{"id":2519,"date":"2009-09-01T14:07:51","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T21:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/09\/01\/a-tip-for-students-interested-in-law-school\/"},"modified":"2009-09-01T14:07:51","modified_gmt":"2009-09-01T21:07:51","slug":"a-tip-for-students-interested-in-law-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/01\/a-tip-for-students-interested-in-law-school\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tip for Students Interested in Law School"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430654\">A new study<\/a> looks at the average LSAT scores of students with different undergraduate majors, sometimes grouping related fields together to gather a statistically significant sample.  (<a href=\"http:\/\/volokh.com\/posts\/1251831448.shtml\">Via<\/a>.)  And the best scores were attained by students studying: <!--more--><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Physics\/Math (160.0)<\/li>\n<li>Economics (157.4)<\/li>\n<li>Philosophy\/Theology (157.4)<\/li>\n<li>International Relations (156.5)<\/li>\n<li>Engineering (156.2)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>At the bottom of the list?  Prelaw (148.3) and Criminal Justice (146.0).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not one to crow about the superiority of physics with respect to other fields, so I found this more amusing than anything else.  Still, that&#8217;s a pretty substantial gap between #1 and #2, if you compare to the differences between the lower scores.  The obvious explanation:  physics and math students get to be really good at taking tests like the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Law_School_Admission_Test\">LSAT<\/a>.  I don&#8217;t imagine this correlates very strongly with &#8220;being a good lawyer.&#8221;  Then again, I don&#8217;t think that good scores on the physics GRE correlate very strongly with &#8220;being a good physicist,&#8221; over and above a certain useful aptitude at being quick-minded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study looks at the average LSAT scores of students with different undergraduate majors, sometimes grouping related fields together to gather a statistically significant sample. (Via.) And the best scores were attained by students studying:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}