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< | I am in the pre-writing state here, but wan't to start putting stuff out there. |
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< | The LSAT Should Not be a Factor in Law School Admissions |
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> | I am going to delete the LSAT stuff for now, but will return if this paper flames out. Thanks for the comments. |
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< | 1. The LSAT does not test for the skills necessary to be an innovative, successful lawyer.
- No synthesis, writing, or speaking requirement.
- The Test is multiple choice that rewards elimination and guessing as much as comprehension and analysis.
How is elimination different from comprehension and analysis?
- The test is highly structured, a confined environmental anachronistic to the real world
- The test is time limited, rewarding those who read quickly
- Promotes individual work, rather than collaboration
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> | Teaching 1Ls |
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> | The Ideal |
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< | 2. The result of LSAT based admissions is a less diverse, less interesting, and less accomplished student body.
- The Test itself is quite learnable, thus assessing thinks like (1) prudence (2) leisure time (3) wealth and (4) planning, rather than critical thinking
- Working within a “confined universe of knowledge” leads to intellectually conservative thinking and the standardization of problem solving.
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> | Vision, Assessment, and Planning (VAP) |
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< | 3. Why the LSAT lives on
- Makes it easy for admissions officers
- It is a huge industry
- The US News Rankings
- It is a stepping stone to being a corporate drone, so the big firms like it
- Prisoner’s Dilemma Among Law Schools
- No one with any power has any incentive to change it.
- Students are just tourists at their schools, their professors are increasingly academics, not teachers.
- The schools on top won’t shake the status quo, those underneath have to play the game and hope for crumbs.
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> | Teach For America, after investigating commonalities between successful classroom teachers, found that achievement is predicated upon (1) a clear vision of student achievement (2) plans aligned to that vision and (3) assessments that facilitate self-reflection while providing accurate information about student learning.
VAP in the Classroom |
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< | -- AdamCarlis - 24 Mar 2008 |
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> | To achieve high levels of student learning, a teacher must enter the year with a clear goal. He or she must know exactly where they are going and what their students will know and be able to do when they get there. Otherwise, the classroom becomes aimless or based on content coverage rather than student mastery. By itself, however, even an ambitious goal is insufficient. Strong teachers break down their goal into units, weeks, days, classes, and activities – each concentric circle aligned to the one before so that every moment is used in a purposeful, goal-aligned way. Finally, the best teachers recognize that assessments are useful, not only because of what they say about student learning, but also because of what they reveal about teacher effectiveness. Good teachers use assessments to improve their teaching. |
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> | Teaching as Leadership |
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< | If your argument is that the LSAT should not be a FACTOR in law school admissions, you should also talk about the other factors that law schools use (grades, essays, recommendations, resume-experiences, pedigrees). Maybe you want to interview someone in admissions and ask them how much WEIGHT they assign to each of these factors. |
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> | This framework is not unique. It amounts to little more than applying fundamental characteristics of strong leadership to the classroom. When Eben says “all it takes to achieve a goal is to know exactly what you want to accomplish and exactly how to get there,” he is articulating the same concept. When Barry Goldstein prepares a class action lawsuit, he starts by thinking about the settlement he seeks and then traces back the steps required to get there. This is what leaders do. While this way of thinking is unnatural to some, it can be taught, developed, and mastered. One can learn to be a leader. |
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< | You should also account somewherefor the fact that LSAT scores successfully predict 1L grades (i.e. within a given university's entering 1L class). That may just be a sign that the 1L curriculum and/or its testing system has a lot of the flaws of the LSAT. But it's worth mentioning that "a given university's entering 1L class" is a good way to control certain variables (although I don't know what they are.) (maybe the classes aren' tdiverse) |
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> | Current Practice |
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< | If you plan to pursue this paper idea, I'd like to talk to you, because I really can't imagine how it can be written. |
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> | The first year program at Columbia Law School lacks teacher leadership. |
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< | -- AndrewGradman - 27 Mar 2008 |
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> | I have spoken with each of my professors about their approach to teaching. Only one has mentioned concrete things they want their students to be able to do at the end of the semester. Vaguely, professors have articulated broad goals around critical thinking, speaking (listening is almost never mentioned), and information synthesis rather than concrete things students will accomplish. Their focus is on coverage of content not depth of understanding.
Assessment is almost uniformly disastrous. Despite daily opportunities for informal assessment, syllabi are not adjusted for reasons other than time constraints. Where teachers should be determining student mastery and adjusting course, they are, instead, going through the motions of the Socratic Method, student by student, until they reach the end of their list. Calling on students is more an exercise in keeping us on our toes than in information gathering. |
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> | As for planning, the syllabi we receive are not roadmaps from ignorance to content mastery, but checklists covering various topics within a doctrine. We are taking survey classes as if they were Sunday drives: this is not mission driven education. Having students conform to a generic plan, rather than adapting instruction to student needs, prevents the majority of students from maximizing their achievement. The “read the next three cases in the casebook” approach to curriculum mapping is not mere laziness, but evidence of a misunderstanding of purpose.
I am not saying our professors don’t care. Quite the opposite is true. Almost without exception, each of my professors have been truly interested in my learning. They want us to do well and they want to help, but they don’t seem to know how. |
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> | Excuses |
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> | Clearly, law school is different than high school. This is a professional school where instruction is designed to separate the wheat from the shaft and our professors are academics with research and writing to do. Fortunately, even if we accept those premises as true, much can be done to improve legal education in the first year.
How can we get Better? |
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> | Improvement rests on teachers taking personal ownership over student learning. Therefore, Columbia must either (1) instill that mentality in all of our faculty members or (2) only allow those committed to student learning teach 1Ls. Either way, we must provide an opportunity for those committed instructors to align their practice with the teaching as leadership framework discussed above. |
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< | Like the comment above, there is a study of a strong correlation between the LSAT scores and 1L grades. Yet another study (done by Michigan University, I think. Professor Heller told us about it in class) found that law school grades have no correlation whatsoever to anything (money, partnership, etc.) down the life. You could probably search for them if you are interested. If those are true, you can develope the idea that the skills you need to score high on the LSAT and the skills you need to succeed in law school in terms of grades overlap, but both do not really have any relationship to how good of a lawyer you will be. Just a thought. |
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> | Quick Wins |
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< | -- JayunKoo - 27 Mar 2008 |
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> | First, I reject the idea that our professors do not take teaching seriously. Jack Greenberg, for example, doesn’t need to work another day in his life. He is here because he enjoys it. The same can be said about most (all?) of his colleagues. Faculty members are accessible, if not eager to assist, and already spend time preparing for class. Just as colleges and grade schools provide professional development, we should, in addition to opportunities for faculty to discuss current developments in the law, create space for learning about current developments in education. Armed with the tools necessary to improve student learning across the board, many of our professors would take the initiative to adapt their practice. |
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> | Second, the class curve masks teacher effectiveness. If every class has the same grade distribution, outcomes are not tied to teacher input. Instead, student grades should reflect how close they came to meeting ambitious classroom goals and they should be treated both as a reflection of student ability and teacher performance.
Such changes would not destroy the school’s ability to differentiate student ability. Instead, it would ensure that every student reached their maximum potential while giving professors more precise knowledge about individual student achievement which they, in turn, could use to make judgments about a particular student’s work. |
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< | Someone should test 1L grades as a predictor of the quality/duration of your friendships with your law school classmates. (I meant to make a joke at expense of antisocial gunners, but actually it sounds like a worthy theory.) |
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> | Conclusion |
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< | (thirty minutes later) I was drifting off to sleep and had this awesome idea for a poll you could do. Anonymously, (maybe create a website and hand out the hyperlink on a scrap of paper) ask 2Ls and 3Ls, "On a scale of 0-100 [i.e. 120-180, weighted] how well do you think LSAT scores, in general, predict 1L grades?" Then, ask for their LSAT score and the average grade they got as 1Ls. |
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> | By aligning teacher practice during the 1L year with the basic principles of classroom leadership instruction will be more focused, student mastery will increase, and, therefore, Columbia will graduate more proficient lawyers. Since many (if not the vast majority) of the faculty already has the requisite desire to see students succeed, equipping them with the tools necessary to ensure such success does not present a major hurdle to a 1L curriculum focused on student learning. |
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< | Ask the questions in THAT ORDER, and I predict that the LSAT score will be correlated, BOTH with their grades, AND ALSO with "How well they think LSAT scores correlate with grades" -- which is funny, because pretty much everyone has NO EVIDENCE for how LSATs and grades correlate, except for their own grades, plus, if they're as lazy and as vulnerable to urban legends as me, some vague notion that scientists say there is a good correlation. Meaning my theory, if validated, says that people are capable of amazing amounts of self-deception. |
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< | I did a google search to figure out the correlation, but when I stopped when I saw this link -- http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3735/is_200601/ai_n17179610/pg_1 |
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< | -- AndrewGradman - 27 Mar 2008 |
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< | I appreciate the comments. I am thinking about writing a significantly different paper, but I do want to address one point here. The correlation between LSAT and law school grades seems to be either (1) irrelevant or (2) confirming of the problems with the LSAT. |
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< | I think we all could write 1000 words on why the average law school exam fails to accurately measure either our own content knowledge or legal prowess. After my first exam I made a conscious decision to shut down the creative part of my brain and just write an answer. Embarrassingly, my grades on my second and third exams were higher. Being able to predict future exam results, if doing well on exams does not mean one will be a good lawyer, seems to be irrelevant. I imagine the correlation is due to the fact that the two things assess similar qualities (reading quickly, memory, intellectually conservative thinking).
-- AdamCarlis - 28 Mar 2008 |
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