All reports in LSAC’s Research Library are available upon request. Executive summaries are available below for the latest LSAT Technical Reports and other research published within the last 10 years.
Current Research:
By Elizabeth Bodamer and Debra Langer
A Foundation of Validity
Beginning with the very first notion of a standardized test for admission to law school, validity was a primary focus. In his May 17, 1945 letter to the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) suggesting the development of such a test, Frank H. Bowles, Director of Admissions at Columbia University, stated the seven criteria listed below.
By Gregory Camilli
Since the inception of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) has sought to evaluate and ensure its validity for use in the law school admission process. As predictive validity is an important component in the overall evaluation of test validity, LSAC has carried out predictive validity studies, also called LSAT Correlation Studies, since the test was first administered.
Contextual Information for Holistic Evaluation in Law School Admission
The figure below shows the progression of undergraduate yearly grade-point average (GPA) for law school applicants across 4 years of undergraduate study divided into quintiles based on individual Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores.
The goal of the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) Skills Analysis Study is to identify the skills that law school faculty consider important for success in required law school courses. If certain tasks are required of all or most law school required courses, the skills involved in those tasks can be inferred to be essential to success in law school.
This study employed a data simulation to evaluate the impact of a strategy to reduce test length by including only high-quality test questions, where quality was defined by a statistical indicator of the degree to which a question distinguishes between more and less able test takers. The impact of this strategy on the rank ordering of simulated test takers according to their total test score was evaluated, as was the predictive validity and classification accuracy of scores based on the shorter tests.
Automated methods have been developed for assembling test forms, evaluating a pool of test questions (i.e., items) to determine the number of test form assemblies it can support, and designing an item pool that can most efficiently support the test form assembly process. Automated methods have greatly maintained and improved such activities, all of which are essential to the support of every testing program. This report reviews the major approaches that have been applied in the development of these methods.
The problems of item pool analysis and design are the subject of many recent studies. The rationale for this type of research is to increase the usability of existing item pools and to decrease the cost of designing new items. Clearly these are crucial problems for all testing agencies.
Since the inception of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) has sought to evaluate and ensure its validity for use in the law school admission process. As predictive validity is an important component in the overall evaluation of test validity, LSAC has carried out annual predictive validity studies, also called LSAT Correlation Studies, since the test was first administered.
Stochastic Programming for Individualized Test Assembly With Mixture Response Time Models (RR 15-01)
Many standardized tests are now administered via computer rather than paper and pencil. The computer-based delivery mode brings with it certain advantages, such as the ability to record not only the test taker’s response to each item (i.e., question), but also the amount of time the test taker spends considering and answering each item. The analysis of response times (RTs) is still a developing area of research.