All reports in ¾«¶«Ó°Òµâ€™s Research Library are available upon request. Executive summaries are available below for the latest LSAT Technical Reports and other research published within the last 10 years.
Current Research:
By Elizabeth Bodamer and Debra Langer
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.
By Gregory Camilli
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 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.
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.
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.