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Here are the stats for Brooklyn, the school cited in the article: http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/ http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brookl
by graeme 11y ago
Here are the stats for Brooklyn, the school cited in the article: http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/ http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/
The school has a total unemployment rate of 12.3%, and an underemployment
Yes, that unemployment rate is worse than the national average for all workers. This is typical of law school grads.
Brooklyn's Median LSAT score has dropped 7 points in four years. It's 25th percentile LSAT score has dropped 9 points in four years, from 162 to 153.
Those are massive drops. I work in the LSAT field. At 162, students will avoid making mistakes in formal logic. E.g. "All cats have tails" can be drawn as C --> T. You can also say "not T" --> "not C".
At 162, students will almost always get this right, even with harder sentences. At 153, students will repeatedly make logical mistakes and come up with things like Tail --> Cat.
(They wouldn't make that error on a simple sentence, but they would with different subject matter)
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Post-2008, legal employment went south, and law school tuition costs soared. To study law now you're looking at $200,000 in debt.
So most smart students avoid law school unless they get a full ride scholarship to a T14 school.
Meaning that a larger and larger portion of remaining students are....less analytically capable, to put it gently.
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People ask: if there's a glut of lawyers, why are legal services not getting cheaper. But there's a certain minimum standard you need in a lawyer.
A bad lawyer can do a LOT of damage, and the damage won't show up for years down the road.
- supercanuck 11y agoWhat does the tilde mean in your Cat/Tail example?
- graeme 11y agoOops, that was a convention from LSAT forums. It means "not". I changed the comment to just use "not" instead because it's clearer here, thanks.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoInterestingly, ~ for logical negation is also a convention in C, which I think is more widely known among HN users. I would have predicted (wrongly, obviously) that the LSAT might use the symbol from logic, ¬. Any idea how they chose the tilde?
- infogulch 11y agoMaybe because there's a key for it on almost all keyboards?
- thaumasiotes 11y agoI don't see why the LSAT would care when the SAT, GRE, etc. don't...
- deanmen 11y ago~ on the US keyboard is in the same location as ¬ on the UK keyboard, and ~ is in ASCII. I have seen both in math books, but ~ is even used in some books which were printed before computers.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoHmm, according to the wikipedia article on ~, it's the original negation symbol in logic, and "Modern use has been replacing the tilde with the negation symbol (¬) for this purpose, to avoid confusion with equivalence relations." I wonder when that started.
- graeme 11y agoThe LSAT only has English, no logical symbols are used. The the English in the test often has logical meaning. So when discussing that online, by convention students often use ~ If strikethrough is available, students use that instead quite often.