I have been fortunate to work with a number of law students who have substantially outperformed traditional predictors of academic success and bar passage, including the students’ scores on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and their undergraduate grade point averages (UGPA). Over the years, I became convinced that there are attributes among students that were simply not captured by the LSAT and UGPA, but have affected their academic performance. Anecdotally, I observed that students who had held full-time jobs prior to law school and who approached law school as though it was a continuation of that full- time employment tended to perform well in law school, regardless of their LSAT and UGPA. That led me to explore the concept of work ethic and the extent to which the ethic could explain or predict students’ academic performance. I found that over the last fifty years, work ethic has become more refined and closely studied in the context of employment and primary through tertiary education. No assessment, however, has been done of law students’ work-related preferences and the extent to which those preferences are related to their academic performance.
Karol Schmidt administered the Learning and Studies Strategy Inventory (LASSI), which assessed aspects of law student motivation such as “diligence, self-discipline, and willingness to exert the effort necessary to successfully complete academic requirements.” Schmidt found that higher-performing students reported greater strengths in selecting main ideas and implementing test strategies. In a study of law students’ legal writing performance, Anne Enquist found that law students who earned high grades in legal writing engaged in a cluster of common specific behaviors and that other behaviors were negatively correlated with high academic performance, such as procrastination and scapegoating.
This article provides an assessment of law students’ work- related preferences and reveals a positive correlation with their grade point averages, and when regressed with LSAT and UGPA, students’ work-related preferences provide a powerful predictor of academic success. During spring 2014, 215 law students responded to a survey that included questions from the Multidimensional Work Ethic Profile (MWEP) and Work Drive Inventory. Analysis of the responses indicated that while the students’ LSAT and UGPA explained 18% of their law school grade point average at thirty hours (LGPA), the students’ Work Drive, LSAT and UGPA explained 28% of the students’ thirty hour LGPA.
Following this introduction, this article summarizes the evolution of the work-ethic construct, tracing its development from Max Weber’s work through that of Michael Miller’s creation of the MWEP. Next, this article describes research findings regarding undergraduates’ work-related preferences and the impact of those preferences on the students’ academic performance. The next section of this article describes the current study, providing the study method and results. This section also discusses John Lounsbury’s development of the Work Drive Inventory. The last section of the article discusses the results from the current study and suggests how these results may enhance the academic performance of law students.