Feb 18-22

This week at DGS and Pre-Law I worked on gathering information for the new DGS newsfeed and calendar. I am working in webtools to create more resources for DGS students online. Thus, I have been collecting relevant news and relevant dates for these resources. I also have been maintaining the Facebook and Twitter for DGS and I researched relevant articles to be used on the Pre-Law Facebook page. I spent a majority of my time attempting to figure out the TV Lobby computer software. The software is not user friendly and when the slides are on my computer, they look different once they get to the TV, so I have done lots of editing of the TV Lobby slides. I also attended the Pre-Law and DGS staff meetings. At the Pre-Law meeting and over email I asked several times how I could help with programming. Thus far, I have not been given much to do. I plan to attend an upcoming pre-law program to see how they run. Because they have a graduate student in their office already, she does a lot of the blogging and she is working on a collaborative workshop with the law school at Illinois.

This week I spent about 1 hour reading and blogging, 2 hours in staff meetings, 5 hours working on the TV in the lobby, 1 hour research for the Pre-Law Facebook page, and 2 hours working on the news feed and calendar on webtools.

This week, I read about law school rankings that are given out by the U.S. News and World Report. The author, Sam Kamin, makes the point that administrators do not like the ranking system, which is based mostly on LSAT scores, and they would rather have faculty produce better and more useful scholarly work. However, administrators cannot deny that there is a structure in place that makes rankings important to people. Kamin states that since the rankings are mostly based off of LSAT, there is a lot of competition to be ranked the highest and that brings out questionable practices by law schools. Kamin also make the point that students see the rankings and try to get into the top schools, yet because the schools are ranked on LSAT alone, the student does not thoroughly explore what school is the best fit for them. The current system of rankings, according to Kamin, does not privilege other characteristics of someone, such as race, ethnicity, work experience, etc. What I find interesting about this is that education is using a standardized test to basically categorize students. Example: If you do very well on the LSAT, then you go to the "best" schools, and thus your are the smartest of all law students. What about the students who are brilliant but do not do well on standardized tests? What about students who do not use the same semantics and lexicon as that used on the LSAT? I do not know much about the LSAT, I am only assuming that it was written for an Anglo-American. Throughout graduate school, we have had numerous conversations about the problems with rankings. I see the case of law school as very extreme and frankly, alarming. After sitting in on appointments with the pre-law advisors, I could tell that they do not push students to go to law school nor push them to go to certain law schools, but rather give them the skills and information to make the most informed decision. I think this is one way that pre-lad advisors can move away from the power of rankings, and more towards student agency in deciding what is best for them.

Kamin, S. (2006). How the blogs saved law school: Why a diversity of voices will undermine the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Indiana Law Journal, 81(1), 375-381.