I spent about 2 hours reading and blogging, 1 hour and 15 minutes at the Pre-Law event, 3 hours posting news to the various social media forums, 1 hour and 30 minutes reviewing student files, 30 minutes at the Pre-Law meeting, 45 minutes doing administrative things (emails, preparing for meeting, etc.), 2 hours brainstorming ways to get the DGS Facebook and Twitter page off the ground to start either this summer during summer registration of this coming fall.
This week, I read
A Forked River Runs Through Law School: Toward Understanding Race, Gender, Age, and Related Gaps in Law School Performance and Bar Passage.
The Bar Passage Study collected data on law school GPAs and Bar passages rates for law students. One of the findings is that minority students have lower Bar passage rates and they also have lower GPAs coming out of law school. These students also graduate at lower rates than white students. Barriers such as language, lower social capital, discrimination on campus, first-year law school events (getting married, getting sick etc.) and family all contribute to the lower success in law school. Women face barriers with law school at the entrance. They score lower on the LSAT compared to men but they do better in undergrad and in law school. Law students who are older have first-year GPAs that are lower than traditional aged law students. Law students with disabilities or with lower SES scored lower on the LSAT. One interesting finding is that when LSAT scores, GPA of law school and GPA of undergrad are held constant, the law school ranking does not influence the likelihood that a student will pass the bar exam. The main point of this article is that law schools do not help close the education gap that disadvantaged groups of students experience as they leave their undergraduate education and enter law school. I don't think this is shocking but it is troubling. Like the recent news on financial aid says, law school is getting more expensive, and this could also possibly put the disadvantaged students at an even further disadvantage of completing law school. Clydesdale suggests that law schools diversify their faculty because students do better in classes with a faculty member from a disadvantaged background. However, I question where these faculty members are going to come from if they aren't completing school as successfully as white students. Also, it appeared that rankings did not ultimately impact the results of the Bar exam.This relates back to the first article I talked about by Kamin (2006). Rankings matter to students.....but should they really matter if, assuming grades and LSAT scores are the same, they are going to get the same score on the Bar anyways? It is clear that the educational achievement gap is present not just in primary, secondary, and higher education, but it prevails in law school as well. I don't think this should be surprising to educators.
I also read Retention Issues in Legal Education: The Roles of Undergraduate Educators of Academic Support in the Law School. This article gives suggestions on how law schools and undergraduate institutions can support their students better. Law schools identified a need to help students when they were starting to see a decline in applications so they were forced to take students with lower academic success. The article exposes a flaw in the undergraduate curriculum claiming that institutions do not prepare students for the writing and communication skills necessary for law school. From my experience with advising, there are students who do well enough on the ACT or AP exam and therefore already completed their composition one requirement. Thus, those students are already down one English class that could have helped them towards law school. I did a fair amount of writing during undergrad but I imagine that different majors require different amounts of writing so many students do not experience much writing. Therefore, the article suggests that undergraduates take more courses on writing, that they have practice in standardized testing, and that institutions start helping young people gain basic skills. The article also describes academic support programs that have been established at law schools to help support students. These programs facilitate workshops, help students develop skills, and provide tutors for students. The article also identifies a need for collaboration between law schools and undergraduate institutions so that students are better prepared for law school. From what I can see, our Pre-Law advising office has many great relationships with law schools. Many deans of law schools visit on our campus to meet with groups of students to talk about their law school and how to get in. I am unsure however about what universities are doing to improve the level of writing ability of its graduates. The pre-law office does promote classes that help improve skills needed for law school, but it is ultimately the student's responsibility to enroll in those courses. However, I will agree that there are structural forces in place, such as students being able to be exempted from the composition one course, that do not force graduates to be better writers.
Calleros, C. R. (2008). Enhancing the pipeline of diverse K-12 and college students to law school: The HNBA multi-tier mentoring program. Journal of Legal Education, 58(3), 327-240.
Clydesdale,
T. T. (2004). A forked river runs through law school: Toward understanding
race, gender, age, and related gaps in law school performance and bar passage. Law & Social Inquiry, 29(4),
711-769.
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