Paul Caron points to an interesting new study looking at the average LSAT performance prospective law students' grouped by major.
Using 1994-1995 and 2002-2003 data, Nieswiadomy (1998, 2006) found that economics majors scored well on the LSAT. These results are frequently posted on university web sites by Economics and other departments. This note, which updates the prior studies using current 2007-2008 data for the 2008-2009 class of students entering law school, finds that Economics majors still perform at or near the top of all majors taking the test. Economics majors (LSAT score of 157.4) are tied for first (with Philosophy) of the 12 largest disciplines (those with more than 1,900 students entering law school). Economics is tied for second (with Philosophy/Religion (157.4)) behind Physics/Math (160.0) in a set of 29 discipline groupings that are created to yield at least 450 students with similar majors.Paul Caron also reproduces a table with the results.
What explains these results? Certainly there could be some amount of self-selection. For instance, I think it's reasonable to assume that only a small portion of physics and math majors take the LSAT, and it is possible that those who take the LSAT have have a greater aptitude for legal reasoning (insofar as that is what the LSAT tests) than do physics and math majors generally. But I also think the data suggests that those disciplines that place a greater emphasis on logic and syllogistic reasoning are better preparation for the LSAT than those that do not.
UPDATE: An interesting thought from the comments: The nation's most selective universities are less likely to offer a "Prelaw" major, therefore the results may reflect the fact that a Yale undergraduate who wants to go to law school may be a history or philosophy major, while an undergrad with the same interests at a less selective school might major in Prelaw or criminal justice. Also, it's curious that the study does not group political science and government majors. Assuming that few schools offer both majors, is it possible that more selective schools are more likely to offer one than the other? Might that explain the three point difference in LSAT averages between the two groups?
But, I am not sure that that makes them any better lawyers. Indeed, I would suggest that hard work, instead of intellectual brilliance, is more important for the practice of law.
It used to be that "Political Science" was a major in all but two universities: the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard. In those two, the college is "Government." So, perhaps, the graduates from Harvard and Texas are a cut above political science majors from other universities.
When I decided I didn't want to go to med school and would go to law school instead, I was informed by my counselor that there was no such degree as pre-law. I had heard that Business was easy, so I said that I would be a business major. My counselor quickly shot that one down as well, showing me all the potential majors within that area. At the top of that list was accounting, so I became an accounting major.
It that actually true? It sounds like the sort of thing that might get bandied around by Texas grads to rarify their diploma.
I have found, as an Economics major, that exposure to the rigorous application of econometrics and being able to translate statistical data into words has paid off tremendously.
Taking statistics teaches students what stats are good for and what they're not. I had to take two semesters of stats for my Economics major, and from what I understand, this is more than the norm.
While I wouldn't "encourage" people to take any major for law school, I have found that my interest in philosophy, taking a few law classes here and there, and taking tough courses that concentrate heavily on abstract concepts help me way more on the LSAT than any one thing.
Kaplan can turn a half ass student into a decent one, but if you already have the basics down, the sky is really the limit.
I was officially an economics major, and I took the LSAT on a dare. My total preparation consisted of getting a good night's sleep.
No, plenty of schools use terminology other than "Political Science." UVa has a Department of Politics. Besides the schools Allan metioned, American, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, and Wesleyan have Departments of Government. You can find more if you keep looking.
I think that is a big part of it. The converse is that every top school does offer philosphy and economics degrees, the two highest scored majors. And there are lower quality schools that do not offer philosophy degrees or logic courses at all. There may be lower quality schools that do not offer economics degrees either, but I am not sure of that.
I never took the LSAT, but got a 780 on the logic section of the GRE when they still had that as part of the test and I was a philophy major (purely anecdoatal evidence I know). I even had fun taking and preparing for that part of the test since it was sort of a giant suduko/word puzzle, but then I also eagerly signed up for a symbolic logic course as an undergrad.
At my college, we have both an informal 'pre-law' program - run by someone in PoliSci - and an interdisciplinary Philosophy/Political Thought major.
We discovered that the person in charge of 'pre-law'was telling students interested in law school that they just had to major in PoliSci/Government. So, one of my older colleagues took to posting information about our grads - from PHIL and from the PPT program - who went to law school: where they went, what they did after finishing. His lists compared these grads with those from the 'pre-law' program. To make it a bit less obvious, he posted similar data about our grads who went into MBA programs, compared with the Business grads, and who went to medical school, as compoared with the pre-med grads.
When the pre-law guy and the Head of Business heard about the comparative results, they went to the Dean to complain that it was not 'fair' of the philosophers to use data that made their programs look less promising.
I'm not sure if they thought it was having philosophers use data that was unfair, or just that their grads did not do as well.
One of the first things I did was get some sample LSATs.
I first ran through a random selection of questions from each area in the first test to get a feel for what the questions were like.
Then I ran through a subset of the questions (every third or fourth question I think) on the second sample test. As I went through the questions, I was surprised by how easy they were (sometimes I would actually reread the question because I thought I must be missing something because they couldn't be that easy). When I scored my results I was even more surprised that I had gotten them all right. Admittedly, I wasn't working under time, performance, or environmental stress factors, but I didn't spend much time on each question, nor check any of my answers after completing each one. It's possible there just isn't enough time to complete the questions and the LSAT is mostly testing how fast one can run through simple problems.
This lead me to seriously question the validity of the LSAT for anything having to do with law school. I just don't see how it was relevant to reading gobs of cases, remembering the cites and relevant facts, and applying these to new situations weeks or months (or, in practice, years) later and explaining my position concisely and convincingly (if you got this far, you know that concise and well structured writing is not my strength!).
One flaw in the LSAT section(s?) that appeared to be intended to tease out reading comp/retention was that it was trivial to (1) read question then (2) read passage. In most cases, could just skim the passage, already knowing the question, and answer the question correctly -- no real comprehension required. Seems that more real world method that would avoid this technique would have been to present a bunch of passages for the test subjects to read (allowing note taking), collect those passages from the test subjects (leaving them with just notes), and then present the questions.
I was amused by the "word problems" aimed at testing logical skills. Having read a lot about interactions between Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, and Eve in my professional work, it took two questions before I realized that the LSAT was even spoon feeding me names with nice obvious symbols for my expressions and diagrams - it's quite possible that someone from, say political science, who had not prepped for the LSAT (does anyone do this?) might not have realized this until well into the test.
Overall, it seemed to me that the LSAT was really biased towards being easy for engineering/science types who also happened to be fairly good readers of (moderately) complex passages in English.
My sad story is that I took an LSAT prep course before taking the LSAT. But I also took the Business School equivalent the next week, without taking the prep course. No surprise, I scored 100 points higher on the LSAT - but then went on and got my MBA first.
I doubt it. I scored in the 98th percentile on the ACT. The LSAT is a totally different ball game.
This is done for a good reason. They're testing your logical reasoning skills. Confusing you with the names would screw that all up, by allowing people to make errors that had nothing to do with their reasoning skills.
I disagree. The LSAT is a logic test, plain and simple. Prior knowledge of the subjects is a waste of time, and can actually harm your performance on the test.
The analysis shows that it clearly isn't. A better question might be "what is a pre-law curriculum?" I don't know of many colleges or universities that offer a pre-law major, for good reason.
I find that many bright high school students expect that a pre-professional program will give them a leg-up when they apply to and attend a professional graduate school. While that may be true for medicine, it isn't for law. My limited knowledge of pre-med curricula suggests that they are intended to provide a foundation of scientific knowledge essential to the study of medicine (though my experience with physician clients suggests that a pre-med or medical school curriculum should require at least one year of accounting as well).
Instead of trying to identify the "right" major to choose in preparation for law school, aspiring lawyers should look for rigorous curricula that interest them and that emphasize analytical thought and written and verbal communication. It's easy to find a way to use almost any moderately rigorous college major in the practice of law. Though I never dreamed I would one day practice tax law as an undergraduate, my religion major turned out to be great preparation for a tax practice (some economics and accounting classes didn't hurt either). Learn to learn, communicate, and delve into the depths of a field of study (or at least hone those skills) as an undergraduate. Learn law in law school.
It is a test of endurance as much as anything else - concentrating intently for 4 hours can be draining. I prepared by taking two full practice tests under exam conditions, and I think that served me well.
As does Oberlin. It used to be Government.
Studies show that economics majors do well on the LSAT. Therefore, the study of economics must prepare you for the LSAT.
The argument is most vulnerable to which of the following criticisms?...
It's not surprising that people from economics and other math oriented fields (and philosophy) do well on the LSAT. It is essentially a test of logic and the ability to apply rules and math is merely logic using numbers and learning and applying rules to numbers. I would guess, however, that the correlation is at least as much due to people who are logical being drawn to those types of majors rather than the undergrad coursework actually preparing you for the LSAT.
If you think four hours of LSAT is draining, you should reconsider law. Law school exams are frequently 3+ hours, the bar exam is 2-3 days, and then there are the years of billing 6/7/8/9/10 hours a day, and I don't even work at a big law firm. Not that I would choose another career, but endurance is vital.
It wasn't 0-800, it was 200-800. The current test scores from 120-180. All they really did was drop a zero from the one's place and add a 1 to the new hundreds place. You can translate your score reasonably well by doing that.
A true translation is slightly more complicated. Ideally, you'd know your percentile rank on your test and then you could compare it to the percentile for a given year on the new one (they fluctuate within a point or so). Even then, you'd need to keep in mind the Flynn Effect. To the extent LSAT's are proxies for IQ tests, you should see the same effect.
I agree with Prof. Kerr that there's likely to be a high correlation with SAT scores.
I also bought a book with more practice tests, and I think I did 6 or 7 altogether. At first I did them untimed, then giving myself about 30% more time than the limit, and then duplicating test conditions.
I had been out of school for many years by this point, so I was really just getting myself back in the habit of taking tests at all. I might have gotten by with less preparation if it hadn't been for that gap. And I spread the practice tests out over several weeks, so it wasn't that big a deal to do them.
Result was top 2% and my first choice of law schools, so I was pleased.
Hmmm ... my son graduated from Harvard in 2008 as a philosophy major (though in Cambridge they call it a "concentration" rather than a "major"). Though I'd be the first to crow that the lad has a certain amount of native wit, I have to say that his score on the "willingness to work very, very hard" scale is by no means in the 99th percentile. Or in the top quartile. Or, in areas such as, say, cleaning the garage, above basement level.
It is also called government (at the behest of the department) at my alma mater apparently because government comes earlier in the alphabetical listing of majors in the student handbook (as a small liberal arts college with fewer choices of majors, this means that government appears near the beginning of the list).
Apparently he hasn't explained to you the full implications of the vita contemplativa.
I think the more likely cause of this ranking is self-selection of people. Math majors are more likely to be interested (and thus likely better) at logic puzzles, which is 1/4 of the exam. The same is probably true for econ majors (which seems like business + math), engineers and chemists. Theology and Philosophy probably do a considerable amount of reading and critiquing, 1/2 of the LSAT exam.
By contrast, I think that some of the lower majors are a lot more ephemeral and touchy-feely. I don't see many sociology/social work majors wanting to do complicated logic puzzles.
It's all a reflection of who selects these majors in the first place.
I strongly suspect that the impact is at the low end. You will flunk out of math, physics, philosophy, chemistry or engineering if you don't have the same aptitudes that the LSAT calls for. In contrast, many humanities and social sciences can tolerate a fair amount of mediocrity and still allow you to take more classes with bad, but not flunking grades. If you can write an essay and turn it in you will at least pass.
Also, some of the low ranking majors are typical of associates degree to four year college transfers, or of non-selective schools. They are terminal degrees oriented towards people with low prospects of going to graduate school.
The bad news is that the ranking also shows a basic problem with the LSAT. A test that selects most strongly for abstract logic is going to strongly select for hard science/philosophy types whom ordinary experience makes clear are not the people most suited to be lawyers. If the typical person who your selection criteria identifies doesn't have much in common with the typical person who is a success in the endeavor that you are making the selection to choose, your test is broken.
Put another way, the LSAT would work better if it were pass/fail. While utter inability to reason logically is bad in a lawyer, exquisite logical reasoning ability may even be a bad rather than a good thing. "The life of law is not reason, it is experience." Lots of legal reasoning isn't rigorously logical. Judges end up favoring logically inferior arguments all the time. Reasoning ability is something with diminishing marginal returns.
In my undergrad experience you did not have to work hard at all to do well in philosphy courses, at least compared to the other subjects I took. You had to be pretty smart, in the sense of being able to understand very abstract concepts and then use logic to interpret and communicate the meanings of these concepts to other people. For work you had to read through some pretty dense texts and then write about them, but generally either you did not find that to be "work" or you picked another major. Those skills also translate well into LSAT tests and lawschool.
I wonder if "Government/Service" means the something like the service academies, not the alternative name for political science. This explanation has problems, too.
I skimmed the paper on SSRN but could not find any answers.
I have to say that his score on the "willingness to work very, very hard" scale is by no means in the 99th percentile. Or in the top quartile. Or, in areas such as, say, cleaning the garage, above basement level.
Oooh, may I tell this to a colleague at Harvard?
Or, perhaps less fun, you were reflecting on your son's lack of hard work around the home. I have the same experience with my eldest, whose professors rave about her work ethic. My husband and I just look at each other. (This being, after all, the person whose idea of vacuming a room is to only do the middle bit.)
For work you had to read through some pretty dense texts and then write about them, but generally either you did not find that to be "work" or you picked another major.
That seems about right. I assume/hope that the papers were assessed rigorously for clarity, precision, and insight.
Bless you. Indeed, most philosophers do NOT think our discipline should be lumped with theology (or, worse yet, with 'Religion'). Unfortunately, this is the standard categorial scheme.
I have no idea, on the other hand, what 'Service' means when paired with 'Government.'
Vacuum? You can get her to vacuum? Doesn't that imply a gap between the junk on the floor and the, well, floor?
I nominate you Parent of the Year.
Oh, thank you.
Of course, you have to understand that there are, umm, coercive factors at work - like access to car keys, allowance, familial guilt, etc. We try to think of these as carrots rather than sticks. She, oddly, does not see it that way.
I wonder also about the kind of people who major in physics and then take the LSAT - doesn't nearly everyone who major in "pre-law" take the LSAT? You'd think there'd be at least a little self-selection in the most unrelated majors (engineering, etc.) for people who think they'd be good at taking the LSAT (and who probably made the decision to take the test, and possibly established the general interest in law school, at two to three years older than the criminal justice kids.) Also, a lot of the lower-ranked majors listed have a lot of adult students (at least, at Ohio State they did.) I bet they also account for a lot of the "I got my BA fifteen years ago and now I want to go to law school" types.
Oh, and if you're a physics major taking the LSAT, I bet you're more likely to also be prepping for the GRE and the GMAT, than someone who's always planned on going to law school. Prepping for these different tests probably gives you at least a bit of an edge.
(Which isn't to say that I don't believe that engineering majors, on average, are better prepared for something like the LSAT than criminal justice majors, on average. I just think it's probably more complicated than "dumb people pick easy-sounding majors I could never see myself signing up for," which seems to be a theory expressed in a lot of the preceding comments.)
(Also, was told years ago by a psychometrician that 500 was mean on SATs, 100 on WAIS IQ, with 75 the SD for the former, 15 for the latter, and the correlation between SATs and WAIS IQ was very strong. Upon reflection, I wonder about those SDs, since +3 SD would be a 725/1450 on SATs and that doesn't sound nearly as impressive as a 145 IQ. But inclined to believe that IQ is excellent, though not perfect, predictor of SATs, and SATs an excellent, though not perfect, predictor of LSATs, a bit weaker predictor of MCATs. And I know nothing of GMATs, so will venture no speculation as to correlates of those scores.)
Otter: Don't worry, I'm Pre-Law.
Boone: I thought you were Pre-Med.
Otter: What's the dif?
The SAT has 3 sections (English, Math, and Reading) scored between 200-800, with the overall score being the sum of each section. 500 the 50th, 675 the 90th.
The MCAT has 4 sections (Physics/Gen. Chem, Reading, Writing, Bio/Org. Chem.) The sciences sections are knowledge exams. The scoring has changed a bit since I took it in 2007, but the Verbal Reasoning section was known as the hardest of any verbal reasoning test of any standardized test.
The LSAT has 5 sections (2 Reading, 2 Logic Reasoning, and 1 Logic Puzzles) scored between 120-180. 150 the 50th, 164 the 90th.
Anecdote: I scored a 89th on the SAT, 90th and 95th on the ACT, 65th on the MCAT science sections and 90th on the verbal, and 90th on the LSAT. High school IQ tests said 130, the 96th percentile. Graduated college with BA in History, BA in Chemistry, and minor in Classical Studies. Make of that what you will.
So it appears I picked the best two subject areas to "prepare" for the LSAT. I did score quite well, but in the exact same range as my verbal SAT. (Those were in the days when both were scored by a number up to 800, and the only difference between the two scores was that one ended in a "6" and the other ended in "9".) My result bears out the thesis that SAT scores are the best predictors of LSAT scores. I suspect that this information simply suggests that those with higher SAT scores who end up taking the LSAT are also those who chose to major in/are attracted to economics or philosophy.
To determine if these majors provide any boost to LSAT scores, I think you would want to compare the LSAT scores of students with different majors who scored in the same range on the SAT. As much as I would like to believe that my areas of study are somehow superior to others, my belief is that holding SAT scores constant would result in no statistical difference based on the major chosen by the student.
The sample sizes might be too small to be statistically significant for the less common majors without clumping and the msot similar majors were the ones lumped. A guess, but a plausible one.
In contrast, the political science and goverment/service categories are both fairly big. Government/service might include Master of Public Administration grads. Service academy graduates, at least until recently, were required to have engineering majors.
A very good guess, in fact. This is probably why standardized student evaluation forms use the same groupings.
One reason I see for lumping philosophy with theology is that both concern themselves with the nature of living. They may approach the problem from different angles and axioms but afaict that is the central quest for both.
Link
Page 13.
I punched in some of those numbers into Excel, and I see strong correlation between SATs and LSATs (R^2 around 0.7). Two biggest outliers are English and Foreign Language majors, with high reading and writing SATs and relatively modest LSATs. If I exclude these two majors, R^2 jumps to 0.88.
One reason I see for lumping philosophy with theology is that both concern themselves with the nature of living. They may approach the problem from different angles and axioms but afaict that is the central quest for both.
Well, as one who does ethics and socio-political and legal philosophy, I want to agree with you. However, a very great deal of philosophy is so distant from any such central question as to make that an inadequate marker for the discipline.
Don't forget, the very first western philosophers were concerned to explain the cosmos and its origins; philsophers (other than the Pythagoreans) did not get around to the nature of living until the sophists.
If you have a comment about spelling, typos, or format errors, please e-mail the poster directly rather than posting a comment.
Comment Policy: We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and in extreme cases to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil (and, especially, free of name-calling). We think of comment threads like dinner parties at our homes. If you make the party unpleasant for us or for others, we'd rather you went elsewhere. We're happy to see a wide range of viewpoints, but we want all of them to be expressed as politely as possible.
We realize that such a comment policy can never be evenly enforced, because we can't possibly monitor every comment equally well. Hundreds of comments are posted every day here, and we don't read them all. Those we read, we read with different degrees of attention, and in different moods. We try to be fair, but we make no promises.
And remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.