What you are describing I think is really the important point for those concerned with quality of performance. In your example, actual employee performance could be objectively assessed, and the assessments led to changes in employee status. If a lawyer is demonstrably bad, they shouldn’t be lawyers much longer. If a lawyer is good, who cares how they did on their LSAT?
Disappointing. Watering down requirements will diminish our society. These requirements for excellence keep our economy/nation the best in the world. We need a diverse base of lawyers & courts but there has to be a better method. Instead of lowering the requirement, find a way to build individuals up.
Took the LSAT 34 years ago. The "logic games" section was a joke. And this is the ABA (a voluntary bar) making this recommendation, which is not binding on any law school.
I can't disagree with you at least on the extreme ends of the bell curve. A lot of the sharpest lawyers I've known wind up as professors or on the federal bench. Those who are really good at business take on associates and make a ton of money. The lawyers who had the worst grades, I probably wouldn't hire either. But for lawyers closer to the middle, most are above average intelligence but not comparable to a 4 or 5 star recruit at a major university. Many lawyers are good test takers, but I think in the actual practice of law, there's no substitute for hard work, long hours, and the ability to multi-task. I suppose that's true for most careers though. Juggling lots of files is not nearly as exciting or as easy as the shows on tv where a genius lawyer, doctor, or detective gets to spend all day focusing on a couple files. But how boring would the shows be if the characters were shown bouncing around between phone calls and emails and writing TPS reports? I'm not sure how well the LSAT reflects any of those skill sets.
You didn't do well on it either, lol? I scored very high on the other sections but did very poorly on the logic games. I probably should have studied for that section. I really didn't feel any deficits in law school from not being good at those sorts of puzzles.
Boy... nothing seems to twist right wing panties tighter than increasing the prioritization of diversity. I assume this would not be recommended if the positives didn't outweigh the negatives, at least in their eyes. Why must so many tremble in the face of change?
Since the ABA doesn't actually admit any students to law school, why do they have a position on admission requirements, which are still set by schools individually (other than to make a social statement)? Side note-when I was in law school at UF in the 80s, UF was still under a decades old desegregation order post-Brown v. Board of Education, to enhance diversity and 10% of the students in my class were affirmative action admits. Most were African American, a small portion were Middle Eastern. It was obvious to me (at least for my year, because I spoke with many of them) that most of these affirmative action admits did very poorly in law school, not because they were preferential admits per se, but because they lacked the foundation for many of the reading/writing/analysis/logical thinking required by law school (and should frankly be necessary to get an undergraduate degree). As a result, they had great difficulty finding jobs by the end of 3d year, in addition to feeling like they didn't belong in our class for virtually all of law school. I recall feeling quite badly for them at the time, because they all had pride and hating doing poorly. Despite my liberal leanings on most social matters, I remember thinking then (and now, almost 40 years later) there has to be a better way to create equal opportunity than taking people who don't necessarily substantively belong to a group and making them struggle in that group. Generally (with some likely exception), the work needed to allow them to be competitive in that environment began long before students sit for the LSAT's.
I was mostly recruiting engineers with leadership potential. All of them with above average intelligence. But you are right, intelligence or test taking skills are overrated in real life. But I definitely saw a correlation between top performance in college and success at work. Most of the recruits came from computer/electrical engineering majors which are very challenging. Being just smart or a good test taker won’t lead to good grades in those majors. Discipline, work ethic, and organizational skills are required and those also lead to success as a professional. Of course other areas like soft skills will eventually determine how far they get, but ambitious, hard working students tend to pick those up as they progress. There are a handful in particular that stood out from first meeting and all except one have done spectacularly well. And the one exception realized early on they had no interest in leadership and remained hands-on technical. They haven’t gone as far, but might the happiest of them all.
At issue is not the few people who tremble in the face of any change. The issue is the many who tremble in the face of change for change’s sake, or more specifically; bad change. We as a society have become enamored with the “change is good” mindset. I don’t agree. All change is not good. Good change is good. Bad change is bad. Change that cheapens the value of a degree or certification is bad. Watch this play out over the next few years. Yes, the ABA does not hire or admit. But they are supposed to set and hold a standard. If they no longer care about LSAT, then very soon the lower grade law schools will not either and we will probably see more “for profit” law schools. These institutions will be more than happy to take money from wanna be ambulance chasers who have no more business being in law school than I would have flying an F-22. But go on and feel all warm and fuzzy that this change has more positives than negatives.
This change could backfire on minority admissions-all it will do is place more emphasis on undergraduate grades. And with the LSAT gone, there will be fewer places for a student from underprivileged means or from a marginal undergraduate program to distinguish their academic record from everyone else beyond their transcript. And not "requiring" the LSAT is different than not looking at it, from an admissions standpoint.
Inspections were ok but fire/arson investigation was 22.5 years of my career. They are different. Investigation was a challenging career that was super stressful at times. Think about having to determine the cause of a fire when there’s a death after a significant amount of damage has been done by the fire itself and during extinguishment. Almost always at night without natural light. If it’s determined to be arson the death in almost all instances is a murder. Sorry for the hijack
Hell, why do you have any standards for anything? Want to vote, just show up. Want an abortion, just show up anytime. Need a living wage for everyone. Want in this country, just walk across the border. When you lower standards for some things it becomes expected for everything. Greatest success was usually met first by failure. some will go on to succeed and some will not
If the last six years has proven anything it's that the only change that trump supporting conservatives like is regressive change. Don't you just yearn for segregation or, gasp, the return to plantation economy? I thank God that you're in the minority. An influential minority but one that is ultimately doomed to failure.
When I was a young man I was always wanting to get laid......sure wish the young ladies would have lowered their standards.
