Law school admissions research led by Professor Marjorie Shultz and UC Berkeley organizational psychologist Professor Sheldon Zedeck is cited in a wider discussion in the October 10 issue of The New Yorker of the history, aims and methods of selecting students for elite U.S. universities. Shultz and Zedeck are engaged in a multiyear project to develop and demonstrate assessment tools that could supplement the LSAT and undergraduate GPA in the law school admissions process.
In his article, “Getting In,” The New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell writes that Shultz and Zedeck “identified twenty-six ‘competencies’ that they think effective lawyering demands—among them practical judgment, passion and engagement, legal–research skills, questioning and interviewing skills, negotiation skills, stress management, and so on—and the LSAT picks up only a handful of them. A law school that wants to select the best possible lawyers has to use a very different admissions process from a law school that wants to select the best possible law students. And wouldn’t we prefer that at least some law schools try to select good lawyers instead of good law students?”