Help Wanted: LSAC Director of Research

For those interested in empirical research of legal education and the legal profession, there is no better funding source than the LSAC Research Grant Program.  The LSAC recently created a new position, which will supervise this program:

Law School Admission Council (LSAC), an educational service organization that develops and administers the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), seeks the following: Director of Educational Research.

Responsibilities include managing LSAC’s educational and social-science research activities, serving as principal investigator for selected research projects, managing Research Grant Program, and designing or reviewing survey instruments. Other responsibilities include providing program-evaluation advice and managing external evaluation services, keeping abreast of relevant current research and informing senior staff of important research developments, and supervising staff within the Educational Research Group.

Requirements include an earned Doctorate in Higher Education Research, Psychology, Sociology, Applied Statistics or related field and experience in the management of research conducted by others. A demonstrated track record of peer-reviewed, published research; grants management experience; and facility with various statistical software packages also required. Interest in research focusing on the pipeline to graduate and professional school helpful.

I have posted the full announcement, which has contact information, here.

Comments

[Alex Robbins]

This is only tangentially related, but since my senior year of college I wondered if LSAC shouldn't add an additional term to the model they use to calculate admissions index: an interaction term between undergraduate GPA and average LSAT score at the student's undergraduate institution. (Currently, I believe LSAC regresses 1L GPA on LSAT and undergraduate GPA, then uses the estimates for that model to come up with the next year's admission indexes.) It seems to me this would better capture the student's undergraduate GPA in the context of his or her school--the average LSAT score for the school already appears on the LSAC form anyway, so no additional data would be need to be collected.