The Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association Channel

Ex-Berkeley Law Professor Marjorie M. Shultz and Psychology Professor Sheldon Zedeck have come up with a new test they claim measures raw talent for being a lawyer. Professor Shultz and Professor Zedeck have developed a test that could be administered to law school applicants to measure their raw lawyerly talent.

Shultz has long insisted that the LSAT does a poor job of predicting how good a lawyer someone will be and also discriminates against minorities, so with some funding from LSAC, which administers the LSAT, she and Zedeck set out to identify important lawyer characteristics and formulate a test based on them.

The result is a test that presents hypothetical situations and asks test takers to respond. This new test was much better in predicting lawyer effectiveness than the LSAT but didn’t better predict how a student would perform in law school. Significantly, though, the newly formulated test didn’t result in score gaps among racial and ethnic groups. (Source: About.com)



Scott discusses the study with Professor Sheldon Zedeck