What constitutes “good output” for a law school, and how do you measure it?

The ABA Journal reports that the part of the ABA that accredits law schools is due to adopt sweeping changes that will radically change the ways it evaluates the quality of the education individual law schools deliver. Most significantly, the ABA will “move away from evaluating law schools on the basis of criteria that measure ‘input’-such things as faculty size, budget and physical plant. Instead, the Legal Education Section would evaluate law schools more heavily on the basis of ‘outcome’ measures. The essential difference is that outcome measures would focus on what students actually take away from their educational experience at a particular law school rather than what the school teaches, and how . . . .”

There is one HUGE question, however, still to be resolved: “Speaking on Friday’s panel, [committee vice chair Margaret Martin] Barry and her fellow committee members said the greatest challenge is to determine the best ways to measure outcome.” 

I’ve got a suggestion on where they should look: Back in March, as I wrote,  the New York Times reported that professors at the University of California, Berkeley, have studied what makes lawyers (not law students or law professors) effective and “have come up with a test that they say is better at predicting success in” practicing law than is the LSAT.  The study concluded, as I’ve long been convinced, that “LSAT scores . . . ‘were not particularly useful’ in predicting lawyer effectiveness’. . .”  What does the new test consider factors that contribute to lawyerly effectiveness?

“[T]he ability to write, manage stress, listen, research the law and solve problems.”

When the ABA starts testing law school graduates on those abilities I’ll be convinced the ABA genuinely is measuring “outcomes.” Somehow, though, I suspect that they’ll focus on instead on salaries, clerkships, and professorships, outcomes determined to a significant degree by people with vested interests in the status quo.