It’s great that you do well on standardized tests. But that you think that a high LSAT score means you have a “higher probability” of figuring out anything before your attorney means, maybe, those skills don’t translate into real-life reasoning.

I’ve yet to talk to a practicing attorney, firm CEO or Judge in the Philly area who disagrees with the following: If you’re in the top 5-10 in you class at almost any school (including Drexel) you can get interviews nearly anywhere in the country and you’ll be able to find a good job after school.

Ditto for the ability to transfer up as an L2 at a better school.

If you do very well in a T2 school people will recognize your ability and realize that you could have done well elsewhere.

I’m likely going to Drexel on a full ride. I have to live in Philly, but my numbers and resume would likely get me into a T14 school. I might get into Penn, but even if I do I may still go to Drexel.

Why don’t yo print the LSAT score on the back of you business cards along with the amount of hours it takes you to research a simple question and the number it takes to research a hard question. Clients pay you on the basis of what you know rather than what you can find out.

If you shallow legal eagles know who Richard Fyneman was, he wrote a series of very clever books. In one he described taking a doctoral level biology class and being bewildered by all these students memorizing the number of bones and locations in variouos mammals. He refused. His answer was that if he wanted to know, he could look it up in a book so why waste the time memorizing something that others had laid out for you so elegantly in literally hundreds of books.

see?

1 – As “Anon” said, it’s the “Law School Admission Test.” An employer who relies on a candidate’s LSAT score, even as one factor among many, does so at his peril.

2 – One of my 1L classmates knocked the LSAT and the GRE out of the ballpark, and she won’t be returning next fall because she can’t, as a matter of fact, hack law school itself. Like the SAT and all of its standardized ilk, the LSAT tests how well its takers do on the LSAT and is of limited applicability to one’s performance both in law school and in the real world. My classmate is a star on standardized tests, but she’s failing out of law school.

3 – I was “affirmative actioned” into law school as a nontraditional student with a middling LSAT score and an undergrad GPA that was more B+ than A-. I have no illusions that if I were right out of undergrad I would not have been accepted with these paper qualifications. Right now I’m in the top 30% of the class. The LSAT can bite me.

4 – I’m over 30, have owned a business, and have worked jobs where I’ve made hiring decisions. If I saw someone’s LSAT, GRE, SAT, or other standardized test score on a resume, I’d fall out of my chair laughing. Then, when I’d gotten back up and composed myself, I’d discard that resume out of concern that the candidate would be a good test-taker but a lousy real-world problem-solver. Not to mention that the office would probably never hear the end of how high the candidate’s LSAT, GRE, or SAT score was.

Way back when, I chose to attend a “2nd tier” school for the scholarship money despite having a LSAT of 167. When I applied for BigFirm jobs as a 2L, I only listed the score on 1 of the hundred or so resumes I sent out. While I received several interviews, I only received an offer at the place I sent the score. As a 3L, I put my LSAT on my resume when applying to Dist. Ct. clerkships, and I received one.

Now I have a vibrant career, but I don’t doubt for a second that listing my LSAT helped get me here.

Apgar Test

Stanford-Binet IQ

PSAT

SAT

LSAT

Multi-State Bar Score

1. Scholarship information is a very imperfect substitute. First, because the standards for various scholarships are largely unknown to those reading the resumes. Second, many people attend lower ranked lawschools for reasons other than scholarships. For example many married women will attend the nearest lawschool for family reasons.

2. There is much that appears on a resume that is not readily verifiable and does not appear on one’s law school transcript. For example, claims of past employment history (including tasks performed), undergraduate major and awards, etc. Among those things LSATs is among the most easily verified. For a small fee the law firm or applicant can have LSDAS send it to the firm. In addition one’s entire LSDAS file including undergraduate grades can all be sent in a single package.

More generally, the argument in favor of including LSATs is not that it should be a substitute source of information, but an additional one. It takes a third of a line of typeface.

Additionally, how would firms know whether the LSAT score on the resume is legitimate? Am I missing something? A transcript includes grades, and it is easy to verify scholarship information. But LSAT scores?

In response to William Henderson, the issue is not whether everyone, or most, or many people should list their LSATs on their resume. The question is whether it is legitimate and acceptable for anyone to do so. The prior rule that it was gauche was merely self-serving piffle. I hope it is now dead.

My LSAT put me in the top 10% easily as did my GRE and Millers. If I put the later two on my resume either then or now, it would have looked idiotically vain. The only reason to put an LSAT on a document is to make sure your hired attorney knows that you have a higher probability of figuring out the issue than he/she does.

It all comes down to numbers:

1) By definition, 75% to 80% of students at any school don’t have a LSAT score that provides potentially flattering NEW information.

2) To do any good, a student would need high grades and a LSAT at least a couple of points higher than the 75th percentile. This sends the signal, “I could have gone to Harvard and done well, so don’t overlook me.” This is a small group.

3) A third category is David Bernstein’s inclusion of this LSAT (see his post at Volokh) to signal he was no weakling at Yale, which does give conventional grades. … Now that is a small cohort!

So there will continue to be exceptions, but the practice itself will not be commonplace.

Regarding Dan’s comment that social sanctions for inclusion of LSAT are “unfair” because enrollment at Harvard signals scores loud and clear, that won’t get us very far. My research with Andy Morriss (81 Ind L J 169) shows tremendous price inelasticity for national law schools. In other words, students want that signal and are willing to pay for it! bh.

Most people who go to top law schools take the $120k or more in debt. A lot of students at those schools can’t afford it either.

Ismone

Anyway, percentiles are no less absolute than “recentered” scores (I mean, I have the raw scores I got on all of my standardized tests, but how helpful is it to say to you that I got all but 8 questions right on the LSAT?) And with percentiles, you have the advantage of seeing what real information you can actually get from the test scores, without having to hunt down a conversion chart on your own time.

Asking for percentiles, especially over the course of several different tests taken at different times, might also let you see where extensive coaching has intervened: I figure my best evidence against accusations that I used an expensive tutor for the LSAT, besides abject poverty, is the consistency between my SAT/ACT percentiles and my LSAT, which was taken 9 years later than the other two. I’m not sure why I feel the need to be able to prove I didn’t have anyone teaching me (in person, at least) how to take the test, but it’s oddly important to me, so hey, maybe it’s important to someone else, right?

Having said all of that, let me share my real-world position: if you only want to hire Harvard, Yale, and “Princeton Law” types (cf. John Sexton,) chances are that an Ohio State undergrad, Ohio Northern JD type won’t fit in no matter how high her LSAT score might have been. Employer recruiting positions are an excellent proxy for cultural factors at a given firm, in my experience.

When I recruited lawyers for a “non-lawyer job” (e.g., consulting), I found the LSAT score to be a helpful indicator of reasoning capability under pressure. (With undergrads, the math SAT score was my proxy.)

I did not require candidates to submit scores but I always found the extra data to be helpful. With a perfect LSAT score, I might be less inclined to drill an applicant with a quantitative exercise than I would be to test for social skills.

Just one view…