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A Foundation of Validity

Beginning with the very first notion of a standardized test for admission to law school, validity was a primary focus. In his May 17, 1945 letter to the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) suggesting the development of such a test, Frank H. Bowles, Director of Admissions at Columbia University, stated the seven criteria listed below.

Since the inception of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), the Law School Admission Council (¾«¶«Ó°Òµ) has sought to evaluate and ensure its validity for use in the law school admission process. As predictive validity is an important component in the overall evaluation of test validity, ¾«¶«Ó°Òµ has carried out predictive validity studies, also called LSAT Correlation Studies, since the test was first administered.

Contextual Information for Holistic Evaluation in Law School Admission

The figure below shows the progression of undergraduate yearly grade-point average (GPA) for law school applicants across 4 years of undergraduate study divided into quintiles based on individual Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores.

The goal of the Law School Admission Council (¾«¶«Ó°Òµ) Skills Analysis Study is to identify the skills that law school faculty consider important for success in required law school courses. If certain tasks are required of all or most law school required courses, the skills involved in those tasks can be inferred to be essential to success in law school.

This investigation of Law School Admission Test (LSAT) preparation patterns for the 2014–2015, 2015–2016, 2016–2017, and 2017–2018 testing years represents a replication of earlier studies, with an additional testing year (i.e., the earlier studies spanned three administrations, whereas the present study spans four). From a list of nine possible test-preparation methods on the answer sheet, test takers were asked to voluntarily select the method(s) they had used to help them prepare for the test.

This study employed a data simulation to evaluate the impact of a strategy to reduce test length by including only high-quality test questions, where quality was defined by a statistical indicator of the degree to which a question distinguishes between more and less able test takers. The impact of this strategy on the rank ordering of simulated test takers according to their total test score was evaluated, as was the predictive validity and classification accuracy of scores based on the shorter tests.

Automated methods have been developed for assembling test forms, evaluating a pool of test questions (i.e., items) to determine the number of test form assemblies it can support, and designing an item pool that can most efficiently support the test form assembly process. Automated methods have greatly maintained and improved such activities, all of which are essential to the support of every testing program. This report reviews the major approaches that have been applied in the development of these methods.

The problems of item pool analysis and design are the subject of many recent studies. The rationale for this type of research is to increase the usability of existing item pools and to decrease the cost of designing new items. Clearly these are crucial problems for all testing agencies.

Since the inception of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), the Law School Admission Council (¾«¶«Ó°Òµ) has sought to evaluate and ensure its validity for use in the law school admission process. As predictive validity is an important component in the overall evaluation of test validity, ¾«¶«Ó°Òµ has carried out annual predictive validity studies, also called LSAT Correlation Studies, since the test was first administered.

Many standardized tests are now administered via computer rather than paper and pencil. The computer-based delivery mode brings with it certain advantages, such as the ability to record not only the test taker’s response to each item (i.e., question), but also the amount of time the test taker spends considering and answering each item. The analysis of response times (RTs) is still a developing area of research.

A mathematical model called item response theory is often applied to high-stakes tests to estimate test-taker ability level and to determine the characteristics of test questions (i.e., items). Often, these tests contain subsets of items (testlets) grouped around a common stimulus. This grouping often leads to items within one testlet being more strongly correlated among themselves than among items from other testlets, which can result in moderate to strong testlet effects.

Text similarity measurement provides a rich source of information and is increasingly being used in the development of new educational and psychological applications. However, due to the high-stakes nature of educational and psychological testing, it is imperative that a text similarity measure be stable (or robust) to avoid uncertainty in the data. The present research was sparked by this requirement. First, multiple sources of uncertainty that may affect the computation of semantic similarity between two texts are enumerated.

The Law School Admission Council (¾«¶«Ó°Òµ) has carried out annual predictive validity studies, also called LSAT Correlation Studies, since the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) was first administered. These studies are geared toward evaluating and ensuring the effectiveness and validity of LSAT scores for use in the law school admission process. In conjunction with these predictive validity studies, ¾«¶«Ó°Òµ also conducts differential validity and differential prediction studies on the LSAT to ensure that the test is fair across gender subgroups.

The Law School Admission Council (¾«¶«Ó°Òµ) has carried out annual predictive validity studies, also called LSAT Correlation Studies, since the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) was first administered. These studies are geared toward evaluating and ensuring the effectiveness and validity of LSAT scores for use in the law school admission process. In conjunction with these predictive validity studies, ¾«¶«Ó°Òµ also conducts differential validity and differential prediction studies on the LSAT to ensure that the test is fair across racial/ethnic subgroups.

This investigation of Law School Admission Test (LSAT) preparation patterns for the 2011–2012, 2012–2013, and 2013–2014 testing years represents a replication of earlier studies. As with the earlier studies, all analyses in this report are descriptive in nature, and no attempt is made to evaluate the effectiveness of the various test-preparation methods.

In a large-scaled high-stakes testing program such as the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), it is necessary to maintain a large bank of test items to support the demand for a new test form at nearly every administration. To assure that the item bank can support the test assembly requirements, ongoing monitoring of the quality of the item bank is necessary to identify deficiencies and direct item development efforts.