{"id":155,"date":"2009-09-02T10:59:10","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T15:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/09\/02\/want-to-be-a-lawyer-study-physics\/"},"modified":"2009-09-02T10:59:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T15:59:10","slug":"want-to-be-a-lawyer-study-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/09\/02\/want-to-be-a-lawyer-study-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"Want to be a lawyer? Study physics."},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, maybe.\u00a0 I learned via Sean Carroll<\/a> about a study <\/a>showing that physics and math majors get better LSAT scores than people who study any other subject.\u00a0 The top 5 disciplines, with mean LSAT scores:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Physics\/Math (160.0)<\/li>\n
  2. Economics (157.4)<\/li>\n
  3. Philosophy\/Theology (157.4)<\/li>\n
  4. International Relations (156.5)<\/li>\n
  5. Engineering (156.2)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In some cases, disciplines with smaller numbers of students were lumped together, so Physics\/Math were treated as one category.\u00a0 Pre-law ranked 28th out of 29, with an average score of 148.3.<\/p>\n

    It’s tempting for us physicists to use this as propaganda to convince people that studying physics is good preparation for a variety of careers, including law.\u00a0 Although I suspect that that proposition is true, this study probably doesn’t provide strong evidence for it, for the usual correlation-is-not-causation<\/a> reasons.\u00a0 Students may self-select into physics and math based on qualities that correlate with doing well on the LSAT, but that doesn’t mean that a given student would do better on the LSAT if she studied physics as opposed to something else.<\/p>\n

    Still, it’s always nice to have bragging rights over other disciplines.<\/p>\n

    The fact that pre-law ranks near the bottom sounds embarrassing, but I suspect there’s not too much significance to it.\u00a0 Pre-law is a funny category: at many institutions (including, I think, every one I’ve ever taught at or attended), pre-law isn’t a major: a pre-law student majors in something else.\u00a0 So I’ll speculate that the students counted as pre-law in this study are a non-representative sample: they come from a different (and plausibly biased in various ways) subset of universities than the others.<\/p>\n

    One last thing.\u00a0 Sean observes<\/p>\n

    The obvious explanation: physics and math students get to be really good at taking tests like the LSAT<\/a>. I don't imagine this correlates very strongly with "being a good lawyer." Then again, I don't think that good scores on the physics GRE correlate very strongly with "being a good physicist," over and above a certain useful aptitude at being quick-minded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Regarding the physics GRE, I seem to recall some actual data showing that scores correlate extremely poorly with a variety of measures of success in and after graduate school, but I can’t seem to find it, so maybe I hallucinated it.\u00a0 If anyone remembers what I’m thinking of and can point me to a citation, I’d appreciate it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well, maybe.\u00a0 I learned via Sean Carroll about a study showing that physics and math majors get better LSAT scores than people who study any other subject.\u00a0 The top 5 disciplines, with mean LSAT scores: Physics\/Math (160.0) Economics (157.4) Philosophy\/Theology (157.4) International Relations (156.5) Engineering (156.2) In some cases, disciplines with smaller numbers of students … Continue reading Want to be a lawyer? Study physics.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}