Why is a Person's Life Fate Decided by 1 Year of Schooling? Forum

[onionz]

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

Your ability to go into the most selective medical specialities such as dermatology, plastic surgery, radiology, etc. is highly correlated to your early academic course grades as well. Your career ceiling as a doctor is pretty well set before your third year (you can only ruin your chances, you won't improve them). Probably even more so than getting into BigLaw. I think ambitious medical students would argue that the chances of getting into BigLaw after fucking up your 1L year through Art. III clerkships or 3L OCI, though slim, are substantially higher than your chances of becoming a dermatologist or plastic surgeon after fucking up your first year of medical school. Granted, the fallback for medical students is substantially better than shitlaw, but doesn't mean they don't have pressure on them.

High-stakes evaluations are part of life in high-stakes occupations. Get over it.

With a fiance in med school, totally disagree. The first two years at most med schools are pass fail. The first thing that matters is the boards exam taken sometime in the third year usually but that varies between schools.. that test does matter more than most related tests in any program I'm familiar with, but doing well in the rotation you want to be matched into for residency is also extremely critical.

[dingbat]

But the bigger issue, again, is that even if you avoid being bottom 25% of your T14, there's no guarantee you'd get biglaw.

You want a guarantee? Get Joe Namath to quarterback the Super Bowl

[BeenDidThat]

Seriously.

Given that law school accepts people from all sorts of backgrounds/UG majors and that the work is not directly tied to any one major, and that the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills (at least the one time period/length where it counts most) is 1L year, how can a person's whole life be determined in that way? Do we really know enough about someone after one year?

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

Your whole life isn't determined by your 1L grades. Try not producing decent work when you have your SA, then get back to me on that "fate" thing.

Is it hugely influential, maybe too much so? Yeah. But is it true that "the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills is 1L year?" Not even close.

Furthermore, even if you miss the biglaw boat, you can become a successful lawyer. Will you be a successful biglaw lawyer? No. Can you make 6 or 7 figures after a couple decades of hard work? Probably.

If you are able to make 6 or 7 figures outside of biglaw, it won't take nearly two decades to do so. If it is not happening 3-10 years out, and probably won't happen.

Cool story bro.

[dood]

wut

lol yeah

[jwinaz]

But the bigger issue, again, is that even if you avoid being bottom 25% of your T14, there's no guarantee you'd get biglaw.

You want a guarantee? Get Joe Namath to quarterback the Super Bowl

lol.

I'm just saying...even if you do well in law school and attend a T14 and "deserve" to be in biglaw, statistically it just may not happen. There aren't enough slots and the firms don't reach that deep. So a person who may be 30th in his or her class of 100 and would have been a great biglaw associate may not ever get that chance. That was the sad part I was trying to highlight.

You could go to a T14, have the skills to later succeed, and still not be given the chance.

[dingbat]

^you and I have a different understanding of what "deserve" means

[LaBarrister]

They're not looking for the best lawyer, they're looking for the most prestigious one.

This doesn't sound very far from the truth.

[scifiguy]

Yeah, but we don't see people getting curved out of medical school/medical profession.

If you are bottom of your class at UPenn Medical School, they won't say to you that you have no shot at becoming a doctor or becoming one that makes $150K+, etc. ...You may not get a prestigious or specific residency, but you'll still become a doctor and make good money at the bottom of your class at a "T14" medical school. Heck, you're an Ivy League Medical School grad!

Why don't we treat lawyers that way and just say OK, you were bottom of your class at Cornell or Georgetown? Someone had to be at the bottom, so no big deal. Doesn't mean you're not capable.

Or, conversely, you were top of your class at Seton Hall. Someone had to be top of the class there, so ....

I guess you could argue that maybe people do get curved out of medical school from UG/pre-med before even getting into medical school. ... But if that's the case, why not make law a UG degree or Master's...or cheaper? At least if you get curved out of medical school from pre-med/UG, that's just UG. You won't be $200K in debt. You'll just have undergrad debt and a chance to earn a degree in a field you can make money with. With law, it's like you have to pay $100-200K to find out if you even qualify for a job.

Why not curve people out earlier? Make a pre-law program (with curves) or make law a BA degree. Why make it so financially risky?

[andythefir]

Not to freak you out, but your life fate as defined by whether or not one can get biglaw can actually be determined in 3 hours (the length of a law school exam that is 100% of your grade). Get a C- or even a C+ for some jobs and it's game over.

[dixiecupdrinking]

Yeah, but we don't see people getting curved out of medical school/medical profession.

If you are bottom of your class at UPenn Medical School, they won't say to you that you have no shot at becoming a doctor or becoming one that makes $150K+, etc. ...You may not get a prestigious or specific residency, but you'll still become a doctor and make good money at the bottom of your class at a "T14" medical school. Heck, you're an Ivy League Medical School grad!

Why don't we treat lawyers that way and just say OK, you were bottom of your class at Cornell or Georgetown? Someone had to be at the bottom, so no big deal. Doesn't mean you're not capable.

Or, conversely, you were top of your class at Seton Hall. Someone had to be top of the class there, so ....

I guess you could argue that maybe people do get curved out of medical school from UG/pre-med before even getting into medical school. ... But if that's the case, why not make law a UG degree or Master's...or cheaper? At least if you get curved out of medical school from pre-med/UG, that's just UG. You won't be $200K in debt. You'll just have undergrad debt and a chance to earn a degree in a field you can make money with. With law, it's like you have to pay $100-200K to find out if you even qualify for a job.

Why not curve people out earlier? Make a pre-law program (with curves) or make law a BA degree. Why make it so financially risky?

It should be an undergrad degree, or at least maybe a course of undergrad study + an extra post-graduate year. But it's not going to happen any time soon because there are too many vested interests in the current system.

As to "why don't we treat lawyers that way," the answer is that there is no "we." There are just a bunch of employers who are hiring JDs and there are too many JDs for the jobs available. They can afford to be choosy. That dynamic isn't present in the medical field.

[20130312]

We need more doctors. We need less law students.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Yeah, but we don't see people getting curved out of medical school/medical profession.

If you are bottom of your class at UPenn Medical School, they won't say to you that you have no shot at becoming a doctor or becoming one that makes $150K+, etc. ...You may not get a prestigious or specific residency, but you'll still become a doctor and make good money at the bottom of your class at a "T14" medical school. Heck, you're an Ivy League Medical School grad!

Why don't we treat lawyers that way and just say OK, you were bottom of your class at Cornell or Georgetown? Someone had to be at the bottom, so no big deal. Doesn't mean you're not capable.

Or, conversely, you were top of your class at Seton Hall. Someone had to be top of the class there, so ....

I guess you could argue that maybe people do get curved out of medical school from UG/pre-med before even getting into medical school. ... But if that's the case, why not make law a UG degree or Master's...or cheaper? At least if you get curved out of medical school from pre-med/UG, that's just UG. You won't be $200K in debt. You'll just have undergrad debt and a chance to earn a degree in a field you can make money with. With law, it's like you have to pay $100-200K to find out if you even qualify for a job.

Why not curve people out earlier? Make a pre-law program (with curves) or make law a BA degree. Why make it so financially risky?

Well, for whatever reason, the AMA (or whoever governs standards for medical schools) chose to create a system controlling barriers to entry at an earlier stage: it's really hard to get into medical school and not everyone who wants to go can go, but once you're in, it's really hard to fail out and pretty much everyone will get a job. And, for whatever reason, the ABA did the opposite - the barriers to entry are pretty low, because there are lots of law schools with standards such that pretty much everyone who wants to go to law school will find some school that will take them. And the consequence is that there are more lawyers than are needed and not everyone will get a job. (This affects even the top schools because when there are so many schools/students, employers can be picky and only dip so low in a class.)

You could argue that the ABA's approach is more egalitarian because it opens up opportunities for people from a wider range of backgrounds (depending on at what point in education/career you think the pipeline matters) - that people who didn't necessarily have the resources to succeed in undergrad can still have the chance to become good lawyers. (This would be sort of ironic and counterintuitive given the documented role of C&F in keeping "the wrong sort of people" out of law, but you could make the argument.) Or you could argue that a more free-market-y approach to the legal profession results in a social good because only really good lawyers will succeed. Or you could argue that the ABA went for the option that benefits them more immediately (more schools to accredit! more lawyers to [sort of] govern!), rather than the option that benefits the profession as a whole.

(Personally, I kinda have some sympathy for the "open access is more egalitarian/leads to a more diverse profession" argument, but I don't think it actually works very well in practice. Am also not convinced that's what motivates the ABA...)

[scifiguy]

Nah, I'm glad medical school isn't run the way law school is.

Can you imagine "TTT" students with 2.85GPAs and the equivalent of 146 LSAT/MCAT's attending medical school? ...

One can hear it now: "Did you hear about Johnny from across the street, who had 2 DUI's in college and graduated with a psychology degree and minor in bio? He failed organic chemistry and took it again and passed. He's worked at McDonald's as a shift supervisor the past two years after college and now is going to medical school after getting a 146 MCAT (LSAT equiv.). He could be my cancer doctor or surgeon someday! I'm so happy for him!"

I think if med schools opened up their admissions the way law school has it that it could really become a circus and medical doctors would lose the public's respect and trust.

You might start wondering about your doctor's abilities. It could be a nightmare.

[Drake014]

Seriously.

Given that law school accepts people from all sorts of backgrounds/UG majors and that the work is not directly tied to any one major, and that the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills (at least the one time period/length where it counts most) is 1L year, how can a person's whole life be determined in that way? Do we really know enough about someone after one year?

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

Your whole life isn't determined this way.

[cinephile]

Can you imagine "TTT" students with 2.85GPAs and the equivalent of 146 LSAT/MCAT's attending medical school? ...

Okay. But that happens sort of anyway. I had a friend who did poorly enough on the MCAT the first time around that she didn't get into any schools. And she retook it and got in the next year. It's just like law school in that way. All tests are learnable (yes, even the MCAT, a third of its points are just basic reading comp/logical reasoning).

[vamedic03]

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

Your ability to go into the most selective medical specialities such as dermatology, plastic surgery, radiology, etc. is highly correlated to your early academic course grades as well. Your career ceiling as a doctor is pretty well set before your third year (you can only ruin your chances, you won't improve them). Probably even more so than getting into BigLaw. I think ambitious medical students would argue that the chances of getting into BigLaw after fucking up your 1L year through Art. III clerkships or 3L OCI, though slim, are substantially higher than your chances of becoming a dermatologist or plastic surgeon after fucking up your first year of medical school. Granted, the fallback for medical students is substantially better than shitlaw, but doesn't mean they don't have pressure on them.

High-stakes evaluations are part of life in high-stakes occupations. Get over it.

With a fiance in med school, totally disagree. The first two years at most med schools are pass fail. The first thing that matters is the boards exam taken sometime in the third year usually but that varies between schools.. that test does matter more than most related tests in any program I'm familiar with, but doing well in the rotation you want to be matched into for residency is also extremely critical.

Good luck matching a ROAD residency without AOA and a very high step 1 score. Thus, in medicine your ability to match into a residency for a high paying specialty is still dependent on a single exam. And doing well in a rotation or MS4 clerkship is as much about not passing off the resident that supervises you as it is about doing anything well.

[bowser]

Personally, I think if Biglaw is at all concerned with the collapse of interest in law school on a macro scale, they should refocus their recruiting and restrict it to a certain caliber of school. Right now going to half of the T-10 schools in the country gives you, what, a 60-75% chance at Biglaw? That's such a terrible incentive compared to the risk.

I don't think they care, though.

[KidStuddi]

Well, for whatever reason, the AMA (or whoever governs standards for medical schools) chose to create a system controlling barriers to entry at an earlier stage: it's really hard to get into medical school and not everyone who wants to go can go, but once you're in, it's really hard to fail out and pretty much everyone will get a job. And, for whatever reason, the ABA did the opposite - the barriers to entry are pretty low, because there are lots of law schools with standards such that pretty much everyone who wants to go to law school will find some school that will take them. And the consequence is that there are more lawyers than are needed and not everyone will get a job. (This affects even the top schools because when there are so many schools/students, employers can be picky and only dip so low in a class.)

You could argue that the ABA's approach is more egalitarian because it opens up opportunities for people from a wider range of backgrounds (depending on at what point in education/career you think the pipeline matters) - that people who didn't necessarily have the resources to succeed in undergrad can still have the chance to become good lawyers. (This would be sort of ironic and counterintuitive given the documented role of C&F in keeping "the wrong sort of people" out of law, but you could make the argument.) Or you could argue that a more free-market-y approach to the legal profession results in a social good because only really good lawyers will succeed. Or you could argue that the ABA went for the option that benefits them more immediately (more schools to accredit! more lawyers to [sort of] govern!), rather than the option that benefits the profession as a whole.

(Personally, I kinda have some sympathy for the "open access is more egalitarian/leads to a more diverse profession" argument, but I don't think it actually works very well in practice. Am also not convinced that's what motivates the ABA...)

I think it's more about the accreditation process for medical schools versus law schools. I.e. it's not that the AAMC or the AMA has come out and mandated certain admission standards, it's that they just have a very tight grip on the number of medical schools. The competitive nature of admissions stems from that limited supply and is also fueled by how small the classes are compared to law school. I don't know if they have a hand in determining class size, but there are probably also pure logistical constraints on large medical schools. There are only so many hospitals and spots to do rotations and residences. You couldn't just open up a TTT medical school and skip these parts of the the training.

IIRC, the ABA did try to crack down and make it harder to open up law schools back in the mid 90s and the Justice Department smacked them down for running afoul of antitrust laws. Don't know the exact details of the case, but I've been led to believe that this precedent has essentially tied the ABA's hands with respect to curtailing the number of lawyers being produced every year.

So, yeah. I don't think it's that the ABA made a conscious choice to turn legal education into the blood bath it's become, it's that they've been ordered to not do anything to prevent it.

[splitmuch]

How about the fact that if you fuck around in college you won't get into a top school? The kid who busts straight As and studies hard for the LSAT might be able to get away with being median at CCN, while the slacker could end up needing top 5% at a T2

Ah, the beauty of the northwestern difference.

[dissonance1848]

1L courses are standardized, so you can actually evaluate students comparably.

You then evaluate them across schools.

Given that there is a huge excess of law school grads relative to the supply, this is the easiest way for biglaw firms to cut down the number of students they are looking at.

Since hiring is never going back to the way it was in the go-go years, this process is actually going to become even more stringent.

I expect the annual number of SA's to actually settle at around the Class of 2011 levels, the remainder becoming career associates in Wheeling, Dayton, and the like.

[Icculus]

How about the fact that if you fuck around in college you won't get into a top school? The kid who busts straight As and studies hard for the LSAT might be able to get away with being median at CCN, while the slacker could end up needing top 5% at a T2

Ah, the beauty of the northwestern difference.

+1

[beautyistruth]

Can you imagine "TTT" students with 2.85GPAs and the equivalent of 146 LSAT/MCAT's attending medical school? ...

Okay. But that happens sort of anyway. I had a friend who did poorly enough on the MCAT the first time around that she didn't get into any schools. And she retook it and got in the next year. It's just like law school in that way. All tests are learnable (yes, even the MCAT, a third of its points are just basic reading comp/logical reasoning).

But that's the thing, she couldn't get in and she had to retake it. It would be like law school in that somebody bombed the LSAT, studied, retook, and got a good score. That still limits who can get into med school.

The problem is that with law schools, you can do poorly on the LSAT and go to a TTT crap school anyways.

[scifiguy]

But can two mere semesters of work completely and accurately tell who will be a great biglawyer? I can see if maybe you had like everyone do a UG degree in law/pre-law and track them over a longer period of time...but just seems kind of short to me. One year. Then bam! Judgement is made. YOU deserve this and YOU don't. Seems kind of dubious to me.

I disagree. Your chances of getting into BigLaw are similarly affected by your UnderGrad GPA / LSAT, which determines which school you can attend. The LSAT is a reasonably accurate test of your analytic and reasoning skills, and your 1L performance is a reasonable indicator of your ability to adapt to a new environment involving a lot of reading, documenting, and applying concepts to fact patterns. And while your LSAT and 1L performance may not tell them how good of a lawyer you'll be 10 years from now, and while there is a big difference between 1L course material and the actual practice of law, that snapshot is a reasonable indicator of how good you are at the time they have to make a decision. It's certainly far better than any other indicators available to them between your 1L and 2L year.

Ii think what I was getting at and what people may have been missing is that law school is a different game.

Back to my "wal-ball" example, it's a different game than football, basketball, golf, tennis, etc.

So, even if there were a "GPA" that measured your athletic talents in these sports in high school, that GPA wouldn't measure your talent in wal-ball. As I tried to illustrate earlier, there may be certain aspects of wal-ball that overlap with football, basketball, etc., but it's just a different game.

The LSAT, while it does predict a decent % of success in law school, is also not a perfect measure. It's predicts less than 50% of law school success and starts to become even less accurate when a classes scores are tight.

So, back to my original exmaple with wal-ball, it'd be like throwing these high school varsity football, golf, tennis, track, etc. athletes onto a college team and having them play wal-ball (a totally new/diff sport) for one year and then drafting them into the pros based on who came out on top or showed most potential. Would ONE year of wal-ball be enough?

I'm aware that only 1L is standardized in terms of course work and so it makes more sense to use that as a cut-off. But I guess that wasn't so much my point. I was asking regardless of that whether that one year of law school is truly a good measure of legal talent (sort of like my wal-ball analogy)?

But that's the thing, she couldn't get in and she had to retake it. It would be like law school in that somebody bombed the LSAT, studied, retook, and got a good score. That still limits who can get into med school.

The problem is that with law schools, you can do poorly on the LSAT and go to a TTT crap school anyways.

Also, you can maybe argue that pre-med is often on average a "tougher" UG track. The curved/weeder physics, bio, chem, etc. classes are arguably tougher than, say, a history or education major's track.

[beautyistruth]

It is much easier to some extent when you can major in anything you want (i.e. what you're effortlessly good at) rather than being forced to take a full spread of courses you may or may not be good at (i.e. a very good biology student could struggle in physics or calculus). I don't know what a better system is, though. There's no way to objectively measure which majors in which undergraduate program are the harder ones. FWIW I found the music major to be incredibly demanding (6+ hours a practice a day, 6+ hours of ensembles a week, full academic course load, and your final grades are largely determined by one performance and graded on a curve), and my GPA showed it. I dropped it for a less time-consuming major. Would an adcom even realize how difficult a music major was? Probably not, and I don't expect them to.

This is why I'm so in favor of the LSAT having more weight than the undergrad GPA.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Well, for whatever reason, the AMA (or whoever governs standards for medical schools) chose to create a system controlling barriers to entry at an earlier stage: it's really hard to get into medical school and not everyone who wants to go can go, but once you're in, it's really hard to fail out and pretty much everyone will get a job. And, for whatever reason, the ABA did the opposite - the barriers to entry are pretty low, because there are lots of law schools with standards such that pretty much everyone who wants to go to law school will find some school that will take them. And the consequence is that there are more lawyers than are needed and not everyone will get a job. (This affects even the top schools because when there are so many schools/students, employers can be picky and only dip so low in a class.)

You could argue that the ABA's approach is more egalitarian because it opens up opportunities for people from a wider range of backgrounds (depending on at what point in education/career you think the pipeline matters) - that people who didn't necessarily have the resources to succeed in undergrad can still have the chance to become good lawyers. (This would be sort of ironic and counterintuitive given the documented role of C&F in keeping "the wrong sort of people" out of law, but you could make the argument.) Or you could argue that a more free-market-y approach to the legal profession results in a social good because only really good lawyers will succeed. Or you could argue that the ABA went for the option that benefits them more immediately (more schools to accredit! more lawyers to [sort of] govern!), rather than the option that benefits the profession as a whole.

(Personally, I kinda have some sympathy for the "open access is more egalitarian/leads to a more diverse profession" argument, but I don't think it actually works very well in practice. Am also not convinced that's what motivates the ABA...)

I think it's more about the accreditation process for medical schools versus law schools. I.e. it's not that the AAMC or the AMA has come out and mandated certain admission standards, it's that they just have a very tight grip on the number of medical schools. The competitive nature of admissions stems from that limited supply and is also fueled by how small the classes are compared to law school. I don't know if they have a hand in determining class size, but there are probably also pure logistical constraints on large medical schools. There are only so many hospitals and spots to do rotations and residences. You couldn't just open up a TTT medical school and skip these parts of the the training.

IIRC, the ABA did try to crack down and make it harder to open up law schools back in the mid 90s and the Justice Department smacked them down for running afoul of antitrust laws. Don't know the exact details of the case, but I've been led to believe that this precedent has essentially tied the ABA's hands with respect to curtailing the number of lawyers being produced every year.

So, yeah. I don't think it's that the ABA made a conscious choice to turn legal education into the blood bath it's become, it's that they've been ordered to not do anything to prevent it.

Sorry to be unclear, I meant standards for medical school accreditation, not standards for admission (making it hard to get in because there are limited slots - or what you said - I just didn't express that well). Though I totally agree, too, that the process of educating doctors is logistically harder (all you need for law school is a prof and a blackboard, really) and that probably plays a role.