I’m a little skeptical that the survey has much value. I’d much have preferred giving law-school grads a writing test and comparing them to other people — I suspect they’d destroy those in most other fields, as graduating from law school requires a ton of verbal and argumentative skills.

Here’s what the survey actually asked:

The 2008 annual results of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, released today, show nearly half of all law school students reporting that their education does not “contribute substantially” to their ability to “apply legal writing skills” in the real world.

Note the survey didn’t find that law schools don’t teach writing skills, just that they don’t emphasize how to apply those skills (which would me seem to be pretty obvious — use your skills when you write briefs).

These grafs from the story make me even more skeptical:

These “disappointing findings,” as the survey calls them, come despite the fact that 72 percent of students report that their writing assignments “frequently require them to integrate ideas and information from various sources” and that 75 percent of students report that they feel their law school “contributes substantially to writing clearly and effectively.” Survey officials, however, say these findings regarding legal writing do not necessarily conflict with one another.
“It’s one thing to write clearly and effectively, and it’s another to feel that you’re learning skills to practice law,” said Lindsay Watkins, LSSSE project manager. “These students are getting good training but feel they are not learning practical writing skills. They would like more opportunities to apply their skills.”

I suspect the aspiring lawyers who took the survey parsed the heck out of the question (“Well, they don’t exactly get into how to apply these writing skills in the real world, or at the very least, law school doesn’t contribute substantially to my ability to do this…”) and reporters are de-parsing it (“law-school grads say they can’t write!”) to make it a story.