<p>Well, I would argue that I think it is not just at ariesathena’s school. Berkeley (which I don’t think ariesathena went to) is highly explicit about the fact that the average engineering student enters with a higher GPA and SAT score (including the SAT-verbal)than do Berkeley liberal arts students do. The same is true for UCLA, and in fact, it is true for most schools that run separate admissions tracks for engineering students and non-engineering students. The evidence seems to be fairly clear. All you have to do is examine the admissions data at, at least, the UC schools. </p>
<p>And to the point that law schools have a vested interest in producing successful lawyers, well, I think that while that is true in theory, the reality is that that incentive is weak at best. AFter all, if you are an admissions officer, then the fact that you admit a class of students that is unusually strong or unusually weak won’t come to light until years, possibly decades after the fact, and by then, you’re probably not working there anymore anyway, so what do you care? On the other hand, if you admit a class that has an unusually low GPA or LSAT score thus causing the ranking of the law school to drop, then the Dean of the law school (who is your boss) is going to want an explanation immediately. In other words, the feedback mechanism for insuring that the adcom really is bringing in what is truly the best future group of lawyers that they can get is weak at best. It is something akin to those CEO’s who manipulate short-run earnings to make themselves look good, at the detriment to the long-run health of the company, figuring that, hey, in the long run, he’s not going to be running the company anymore anyway, so who cares what happens then? That’s the next CEO’s problem. All that matters is goosing short-run results. </p>
<p>And besides, Cardozo, we aren’t talking about anecdotal anomalies there. You say that some engineers out there would be screwed in an arts class. Of course. On the other hand, I could point to some guys who are wizards in liberal-arts classes who can’t handle law classes to save their lives. The point is not to look at a few isolated data points, but rather to look at where the trends lie. The fact is, the trend indicates that engineering students tend to be extremely hard working. Not all of them, true. But the trend is clear. And hard work is a key asset, arguably the most key asset, to doing well in law school. Let’s face it. On average, liberal arts students are not as hard-working as engineering students are. We can all come up with isolated exceptions, but the trend is clear. This is particularly so for those students who do well enough to get into top law schools - the engineering students with top grades in general worked significantly harder than did the liberal arts students with top grades, on average. We can also talk about some dumb engineers, but the fact is, we all know that there are far far more dumb (and extremely lazy) liberal arts students. It’s all about where the data points congregate, not where a few isolated data points lie.</p>