Posted on 03/17/2023 7:44:40 AM PDT by karpov
Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had grades in the bottom 10th of their class; and Blacks were six times as likely as whites to take the bar exam multiple times but never pass.
I argued that the preferences system was utterly perverse. What was meant as a helping hand was instead placing students in schools where they were not academically prepared to succeed. My article laid out considerable evidence that, when one controlled for the effect of preferences, Blacks and whites earned similar grades and graduated and passed the bar at the same rate. The use of massive preferences was depressing Black outcomes so much that eliminating preferences would actually increase the number of Black lawyers.
Most law-review articles languish in obscurity or are read by only a handful of specialists, but my Stanford piece was downloaded some 60,000 times in the two months after it appeared. Although other scholars had already published excellent work on “mismatch” effects at the undergraduate level, my article on “law-school” mismatch was the first to attract not only a wide readership but national media attention. It also spawned dozens of critiques, some by very prominent scholars.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Placing people in positions where they are doomed to fail is not a way to help them.
This is why a Mooch Obama, despite her her Harvard Law and Princeton undergrad pedigree, fails the Illinois bar exam, while ordinary white schlubs from IIT or Loyola Chicago pass it.
From the article
“But students at the elite school with LSAT scores 12 to 14 points below the median of their fellow students (i.e., LSAT scores of 150-152) had only a 22 percent first-time bar-passage rate, while students with the same LSAT score at the non-elite school in question had a 79 percent first-time bar-passage rate”
In other words students who aren’t quite as strong (lower LSAT scores) can still be educated to pass the Bar exams if matched with an appropriate law school.
You mean people still flunk out of law school? I doubt it. Law School is about making money for the law school. Therefore, if someone flunks out and no longer pays, well thats less money for the law school.
What needs to happen is for BLACKS that fail to pass bar exam a couple of times to sue the law school for letting them in knowing they weren’t smart enough to become a lawyer.
The law schools are stealing money from blacks by letting them in and taking their money knowing full well they wont be able to become lawyers.
I never went to law school , but have been through a couple of colleges and gotten degrees. And there were some people who didn’t do well were put on academic probation and eventually flunked out.
I wonder if the idea of academic standards doesn’t really exist anymore. If nobody flunks out of law school anymore and the goal is to keep more students in school paying tuition, it calls into question whether they have any real academic standards at all
The only thing you need to know about the incalculable damage that “affirmative action” has done is to look at the bucket-o-rocks stupid black female judges who don’t even know the basic fundamentals of law or the Constitution.
I find it funny that I went to a 3rd tier law school with a 168 LSAT (and passed the NY bar on my first try from an out of state law school) while the Black students at even elite law schools were averaging between a 152 and 154 LSAT.
My private law school wanted to make themselves look good by having a very high bar passage rate. So they examined which of their students were not passing the bar and discovered it was the bottom 1/3rd of the class.
So they implemented a forced bell curve and flunked out the bottom 1/3rd of the class in the first year every year. It worked. Their bar passage rate was higher than all but one other law school in California. (I think it was UCLA). I know the bar passage rate for my school was higher than Stanford’s or Cal’s.
If not, that notion is quickly on the way out. LSAT's are routinely being disregarded, or not required at all, for law school admissions. The Age-old standard college entrance exams, the SAT and ACT, are on the chopping block in many states and leftist schools as well. All you have to prove to get in and "graduate" is that you check enough "victim group" boxes.
“..The only thing you need to know about the incalculable damage that “affirmative action” has done is to look at the bucket-o-rocks stupid black female judges who don’t even know the basic fundamentals of law or the Constitution....”
Yep...and it’s not just limited to judges either.
They’ve infiltrated into positions of our federal/state/local governments with the same moronic mentality.
This is the mental state that now literally rules over us...
We’re more than well on our way to some hellish form of Venezuela/Zimbabwe/South Africa...well on our way.
It’s not that the students flunk out. They give up and drop out.
Years ago UC Berkeley had a very high minority drop out rate. That was when they were accepting blacks with low scores. When they stopped doing that they greatly reduced the drop out rate.
Question: who is imposing these admissions preferences? Fed/State Government mandate? An leftist mindset and group-think among Ivy-League schools such that they all move in tandem? Or do the mandates differ among schools?
There may be some students who were underachievers and bloom when thrown into a very hard school, but more fail. Standardized tests were meant to help pick those out, but since they don't give the results leftists want they are now being eliminated.
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, ruling in which, on June 28, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court declared affirmative action constitutional but invalidated the use of racial quotas. The medical school at the University of California, Davis, as part of the university’s affirmative action program, had reserved 16 percent of its admission places for minority applicants. Allan Bakke, a white California man who had twice unsuccessfully applied for admission to the medical school, filed suit against the university.
Citing evidence that his grades and test scores surpassed those of many minority students who had been accepted for admission, Bakke charged that he had suffered unfair “reverse discrimination” on the basis of race, which he argued was contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court, in a highly fractured ruling (six separate opinions were issued), agreed that the university’s use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and ordered that the medical school admit Bakke, but it also contended that race could be used as one criterion in the admissions decisions of institutions of higher education. Although the ruling legalized the use of affirmative action, in subsequent decisions during the next several decades the court limited the scope of such programs, and several U.S. states prohibited affirmative action programs based on race.
Thomas Sowell writes that blacks who quickly realize they are outmatched when it comes to college admissions do one of two things: Drop out or scream “racism.”
The theory is that departments such as black studies were created to serve as a buffer so blacks and the colleges themselves could save face when blacks flunked out of engineering or pre-med - and still graduate with a “college degree.”
The government and education system is full of such graduates.
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