Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

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Another factor to consider here is a rise (if any) in engineering undergraduate degrees. I know that grad engineering degrees to law degrees seems like more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but there's a big difference. A history major who goes to law school goes from not lawyer to lawyer (assuming he or she passes the bar).

Engineering graduate students, on the other hand, almost always have a background in their field of graduate study. This is often very substantial - for instance, an EE major doesn't need a grad degree in EE to get to work. And even if a student is using grad school to build some general knowledge of a new field (such as a physics or math major going to grad school in CS), they're much closer than a history major would be to law [1].

In this case, the growth in grad enrollment might understate the transition, since a student who wanted to be a lawyer who instead decides to become an engineer might just change majors and avoid grad school altogether.

[1] I actually think that if people were allowed to take the bar without attending law school, you'd find that a lot of people could become extremely talented lawyers without the graduate degree.

As a lawyer, I think I'd actually be in favor of the opposite approach -- law school (maybe just one year) with no bar exam. I guess the bar has some value as a "last line of defense" against totally incompetent people entering the profession [1], but it's really just a giant memorization frenzy with no real practical benefit. It's expected that you'll get a large chunk of the test wrong and forget everything in a couple months. Law school, on the other hand, is where people are introduced to legal writing, reading opinions, legal research, and thinking logically (something that isn't a big deal for many undergrads.)

It kills me because law school is way too expensive and way too long, and may well be unnecessary for a lot of people. But I understand the need for some kind of meaningful credentialing, since the harm one can do as a bad lawyer is usually more dangerous than what can be done by a bad engineer. (Mostly because any law grad can go and hang a shingle the day after they are admitted.)

[1] I don't mean to imply that failing the bar means one is incompetent! Extreme incompetency is a sufficient, but not necessary, condition.

I don't know - I personally felt I learned a lot from studying for the bar. Sure, I don't remember most of the details - but I remember enough to have instincts and point myself in the right direction if I need to. And I definitely learned a lot more black letter law from studying for the bar than I did in law school. Frankly, I think I would have been well-served by having to study for the bar prior to law school.

Agreed on "way too expensive and way too long." Most of the world seems to do fine with law as an undergraduate degree. I think a mandatory apprenticeship period, as Canada and the UK have, would also be useful, as neither American law schools nor the bar exam teach you much about how to actually practice law. (But good luck convincing the ABA education committee of any of this...)

Actually, engineering students statistically score highest on the LSAT out of any undergraduate degree

I think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling.

After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+ percentile, without studying at all. I then enrolled in a MBA program and was shocked at how easy, and unrigorous, the courses were compared to EE classes.

I wouldn't be so quick to write those majors off, they involve massive amounts of reading and writing; both skills that I heard many engineering students say they felt they were lacking in. Furthermore both of those majors score highly as well and the marginal difference is not large. I don't think that its the difficulty of engineering that lends itself to the LSAT I think it is the emphasis on problem solving and logical thinking, which is essentially what the LSAT tests.

When I was at uni we used to talk about "contact hours", which was basically how many hours you spent per week in lectures, labs and tutorials. In my first year (studying Engineering) I had about 20-25 contact hours a week, that didn't include time spent studying working on assignments etc. From what I remember that was at the upper end of most undergraduate courses.

In later years during weeks with a large portion of lab work it wasn't uncommon to have 40+ hour weeks.

While I was an undergrad I rented a flat with a good friend of mine who was doing a B.A. (majoring in creative writing). He would complian if he had more than 7 hours a week.

There was a certain element among engineering students who reveled in the percieved difficulty of the degree there was a lot of 'machoness' about how hard the course was etc and there was a tendency to disparage other faculties particularly the Arts faculty. Which of course is nonsense.

I wouldn't have called most of the classes in my MBA program easy or unrigorous. I didn't find just about any extremely challenging as I found some of my undergraduate engineering courses. It probably didn't hurt that I had worked for a few years and probably had significantly better work habits when I got my MBA.

It's also true that the non-quantitatively inclined do find some of a good MBA core curriculum pretty hard. I did some tutoring and in economics, among other things, and I had students who couldn't a simple equation. One once asked me to "explain how graphs work," i.e. basic x-y axis price elasticity, etc. Every few years there seems to be a book written by someone who really struggled with basic math in business school.

> except maybe pre-med types

As pre-med isn't an undergrad degree in the states, we'd probably find pre-meds with engineering undergrad degrees outscore other majors on the MCAT. The engineering grad is also a bonus for admission (given way too many chem/biology applicants). Not that this happens very often, however.

Where did you go to business school?

I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a time-pressure based test, this gives you a big advantage. Of course, the reading comprehension parts are still hard, and engineering gives you no advantage there. There's also lots of selection bias potentially going on - engineers who go on to take the LSAT are rare. Who knows how that prior correlates with ability.

Somewhat relatedly, it's been well known that for CS PhD admissions, at least with native English speakers, the GRE Verbal is a better predictor of PhD performance than the GRE Math. It's unclear how much of this is top-end compression in math though (almost everyone going to a top CS PhD school gets a 790 or 800 on the GRE Math, so there's no signal left there, whereas verbal has a higher spread. A 720 on the verbal is 98th percentile).[2]

[1] I know this because in 2009 as a college senior, I took some practice LSAT tests, and found the logic section endlessly delightful and challenging in a timed setting - I was this close to applying to law schools before I changed my mind and did a CS PhD instead. I know it sounds like a weird choice, but 2009 was a weird soul-searching year for me for various personal reasons.

[2] All of this has changed since 2011 when the GRE scoring system changed to a 130-170 scale from the old 200-800 scale, along with changes to the test itself. All of my points are probably obsolete.

I think the section that delighted you is actually called the "analytical reasoning" section. The "logical reasoning" section gives you a paragraph about some subject, and that asks about inferences and deductions you can make from that.

There are samples from both sections here for comparison: http://www.lsac.org/jd/lsat/about-the-lsat/

I too found analytic reasoning delightful, both during practice tests and during the actual test. One thing about the actual test that kicked it up a notch over practice tests (aside from the pressure of it being for real) was that you could not bring scratch paper to the real test. There was a fair bit of empty space in the test booklet so you had room for truth tables, graphs, and such, but if you botched one and had to start over you might find scratch space tight.

I aced analytic reasoning. Shortly after the test, I saw a magazine at the supermarket full of those kinds of problems. The shelf position and the ads in the magazine indicated it was aimed at older women. I bought it, because I enjoyed that part of the test so much, but didn't have much hope because I aced that part of the LSAT! How are puzzles for Grannies going to be a challenge? So I tried a level 3 difficulty puzzle (range was 1 to 5 with 5 the hardest).

It DESTROYED me. I could do level 1 reasonably, and level 2 with a lot of effort.

I vowed that if I did become a lawyer, I would not take cases that would pit me against old ladies. (I did not become a lawyer. I decided near the end of law school that I would rather be a programmer who knew a lot about law than a lawyer who knew a lot about programming. My policy of not going against old ladies in battles of wits remains in force).

The GRE math is actually a dumbed down version of the SAT math so it's not surprising there's no signal left among engineering students. Probably most engineering students have gotten better at math since high school.

The GRE verbal is a great predictor of success in CS grad school and any kind of science grad school because it's so heavily g-loaded. Verbal scores are very hard to game and correlate well with raw IQ even when people try to study for the test and artificially improve scores. Antonyms, vocabulary, and reading comprehension are very good measures of the same mental ability that deep cutting edge research requires.

Of course, that doesn't work for non-fluent English speakers.

Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.

You could also think of law as a form of code.

I think it's more like an api. You hack it to get what you want.

CS is also about creatively using fixed rules to get a desired result.

But then, so's engineering.

Standardized test scores aren't that important after your first professional job. For some reason, though, the financial industry is infatuated with GPAs.

They get an unspeakable number of applicants and finance requires horse like work ethic, a high tolerance for boredom and detail orientation. A high GPA is a strong signal of all of those and also has a very high correlation with g/IQ/processing speed.

Work sample tests might work better but at least in the UK they do multiple rounds of structured interviews followed by free form interviews after filtering by class of degree/university prestige. I bet their false positive rate on hiring is very low even if the false negative rate is high.

To your [1], I actually think studying for the LSAT has been the most intellectually enjoyable part of my legal career so far!

I've heard the same thing from Philosophy majors though...

I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I've read a lot of data, eg the link below, that shows that engineers do very well, but aren't the top major.

With that in mind, it's not as if all students from all majors are required to take the exam- the data represents those people that self-selected to take the lsat.

http://www.potsdam.edu/academics/AAS/Phil/upload/LSAT-Scores...

Is that accurate? Googling around shows a few different results, all with engineering doing well, but not listed as highest.

Actually,Math/Physics, along with Econ,Philosophy as well as International Relations majors score higher than Engineers on the LSAT.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430654

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