciplinary record is a significant minus, akin to 7½ fewer LSAT points; and (5) long-noted gender disparities seem to have abated, but racial disparities persist. Some predictors were interestingly nonlinear: college quality has decreasing returns; UGPA has increasing returns; a rising UGPA is a plus only for law students right out of college; and 4-9 years of work is a sweet spot, with neither 1-3 or 10 years' work experience significant. Some, such as those with military or science work, have high LGPA variance, indicating a mix of high and low performers requiring close scrutiny. Many traditionally valued traits had no predictive value: typical pre-law majors (political science, history, etc.); legal or public sector work; or college leadership.These findings can help identify who can outperform overvalued predictors like the LSAT. A key caveat is that statistical models cannot capture certain difficult-to-code key traits: some who project to have weak grades retain appealing lawyering or leadership potential; and many will over- or under-perform any projection. Thus, admissions will always be both art and science – but perhaps with a bit more science.

Why-Rac? Revisiting the Traditional Paradigm for Writing About Legal Analysis

You made the grades. You took the LSAT. You accepted an invitation to the law school of your choice. Now, you have to do it all over again. This time you need to make the law school grades, in order to be invited to join the law firm of your choice. To make the grade, you need to employ the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) method of case briefing for the next three years of your life. IRAC enables readers to easily follow your legal writing.

Character strengths and academic performance in law students

We examined law student character and academic performance. Incoming students from Emory University (N=132) and American University (N=164) completed the Values in Action Character Strengths Inventory. Strengths were compared to a sample of U.S. lawyers (N=6,219) and six other samples (N=135,814). Law students demonstrated a normal range of characteristics, similar to other highly educated groups. Top strengths included judgment, curiosity, love of learning, and fairness. Strengths were positively related to undergraduate grades, but negatively related to LSAT scores and law school grades. Findings suggest a selection effect, such that character matters more for entry into law school, at least on one main admission criterion, but matters less for academic success once there.

The Secret of My Success: How Status, Eliteness, and School Performance Shape Legal Careers

If we study the 40,000 law graduates who join the legal profession each year, how well can we predict their future careers? How much of their future is predicted by their social class? The law school they attend? Their law school grades? This article undertakes the first in‐depth examination of these questions. Drawing on several large and recently released data sets, we examine the role of class, school prestige, and law school grades on the career earnings of lawyers and the success of big firm associates in becoming partners. We find that social class strongly conditions who goes to law school, but no longer predicts much about postgraduate outcomes. Law school prestige is important, but it is generally trumped by law school performance (as measured by law school grades). Law school grades reflect both personal characteristics not well captured by prelaw credentials, and one's relative position in a law school class as measured by prelaw credentials. Our findings suggest that there is little empirical basis for the overwhelming importance students assign to “eliteness” in choosing a law school.

Scholarships at Risk: The Mathematics of Merit Stipulations in Law School Financial Aid

Many law schools in the United States condition financial aid grants on the recipients’ maintenance of a certain grade point average. These merit stipulations require students to meet or exceed minimum academic standards in order to keep all or part of their financial aid. Law students should take merit stipulations into account when they decide whether to accept an offer of admission paired with a conditional grant of financial aid. By all accounts, they do not. Law schools should transparently disclose the likely effect of merit stipulations on their financial aid awards. By all accounts, law schools do no such thing. Absent external coercion, they are unlikely to change their current practices. In the absence of industry-wide standards counseling full disclosure of financial aid practices, this article will try to equip law school applicants with the mathematical tools to assess the real impact of merit stipulations on their financial well being.This article first presents very simple models for discounting financial aid awards for the risk of failure to uphold a merit stipulation. It outlines a simple methodology for calculating the expected value of a financial aid award subject to a merit stipulation. The article also evaluates one extraordinary circumstance in which a law school has implicitly revealed its break-even point - the amount of aid that the school would award if it did not impose any merit stipulations.Building upon those foundations, this article performs a comprehensive analysis of law school grades and merit stipulations as artifacts of the standard normal distribution. It performs three distinct tasks. This article defines standard scores and explains how law school grading is based on the relationship between the standard score of each student’s raw score and the mean and standard deviation of of the distribution as a whole. This article then describes the risk of failure to satisfy a merit stipulation in terms of the normal distribution’s cumulative distribution function. For those instances in which the risk of failure to satisfy a particular school’s merit stipulation is known, this article demonstrates how to use the inverse cumulative distribution function to estimate the mean and standard deviation of a school’s grade distribution. As a bonus, this final exercise provides an introduction to value-at-risk analysis, a leading tool for assessing risk in global capital markets.

Predicting Lawyer Effectiveness: Broadening the Basis for Law School Admission Decisions

Law school admission decisions are heavily influenced by a student's undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score. These measures, although predictive of first-year law school grades, make no effort to predict professional competence and, for the most part, they do not. These measures also create adverse impact on applicants from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. This article describes the rationale for and process by which we explored new tests to predict lawyer effectiveness rather than law school grades and reports results of a multiyear empirical study involving over 3,000 graduates from Berkeley Law School and Hastings College of the Law. Tests measuring personality constructs, interests, values, and judgment predicted lawyering competency but had little or no adverse impact on underrepresented minority applicants. Combined with the LSAT and UGPA, these broader tests could assess law applicants on the basis both of projected professional effectiveness and academic indicators.

The Secret of My Success: How Status, Prestige and School Performance Shape Legal Careers

Rewards are distributed more unevenly within the legal profession than in virtually any other occupation. Most of those who study the careers of lawyers would agree that law school eliteness, law school grades, and social status each play a role in determining which lawyers capture the greatest rewards. But remarkably little effort has been made to directly compare these inputs in explaining career outcomes, to see which of the three matters most, and how they interact.In this paper, we first examine general beliefs about the importance each of these three factors has upon lawyer careers – beliefs among academics as well as beliefs among the actual participants in the sorting process. We next present some specific findings about each of the three factors. Finally, we directly compare the three factors in regression models of career outcomes. The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school – as measured by law school grades – is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school “eliteness.” Socioeconomic factors play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but little or no discernible role in shaping post-graduate careers. Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all-important, and since students who “trade-up” in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message.

Is the partnership gap closing for women? Cohort differences in the sex gap in partnership chances

This paper test predictions from three social science explanations as to how sex differences in attainment of partnership and how women’s perceptions of sex discrimination should have changed as women have been integrated into law. Men’s and women’s partnership rates 15 years after graduation and women’s reports of sex discrimination are compared for two cohorts of University of Michigan Law School graduates: the classes of 1972 to 1978 and the classes of 1979 to 1985. Four stages at which women are selected out of, or select themselves out of, the path to partnership are investigated: (1) career plans at graduation; (2) entry into a firm; (3) early attrition from firm practice; and (4) the attainment of partnership among non-attriters. The sex gap in attaining partnership dropped across cohorts, primarily due to declines in sex differences at the first three stages; but sex differences in the percentage of non-attriters who were partners 15 years after graduation declined little across cohorts, both before and after controlling for career plans, legal specialization, work experience, law school grades, and family situations. And in both cohorts, roughly 90 percent of women reported experiences of sex discrimination.

Michigan's Minority Graduates in Practice: The River Runs Through Law School

This paper reports the results of a 1997–98 survey designed to explore the careers of the University of Michigan Law School's minority graduates from the classes of 1970 through 1996, and of a random sample of Michigan Law School's white alumni who graduated during the same years. It is to date the most detailed quantitative exploration of how minority students fare after they graduate from law school and enter law practice or related careers. The results reveal that almost all of Michigan Law School's minority graduates pass a bar exam and go on to have careers that appear successful by conventional measures. In particular, the survey indicates that minority graduates (defined so as to include graduates with African American, Latino, and Native American backgrounds) are no less successful than white graduates, whether success is measured by the log of current income, self-reported satisfaction, or an index of service contributions. Also, although an admissions index that combines LSAT scores and undergraduate grade-point average is a significant predictor of law school grades, it does not predict career success on any of our three outcome measures. Michigan is a highly selective law school; our results may not generalize to people who have graduated from other law schools.

A Comparison of Two Adjustment Methods for Improving the Prediction of Law School Grades

In this study, two statistical approaches for adjusting grades were tested on data obtained from four American law schools. These approaches were previously validated using data on undergraduates but have not been used in a study of postgraduate performance. Neither method yielded consistent improvements in the predictive validity of Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores and undergraduate grades. The single exception was for School D, where a significant improvement in the correlation of test scores with law school grades was observed. It is hypothesized that the greater variability of LSAT scores in School D was the main reason for this result.

AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF FIVE METHODS OF SHORTENING A TEST*

ABSTRACTThis study was designed to provide an empirical comparison of the following methods of shortening the Law School Admission Test: (1) Internal consistency item analysis; (2) External criterion item analysis; (3) A method involving the ratio of item‐criterion correlation to item‐subtest correlation, substantially as described by Gulliksen; (4) A method described by Horst for estimating optimal times for subtests; and (5) A linear method for estimating optimal times for subtests. The analysis was carried out separately for two parallel subsamples of 500 first‐year law school students, and trial scoring keys requiring 135 minutes of testing time were assembled from material originally requiring 190 minutes.When the trial scoring keys obtained from one subsample were validated against first‐year law school grades for the opposite subsample, the results were as follows: For one subsample, the validity coefficients for the five trial keys ranged from .568 to .576; the coefficient for total score on the 190 minute test was .586. For the second subsample, the validities of the trial keys were between .483 and .496, as compared with .493 for the 190 minute test.

THE LAW SCHOOL ADMISSION TEST AS A PREDICTOR OF LAW SCHOOL GRADES*

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONSThe effectiveness of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) as a predictor of first‐year law school grades grades was evaluated in a series of studies initiated in the summer of 1949. This report is based on the findings of studies is eighteen law schools, including twelve schools which provided data on some measure of the previous academic success of their students. The eighteen law schools on which this report is based include all schools now represented on the Policy Committee of the Law School Admission Test which had test scores on 25 or more students.The principal finding of this study is that Law School Admission Test scores are distinctly useful alone or preferably as supplementary to evidence of previous academic success in predicting first‐year grades of law students. This conclusion, is based on the fact than the predictive effectiveness of the combined predictors is represented by a correlation coefficient of .52, as compared with a value of .40 for the test alone and of .38 for previous academic success alone. These figures summarize results based on 1725 day students in 12 law schools. In ten of those twelve schools the test score equalled or excelled the college record as a predictor of first‐year lay grades.The Law School Admission Teal had a validity coefficient of .44 based on the pooled results from 18 groups of day students and three groups of evening students. A coefficient of this size indicates definite usefulness in prediction of graces for the best used alone. It would reasonably be expected that the coefficients obtained would have been higher if the students had net been selected, at least in part, on the basis of test scores.In a number of law schools, attention was given to the possibility that the number of years of pre‐law college work might be considered an additional determiner in predicting success. It was found, however, that no appreciable gains in predicting success could be obtained by using this information. Similarly, it was found that no appreciable gain in prediction could be obtained by taking into account whether or not the student had received his undergraduate education at the same university in which he was attending law school.