Monday, May 30, 2011
In memoriam: two of our favorite people.
Both served our country with honor: Ron Bliss and Joe Reynolds. Always in our hearts.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Few things in life are as satisfying as watching a former student soar.
Scott Unger (former student and a long-time friend) just published this (here). Scott's a wonderful litigator and, just as important, a person who cares deeply about ethics and professionalism.
Way to go, Scott!
Way to go, Scott!
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
I love NASA.
I still remember when we went to see the shuttle liftoff with our friends Randy and Cathleen. So when I read this essay (here) in the Wall Street Journal, it triggered those memories.
Friday, May 06, 2011
Chicken, meet egg.
The ABA Journal is reporting (here) USNWR's reaction to being blamed, at least in part, for the frenzy to buy high UGPA and LSAT scores with merit scholarships. Last Sunday, the New York Times reported (here) that many of the students who received merit scholarships didn't retain those scholarships after the first year. The consequences of losing a merit scholarship at an expensive school can be dire.
It's true that the USNWR rankings don't cause students to lose their scholarships. (The cause is a combination of a scholarship's requirements, the grading curve, and the individual student's abilities--as well as any particular personal crisis that the student might be having during the first year.)
It's equally true that schools are buying "high-numbers" students as a way to improve their rankings, given how much UGPA and LSAT figures can drive the rankings (here) and how few other ways there are to game the system. It's really difficult to affect the peer and lawyers/judges rankings (notwithstanding all of the glossy brochures that we all get in the fall); in this economic environment, placing students in real jobs at graduation is also really difficult. Bar passage isn't a large enough factor in the rankings. What does that leave? Ah, yes: "the numbers."
I can't remember a time before the rankings. (I can't remember a lot of things, though, so I'm not worried about this particular lapse in my memory.) At some earlier point, didn't we select our students based on our predictions of the applicants' success in our schools? We used UGPAs and LSATs for those predictions, but we also used non-numerical predictors of academic success. Schools may still use those, but they sure do pay attention to how "the numbers" are going to look at matriculation.
No matter how we admitted students before, "the numbers" and the USNWR rankings are now officially a chicken-egg problem.
It's true that the USNWR rankings don't cause students to lose their scholarships. (The cause is a combination of a scholarship's requirements, the grading curve, and the individual student's abilities--as well as any particular personal crisis that the student might be having during the first year.)
It's equally true that schools are buying "high-numbers" students as a way to improve their rankings, given how much UGPA and LSAT figures can drive the rankings (here) and how few other ways there are to game the system. It's really difficult to affect the peer and lawyers/judges rankings (notwithstanding all of the glossy brochures that we all get in the fall); in this economic environment, placing students in real jobs at graduation is also really difficult. Bar passage isn't a large enough factor in the rankings. What does that leave? Ah, yes: "the numbers."
I can't remember a time before the rankings. (I can't remember a lot of things, though, so I'm not worried about this particular lapse in my memory.) At some earlier point, didn't we select our students based on our predictions of the applicants' success in our schools? We used UGPAs and LSATs for those predictions, but we also used non-numerical predictors of academic success. Schools may still use those, but they sure do pay attention to how "the numbers" are going to look at matriculation.
No matter how we admitted students before, "the numbers" and the USNWR rankings are now officially a chicken-egg problem.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
A very happy mention of my buddy David Polyansky in the L.A. Times
See here, especially the last few lines.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)