As I start to read through AALS FAR forms for the 4th time in 9 years in teaching, I once again find hundreds of small empirical questions I want to answer. A random sample:
- Do people in the first distribution with last names A-D do better than others with similar qualifications? My intuition is that the giddiness that is associated with the start of the process causes us to be wowed by the first resumes we look at and to award a disproportionate share of DC interviews to those in this group. Of course, these people are largely on their own after that, but maybe over-sampling them at the start of the process increases their ultimate job prospects.
- Do people who fail to list a class rank in law school do better or worse than those who list a mediocre-poor class rank? I’d guess that schools are more willing to overlook the absence of a class rank than they are the fact that someone finished in the middle of the class. Similarly, I’d guess that the absence of a publication is easier to overlook than a single, poor article.
- Does a catchall comment such as: “I would be willing to teach any first year subject” help or hurt? Again, I have an intuition. I would guess that someone SO open-minded will be seen as a desperate dilettante and treated accordingly.
- Finally, what happened to the infamous candidate who said that s/he would not accept a job in a red state?
I can’t imagine I’m the only one having such thoughts? What occurs to you as your eyes glaze pouring over the 275th resume of the evening?
(Cross-posted on MoneyLaw)
Posted by Sam Kamin on September 4, 2007 at 05:00 PM
Comments
With regard to the class rank question: one of the many problems with the FAR form is that it has no method for explaining lack of class rank. The school I attended does not rank (or calculate GPA), but most reviewers are likely to think I left the space blank because my grades were low (most reviewers are unlikely to know about my school’s grading/ranking policy off-hand.)
Also, I’ve heard of candidates who’ve had sections of their FAR that they filled out end up missing from the database.
You’d think that with all those application fees, AALS could get a halfway decent database system up… from the applicant’s perspective, the one they have leaves a lot to be desired.
Posted by: Hopeful Prof | Sep 10, 2007 3:26:59 AM
Now I know why it took me so long to find an academic position — committees never made it to the “Z” listings! (Silly me. When I was a candidate I thought that the FAR forms would be distributed in the order received, not alphabetically.)
As for the comment — “Similarly, I’d guess that the absence of a publication is easier to overlook than a single, poor article.” — I’d say just the opposite. Failure to list any publications can be a litmus test for automatic rejection to many reviewers. And how will I know an article is “poor” solely from the FAR form? I can’t use placement as a proxy, can I, given how arbitrary the manuscript selection process can be?
Posted by: tim zinnecker | Sep 4, 2007 8:46:12 PM
It seems to me that the answer to your first question would largely depend on the process used by appointments committees to read through the FAR forms. On the one hand, if all committee members are given the entire stack of FAR forms organized in alphabetical order, then I would say there may be something to your intuition. If, on the other hand, the committee is divided into teams, and the teams are assigned discrete portions of an alphabetically organized stack of FAR forms (e.g., team 1 receives A-D, team 2 receives E-H, and so on) with each team reporting back its recommendations to the entire committee, then my guess would be that no statistically significant association would exist between the last name of the applicant and the granting of a DC interview. The one time I served on an appointments committee, the latter approach was used.
Posted by: Rafael Pardo | Sep 4, 2007 5:40:13 PM