I feel I have taken a step backwards. I have staying at a steady 0, -1 in Logic Games and yesterday -8!!! Are you serious!!! I need to wake up or something. I did improve on my Logical Reasoning, I went from -12 to -6 so an improvement. Reading Comprehension we won't even discuss, I crashed and burned. I think I am overdoing it and need a break. I don't think I am able to focus and so I read the stem wrong.
Hopefully this weekend I some how get my mojo back!!!
It’s advice that’s been passed down through the ages, from generation to generation. Law is a profession that trades, the thinking goes, on prestige. Clients like prestigious names like Wachtell and Cravath; the wealthiest firms like names like Harvard, Yale and Chicago. Get into one of those schools, and up go your chances of going to a big firm, kicking tail, making partner and grabbing that brass ring.
Or so the conventional wisdom has for decades dictated.
But is it true? In a new paper, UCLA law professor Richard Sander and Brooklyn law professor Jane Yakowitz argue no. “Eliteness” of the school you attended matters much less, they found, than your GPA.
The work is part of a continuing effort to examine preferences and law school, specifically, whether affirmative action actually hurts those it’s most supposed to benefit. Sander has previously argued that minority law students will often do better academically (and on the bar) if they attend a less-competitive school.
As part of that effort, Sander and Yakowitz set out to uncover whether this notion could be applied more broadly. That is, whether someone who finishes at the top of the class at, say, the University of Iowa, might face better career prospects than one who finishes in the middle of the class at, say, a place like Harvard.
Write Sander and Yakowitz:
The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school – as measured by law school grades – is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school “eliteness.” . . . Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all‐important, and since students who “trade‐up” in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message.Sander started the project, he told us, because there were two conventional wisdoms he thought were overstated: That social status plays a big role in the advancement of lawyers, and that law school prestige is incredibly important.
But he and Yakowitz found that “higher performance produces a much larger dividend than eliteness does.” They write:
As an illustrative hypothetical, imagine an average student (GPA 3.25‐3.5) at 47th ranked University of Florida. Using the fifth column from Table 11 (AJD regressions on salary), we can predict how her earnings would be affected under various counterfactuals. If she had attended 20th ranked George Washington University, her grades likely would have slipped to the 2.75‐3.0 range, and her salary would drop considerably (by 22%, all other factors held constant.) Even if she had managed to get a spot at 7th ranked UC Berkeley, where the tier premiums are highest, her grades likely would have fallen into the 2.5‐2.75 range, and her salary would be 7% lower. On the other hand, if she had attended 80th ranked Rutgers, she probably could have improved her grades to land in the 3.5‐3.75 range, and earned a 13% higher salary.Okay. So assuming the conclusions are true. Why are they true? On that front, Sander and Yakowitz don’t have a lot of hard answers. “We weren’t looking at that, so we don’t know,” said Sander. “But it could have to do with psychological factors, a level of confidence you gain from doing well that serves you well not only in school but afterward.” Sander and Yakowitz concede, however, that on this front they’re “mostly speculating.”
Will Sander and Yakowitz do to law school what Bill James and others did to baseball? If not, it won’t be for lack of trying. “Strong supporters of affirmative action are strong believers that eliteness [of an institution] and social status really matter a lot,” he said. “Both pieces of conventional wisdom are very widely held. We’re trying to shake that up.”