In many educational settings, students may have an incentive to take courses where high grades are easier to achieve, potentially corroding student learning, evaluation of student achievement, and the fairness and efficiency of post-graduation labor outcomes. A grading system that takes into account heterogeneity of teacher standards and student…

Standardized tests have been increasingly controversial over recent years in high-stakes admission decisions. Their role in operationalizing definitions of merit and qualification is especially contested, but in law schools this challenge has become particularly intense. Law schools have relied on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and an INDEX…

As racial and ethnic population changes occur in the United States these same changes should be reflected in the legal community of lawyers and judges. Although Black and Hispanic populations have been increasing over the past 30 years in the United States, this same proportionate increase has not occurred in the American Bar Association (ABA)…

The literature on student academic success of law students is limited to mostly single institution studies, and as such, a nationwide, multi-institutional empirical study of the factors that predict student academic success is greatly needed by higher education scholars, law school admission officers, faculty, and administrators. This dissertation…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the evidence on whether grade inflation has led to an increasing emphasis on standardized test scores as a criterion for law school admissions. Design/methodology/approach: Fit probabilistic models to admissions data for American law schools during the mid to late 1990s, a period during which…

In order to participate in federal student financial aid programs, law schools must be accredited by an agency recognized by the Department of Education (Education). Accreditation is intended to ensure that schools provide basic levels of quality in their educational programs, and Education recognizes those accrediting agencies that it concludes…

This study focuses on the relationship between the personality characteristics of entering law students and academic success in law school. The subjects (137) were entering law school students at Pepperdine University School of Law. Students were administered the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) as a measure of their temperament and…

Group differences among ethnic and racial groups on a series of educational measures and outcomes are examined. African-American and Hispanic students perform substantially lower than white and Asian students on the SAT I. These substantial differences also exist on a variety of other admissions tests used for undergraduate, graduate, and…