4 ms·

Actually, engineering students statistically score highest on the LSAT out of any undergraduate degree

guelo 12y ago
I think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling. After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+ percentile, without studying at all. I then enrolled in a MBA program and was shocked at how easy, and unrigorous, the courses were compared to EE classes.
- theVirginian 12y ago
  I wouldn't be so quick to write those majors off, they involve massive amounts of reading and writing; both skills that I heard many engineering students say they felt they were lacking in. Furthermore both of those majors score highly as well and the marginal difference is not large. I don't think that its the difficulty of engineering that lends itself to the LSAT I think it is the emphasis on problem solving and logical thinking, which is essentially what the LSAT tests.
- throwaway344 12y ago
  Where did you go to business school?
- bigger_cheese 12y ago
  When I was at uni we used to talk about "contact hours", which was basically how many hours you spent per week in lectures, labs and tutorials. In my first year (studying Engineering) I had about 20-25 contact hours a week, that didn't include time spent studying working on assignments etc. From what I remember that was at the upper end of most undergraduate courses. In later years during weeks with a large portion of lab work it wasn't uncommon to have 40+ hour weeks. While I was an undergrad I rented a flat with a good friend of mine who was doing a B.A. (majoring in creative writing). He would complian if he had more than 7 hours a week. There was a certain element among engineering students who reveled in the percieved difficulty of the degree there was a lot of 'machoness' about how hard the course was etc and there was a tendency to disparage other faculties particularly the Arts faculty. Which of course is nonsense.
- ghaff 12y ago
  I wouldn't have called most of the classes in my MBA program easy or unrigorous. I didn't find just about any extremely challenging as I found some of my undergraduate engineering courses. It probably didn't hurt that I had worked for a few years and probably had significantly better work habits when I got my MBA. It's also true that the non-quantitatively inclined do find some of a good MBA core curriculum pretty hard. I did some tutoring and in economics, among other things, and I had students who couldn't a simple equation. One once asked me to "explain how graphs work," i.e. basic x-y axis price elasticity, etc. Every few years there seems to be a book written by someone who really struggled with basic math in business school.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  > except maybe pre-med types As pre-med isn't an undergrad degree in the states, we'd probably find pre-meds with engineering undergrad degrees outscore other majors on the MCAT. The engineering grad is also a bonus for admission (given way too many chem/biology applicants). Not that this happens very often, however.
arjunnarayan 12y ago
I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a time-pressure based test, this gives you a big advantage. Of course, the reading comprehension parts are still hard, and engineering gives you no advantage there. There's also lots of selection bias potentially going on - engineers who go on to take the LSAT are rare. Who knows how that prior correlates with ability. Somewhat relatedly, it's been well known that for CS PhD admissions, at least with native English speakers, the GRE Verbal is a better predictor of PhD performance than the GRE Math. It's unclear how much of this is top-end compression in math though (almost everyone going to a top CS PhD school gets a 790 or 800 on the GRE Math, so there's no signal left there, whereas verbal has a higher spread. A 720 on the verbal is 98th percentile).[2] [1] I know this because in 2009 as a college senior, I took some practice LSAT tests, and found the logic section endlessly delightful and challenging in a timed setting - I was this close to applying to law schools before I changed my mind and did a CS PhD instead. I know it sounds like a weird choice, but 2009 was a weird soul-searching year for me for various personal reasons. [2] All of this has changed since 2011 when the GRE scoring system changed to a 130-170 scale from the old 200-800 scale, along with changes to the test itself. All of my points are probably obsolete.
- theVirginian 12y ago
  Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    CS is also about creatively using fixed rules to get a desired result. But then, so's engineering.
  - 12y ago
donaldr3 12y ago
Is that accurate? Googling around shows a few different results, all with engineering doing well, but not listed as highest.
rudimental 12y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I've read a lot of data, eg the link below, that shows that engineers do very well, but aren't the top major. With that in mind, it's not as if all students from all majors are required to take the exam- the data represents those people that self-selected to take the lsat. http://www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS/Phil/upload/LSAT-Scores-of-Majors.pdf http://www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS/Phil/upload/LSAT-Scores...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ekm2 12y ago
Actually,Math/Physics, along with Econ,Philosophy as well as International Relations majors score higher than Engineers on the LSAT. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430654 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430654

guelo 12y ago

I think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling. After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+ percentile, without studying at all. I then enrolled in a MBA program and was shocked at how easy, and unrigorous, the courses were compared to EE classes.

theVirginian 12y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to write those majors off, they involve massive amounts of reading and writing; both skills that I heard many engineering students say they felt they were lacking in. Furthermore both of those majors score highly as well and the marginal difference is not large. I don't think that its the difficulty of engineering that lends itself to the LSAT I think it is the emphasis on problem solving and logical thinking, which is essentially what the LSAT tests.
throwaway344 12y ago
Where did you go to business school?
bigger_cheese 12y ago
When I was at uni we used to talk about "contact hours", which was basically how many hours you spent per week in lectures, labs and tutorials. In my first year (studying Engineering) I had about 20-25 contact hours a week, that didn't include time spent studying working on assignments etc. From what I remember that was at the upper end of most undergraduate courses. In later years during weeks with a large portion of lab work it wasn't uncommon to have 40+ hour weeks. While I was an undergrad I rented a flat with a good friend of mine who was doing a B.A. (majoring in creative writing). He would complian if he had more than 7 hours a week. There was a certain element among engineering students who reveled in the percieved difficulty of the degree there was a lot of 'machoness' about how hard the course was etc and there was a tendency to disparage other faculties particularly the Arts faculty. Which of course is nonsense.
ghaff 12y ago
I wouldn't have called most of the classes in my MBA program easy or unrigorous. I didn't find just about any extremely challenging as I found some of my undergraduate engineering courses. It probably didn't hurt that I had worked for a few years and probably had significantly better work habits when I got my MBA. It's also true that the non-quantitatively inclined do find some of a good MBA core curriculum pretty hard. I did some tutoring and in economics, among other things, and I had students who couldn't a simple equation. One once asked me to "explain how graphs work," i.e. basic x-y axis price elasticity, etc. Every few years there seems to be a book written by someone who really struggled with basic math in business school.
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
> except maybe pre-med types As pre-med isn't an undergrad degree in the states, we'd probably find pre-meds with engineering undergrad degrees outscore other majors on the MCAT. The engineering grad is also a bonus for admission (given way too many chem/biology applicants). Not that this happens very often, however.

arjunnarayan 12y ago

I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a time-pressure based test, this gives you a big advantage. Of course, the reading comprehension parts are still hard, and engineering gives you no advantage there. There's also lots of selection bias potentially going on - engineers who go on to take the LSAT are rare. Who knows how that prior correlates with ability. Somewhat relatedly, it's been well known that for CS PhD admissions, at least with native English speakers, the GRE Verbal is a better predictor of PhD performance than the GRE Math. It's unclear how much of this is top-end compression in math though (almost everyone going to a top CS PhD school gets a 790 or 800 on the GRE Math, so there's no signal left there, whereas verbal has a higher spread. A 720 on the verbal is 98th percentile).[2] [1] I know this because in 2009 as a college senior, I took some practice LSAT tests, and found the logic section endlessly delightful and challenging in a timed setting - I was this close to applying to law schools before I changed my mind and did a CS PhD instead. I know it sounds like a weird choice, but 2009 was a weird soul-searching year for me for various personal reasons. [2] All of this has changed since 2011 when the GRE scoring system changed to a 130-170 scale from the old 200-800 scale, along with changes to the test itself. All of my points are probably obsolete.

theVirginian 12y ago
Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  CS is also about creatively using fixed rules to get a desired result. But then, so's engineering.
- 12y ago

donaldr3 12y ago

Is that accurate? Googling around shows a few different results, all with engineering doing well, but not listed as highest.

rudimental 12y ago

I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I've read a lot of data, eg the link below, that shows that engineers do very well, but aren't the top major. With that in mind, it's not as if all students from all majors are required to take the exam- the data represents those people that self-selected to take the lsat. http://www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS/Phil/upload/LSAT-Scores-of-Majors.pdf http://www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS/Phil/upload/LSAT-Scores...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

ekm2 12y ago

Actually,Math/Physics, along with Econ,Philosophy as well as International Relations majors score higher than Engineers on the LSAT. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430654 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430654