← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Valley Forge
Thread ID: 10888 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2003-11-02
2003-11-02 05:10 | User Profile
I'm currently preparing for the so-called Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), which I will sit for in December. While doing some research on the Internet, I ran across the usual garbage. You see, as is the case with the other standardized tests (SAT, GRE, MCAT, etc.), Whites on average make higher scores than non-Whites on this test too. And that, as you might guess, is something that just can't be tolerated. There are some real groaners in this one, if you feel like slogging through it.
Should Law Schools Drop Reliance on LSAT Scores? By JESS BRAVIN Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
From The Wall Street Journal Online
NEWTOWN, Pa. -- The Law School Admission Council, which administers the Law School Admission Test, finds itself wrestling with a problem as vexing as any on its three-hour exam: how to wean its members from what it calls their "historic overreliance on the LSAT."
The test, first administered in 1948, has become the single most important factor in deciding who gets admitted to a law school. But it is in danger of becoming a casualty of the legal and political battles over affirmative action. The latest blow came in late March, when a federal judge in Detroit struck down the University of Michigan Law School's admissions system, in part because whites generally had to score higher on the LSAT than minorities to be admitted.
Michigan Law, wanting blacks and Hispanics to constitute at least 10% of its enrollment, adopted the policy partly to compensate for the fact that whites, on average, score 10 points higher than blacks on the LSAT. Similar policies at law schools in California, Texas and Washington state have been ended in recent years, either by voter initiative or court action, spurring officials to seek new ways to get more minorities into the profession.
While setting different standards for whites and minorities is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman proposed in his March ruling that schools "relax, or even eliminate, reliance on the LSAT." Evidence suggests that the test "does not predict success in the legal profession at all," the judge wrote, so "one must wonder why the law school concerns itself at all with an applicant's LSAT score."
Elliott Milstein, an American University law professor and past president of the Association of American of Law Schools, concurs. "If important societal goals" such as enrolling minorities "are being thwarted" because of heavy reliance on the LSAT, he says, "we ought to be open to thinking about whether we need the test at all."
Sensing the direction of the prevailing legal winds, and seeking to protect its place at the center of legal admissions, the LSAC has been trying to persuade admissions officers to rely less on the test and help determine other ways to measure aspiring lawyers. In December, the council launched a $10 million project toward that end, funded by fees charged students, which typically exceed $200 for the LSAT and related services.
Given in five 35-minute sections, the LSAT purports to measure reading comprehension with passages that the student must dissect, as well as "analytical reasoning" and "logical reasoning" through a thicket of puzzles and word problems. It does not test knowledge of such things as the U.S. Constitution or legal principles, history or ethics. Scores are reported on a scale from 120 to 180.
The admission council acknowledges that the test serves only to predict which applicants are likely to have higher grades than others in the first year of law school. Nevertheless, the test has become central to a law school's standings. The influential annual ratings published by U.S. News & World Report use the scores of incoming students for 12.5% of each school's rank.
Unlike other factors, such as reputation among lawyers and judges, the profile of students is within a school's control. So if a school wants to boost its rank, "the quick fix is, 'Let's get next year's LSAT median up,' " says the admission council's president, Philip D. Shelton, himself a former dean at the Mercer and Washington University law schools.
The council long has said its exam is but one of many factors that schools should weigh when reviewing applicants. But the fact is, Mr. Shelton says, that law schools have largely followed that advice only for minority groups. For others, Mr. Shelton says, essays, recommendation letters and lists of undergraduate activities could rarely redeem a moderate LSAT score.
No one knows the precise reason for the gap between scores of blacks and Hispanics and those of whites and Asians. Theories range from poor schools in minority neighborhoods to inherent bias on the exams themselves. But it's clear that race-blind admission decisions based primarily on LSAT scores and, to a lesser extent, college grades have had a devastating effect on black and Hispanic enrollment.
At the University of California's three law schools, for example, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans made up 9.4% of the 2,600 students admitted in 2000; in 1996, the last year of affirmative action, they were 18.4% of the admits. In the same period, Asians have remained constant at about 18% of admits, while white admissions have grown to 72.8% from 63.9%.
Last year, Rennard Strickland, dean of the University of Oregon law school and chairman of the LSAC board, wrote in an essay that, thanks to affirmative action, administrators became "inattentive, if not lazy" about the shortcomings of an LSAT-driven admissions process. To encourage admissions officers to rely less on the test, the LSAC last year devised a handbook laying out eight "new models" of how to weight various factors.
The council's favored method -- which it acknowledges is "the most labor-intensive" -- requires schools to assign candidates ratings in nine categories, including "leadership," "obstacles overcome," "accomplishments" and work experience. The LSAT and undergraduate grades could each account for only 10 of 49 points. The handbook, however, ended up being "pretty meaningless," Mr. Shelton says, since schools were unwilling to abandon their current systems without confidence in a new one.
In January, the council began a modest experiment with several hundred students who registered online for the LSAT. In exchange for a $25 rebate on test fees, the students completed a 14-question form that asked them to describe "factors that ... may have caused your LSAT score(s) ... to underestimate your ability to be a successful law student or attorney." They were also asked to discuss their qualities of "integrity, initiative, perseverance, compassion, generosity and civility," to indicate whether their parents were immigrants and to describe their "personal experience, if any, of racial diversity."
The questionnaire aims to elicit evidence that an applicant overcame racial discrimination -- which courts have found to be permissible -- rather than automatically giving minority applicants an edge.
Mr. Shelton says the council will team up this year with three or four law schools, as yet unnamed, and conduct a dual admission process -- one using the questionnaire, one not. Though actual decisions will be based on the current system, the council hopes to determine whether using the forms would have resulted in more minorities' being admitted. It hopes to quantify the questionnaire's answers in some manner but isn't sure at the moment how that will be carried out.
The LSAC has also funded the first phase of a $500,000 project at the University of California, Berkeley, that aims to develop a new test to complement the LSAT. Researchers want to find "criteria that will predict successful lawyering, as opposed to successful law studenting," says Marjorie Shultz, a law professor who, along with a psychology professor, designed the project.
Starting in July, the researchers will survey students, faculty and alumni of Berkeley's law school, Boalt Hall, on the skills and traits a lawyer needs. The hard part will be figuring out how to test for those traits. One possibility, Ms. Shultz says, could be multiday projects in which a group of applicants would be assigned a specific task. They would then be graded on how much they contributed to the group's success, which Ms. Shultz says more closely resembles the way lawyers work in firms. "Screening devices ought to be job-related and not simply extraneous," she says.
As the LSAT debate goes on, some critics are even saying a high score might indicate negative attributes. Prof. David B. Wilkins, who directs Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession, cites research showing that "the higher your LSAT score, the lower your likelihood to do community service" as a lawyer.
[url]http://www.collegejournal.com/aidadmissions/gradschooladvice/20010525-bravin.html[/url]
2003-11-02 06:11 | User Profile
Ha. Community service is defined as minority pro-bono work? Minorities score lower and do more pro-minority work...big surprise. Such dishonesty and misrepresentation of the facts.
2003-11-02 19:31 | User Profile
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for HLS to drop the LSAT as an entry requirement. In any event, it's not as if standardized test scores have been all that insurmountable an obstacle to the multiracial beshitting of America --- just a minor one, which administrators have found ways around. That "community service essay" you have to write? That's where they look for signs of blackness, as in, "I be workin' at the community centah in Gary, yo." Whereupon, your lousy LSAT gets pushed to the background.
The REAL effect of affirmative action and its unholy combination with standardized test requirements is to put the squeeze on middle-class, middle-ability WHITES. Talented and well-off Whites, as they can in so many other sectors of life, eek past affirmative action bars because their protective coating is thick enough to make a mad dash through the burning forests of multiracialism. Flub-lippers and taco-snackers get airlifted by Jews and their Espicopalian copilots.
This helps to explain why White elites are so often befuddled about us and our issues. "What's the problem? I got into Harvard Law, and I now drive a very nice Lexus." This will likely always be so for many of them. As a believer in elitism (who nevertheless logged a quite modest/lame 155 on the LSAT), I believe this failure of leadership explains those aspects of our dispossession not explained by Kevin MacDonald.
2003-11-02 19:44 | User Profile
No one knows the precise reason for the gap between scores of blacks and Hispanics and those of whites and Asians.
That statement epitomizes the denial of reality that academia and the press have. They refuse to accept the truth face-value: Whites and Asians score higher than non-Whites and non-Asians because of genetics, not because of their social settings. To accept that as truth is "racism" and everyone knows it. We will continue to live on lies because that is the only way our country functions.
2003-11-02 20:36 | User Profile
[QUOTE]No one knows the precise reason for the gap between scores of blacks and Hispanics and those of whites and Asians.[/QUOTE]
Ummm . . . I know why.
[QUOTE]Theories range from poor schools in minority neighborhoods to inherent bias on the exams themselves.[/QUOTE]
They left one out: blacks and Mexicans are dumb. It's the genes, dummy!
[QUOTE]But it's clear that race-blind admission decisions based primarily on LSAT scores and, to a lesser extent, college grades have had a devastating effect on black and Hispanic enrollment.[/QUOTE]
Read the Bell Curve. Of course they have a devastating effect. Blacks and Hispanics are much less intelligent - on average - than whites and Asians.
[QUOTE]At the University of California's three law schools, for example, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans made up 9.4% of the 2,600 students admitted in 2000; in 1996, the last year of affirmative action, they were 18.4% of the admits. In the same period, Asians have remained constant at about 18% of admits, while white admissions have grown to 72.8% from 63.9%.[/QUOTE]
That's exactly the result the Bell Curve would have predicted.
Accepting theories that can predict results and rejecting theories that can't is called SCIENCE. Repeatedly denying the reality of race in the face of volumes of good data to the contrary is called STUPID.
Good article, thanks for posting it.
Walter
2003-11-02 22:31 | User Profile
I think most telling of all is the fact that the more "culture fair" the test, the greater the disparity between the Black and White averages! That little tidbit doesn't get mentioned very often in the press because (1) the mainstream media tends to sympathize with the multiculturalists and accept their dogma of universal equality, and (2) the "culture fair" tests (such as the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, which uses no words or numbers but only abstract figural patterns) are almost never used for academic admissions testing and are thus of little societal consequence.
The less "culture-fair" (i.e., more "achievement-based") tests -- such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, and LSAT -- are indeed somewhat discriminatory, but not in the way the multiculturalists claim! Those tests actually discriminate against Whites. That means that when such tests are used to predict the future performance of Whites in school, they tend to predict a lower level of performance than is eventually attained. The reverse is true for Blacks: they tend to do end up doing worse in school than the tests predict. Whites still do better than Blacks on these tests; it's just that Whites would outperform Blacks to an even greater degree on culture-fair tests like the Raven's, which focus more on raw ability than on acquired skills.
2003-11-03 07:32 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Angler]I think most telling of all is the fact that the more "culture fair" the test, the greater the disparity between the Black and White averages! That little tidbit doesn't get mentioned very often in the press because (1) the mainstream media tends to sympathize with the multiculturalists and accept their dogma of universal equality, and (2) the "culture fair" tests (such as the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, which uses no words or numbers but only abstract figural patterns) are almost never used for academic admissions testing and are thus of little societal consequence.
The less "culture-fair" (i.e., more "achievement-based") tests -- such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT, and LSAT -- are indeed somewhat discriminatory, but not in the way the multiculturalists claim! Those tests actually discriminate against Whites. That means that when such tests are used to predict the future performance of Whites in school, they tend to predict a lower level of performance than is eventually attained. The reverse is true for Blacks: they tend to do end up doing worse in school than the tests predict. Whites still do better than Blacks on these tests; it's just that Whites would outperform Blacks to an even greater degree on culture-fair tests like the Raven's, which focus more on raw ability than on acquired skills.[/QUOTE]
That's my understanding as well.
This is not to say, as I'm sure you'll agree, that the LSAT is not "g-loaded." It is.
I took the LSAT, and can confirm that it's really all about "getting it." There are tests on spotting the relevant issues and facts in a reading, logic puzzles, and reading comprehension. All of those things are close proxies for "g", or general intelligence.
Blacks and Mexicans have, on average, lower "g" than whites and Asians, hence the results. Charles Murray wrote in a prologue to the Bell Curve that "g" is a very narrow measure of human ability - as a species we are possessed of may other talents like music and personal exuberance in which blacks, on average, surpass whites. But as Murray pointed out, like it or not, "g" is the factor that ALONE predicts a whole host of life outcomes, from success in law school to the chances of having a stable marriage and winding up on the dole.
General intelligence is the thing. I don't particularly like that fact, the truth be told. I like to think that there are whole other aspects to me than my ability to analyze legal problems. But there is no doubt in my mind that my having been born with a brain that can think like that is the direct cause of other nice things that I have in life.
I understand the reluctance of white liberals to discuss the fact of low intelligence among blacks and Native Americans, but as they say "denial isn't just a river in Africa." We need to get over this squamishness about racial differences.
WSJ Online just perpetuates the problem by no doubt consciously ignoring the painful truth as revealed in the Bell Curve.
Walter
2003-11-03 08:30 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Hugh Lincoln]I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for HLS to drop the LSAT as an entry requirement. In any event, it's not as if standardized test scores have been all that insurmountable an obstacle to the multiracial beshitting of America --- just a minor one, which administrators have found ways around. That "community service essay" you have to write? That's where they look for signs of blackness, as in, "I be workin' at the community centah in Gary, yo." Whereupon, your lousy LSAT gets pushed to the background.
The REAL effect of affirmative action and its unholy combination with standardized test requirements is to put the squeeze on middle-class, middle-ability WHITES. Talented and well-off Whites, as they can in so many other sectors of life, eek past affirmative action bars because their protective coating is thick enough to make a mad dash through the burning forests of multiracialism. Flub-lippers and taco-snackers get airlifted by Jews and their Espicopalian copilots.
This helps to explain why White elites are so often befuddled about us and our issues. "What's the problem? I got into Harvard Law, and I now drive a very nice Lexus." This will likely always be so for many of them. As a believer in elitism (who nevertheless logged a quite modest/lame 155 on the LSAT), I believe this failure of leadership explains those aspects of our dispossession not explained by Kevin MacDonald.[/QUOTE]
MacDonald does state that the frankfurt school jewing of white society, of which "affirmative action" is part, has worse effects on whites the further left on the bell curve they are.
2003-11-03 16:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=W.R.I.T.O.S]MacDonald does state that the frankfurt school jewing of white society, of which "affirmative action" is part, has worse effects on whites the further left on the bell curve they are.[/QUOTE] Are you sure he says this? Where?
In any event, I don't think it's true (although high-IQ are better able to get by despite the discrimination). Yggdrasil argues the opposite, especiallywith respect to white women.
[url]http://home.ddc.net/ygg/ms/ms-48.htm[/url]
Median Individual Income by IQ by Race
NLSY 1979 Sample, 1996 Update -
MALES
IQ Bracket Jew Black Hispanic White
Top 2% 69,000 54,200 46,000 46,000
Next 8% 44,000 50,000 43,000 43,315
Next 15% 48,200 46,000 42,000 38,000
Second Quartile 36,500 31,000 35,000 35,000
Third Quartile 44,000 25,000 30,000 28,000
Bottom Quartile 24,000 19,000 22,000 21,000
FEMALES
IQ Bracket Jew Black Hispanic White
Top 2% 45,350 None 50,000 28,000
Next 8% 57,550 61,500 48,750 28,000
Next 15% 20,000 38,000 30,000 24,300
Second Quartile 24,000 27,685 26,000 21,000
Third Quartile 26,550 22,000 21,000 15,500
Bottom Quartile 11,000 13,500 13,000 10,200
And from page 321 of the Bell Curve:
"But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20."
2003-11-11 14:09 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]That's my understanding as well.
This is not to say, as I'm sure you'll agree, that the LSAT is not "g-loaded." It is.
I took the LSAT, and can confirm that it's really all about "getting it." There are tests on spotting the relevant issues and facts in a reading, logic puzzles, and reading comprehension. All of those things are close proxies for "g", or general intelligence.
Blacks and Mexicans have, on average, lower "g" than whites and Asians, hence the results. Charles Murray wrote in a prologue to the Bell Curve that "g" is a very narrow measure of human ability - as a species we are possessed of may other talents like music and personal exuberance in which blacks, on average, surpass whites. But as Murray pointed out, like it or not, "g" is the factor that ALONE predicts a whole host of life outcomes, from success in law school to the chances of having a stable marriage and winding up on the dole.
General intelligence is the thing. I don't particularly like that fact, the truth be told. I like to think that there are whole other aspects to me than my ability to analyze legal problems. But there is no doubt in my mind that my having been born with a brain that can think like that is the direct cause of other nice things that I have in life.
I understand the reluctance of white liberals to discuss the fact of low intelligence among blacks and Native Americans, but as they say "denial isn't just a river in Africa." We need to get over this squamishness about racial differences.
WSJ Online just perpetuates the problem by no doubt consciously ignoring the painful truth as revealed in the Bell Curve.
Walter[/QUOTE]
It is true the LSAT and all those other standardized admissions tests are highly "g-loaded." However, the well-supported distinction between fluid and crystallized g ("Gf" and "Gc") comes into play here. I have not taken the LSAT personally, but everything I've heard about it suggests to me that it relies at least as much on Gc as on Gf (and probably much more on Gc).
As you're probably aware, Raymond Cattell (who, like other famous psychologists in the field of intelligence, was hounded by radical egalitarian liberals as a "racist") discovered that g actually has two aspects: fluid and crystallized ability. Fluid ability (often denoted "Gf") is raw, biologically-based mental power, while crystallized ability ("Gc") is an individual's stock of knowledge and mental skills that facilitate thinking, learning, and problem solving. This basic two-factor model currently enjoys wide use, as it has reams of statistical/experimental evidence to support it. Even common experience supports the distinction. For example, if a child and his parents spend a lengthy time in a foreign country, the child will generally learn the language more rapidly due to the greater fluid ability of young people. On the other hand, it would be unwise to trust a team of even the smartest college-age engineering students in the world to build a spacecraft as competently as a team of older engineers who, despite being less intelligent, had decades of valuable experience to aid their intuition and judgment. Even reasoning itself can be learned -- although a person's ability to learn to reason well depends on his level of Gf!
When you take, say, a vocabulary test, you are taking a test that is highly correlated with Gc. No one is born with a large vocabulary; you had to learn every word you know. However, vocabulary is substantially heritable, probably because long-term memory is undoubtedly heritable, and because most people in American society (including minorities) have access to the same books, newspapers, etc. Further support for this theory is provided by the experimental observation that the older a person gets, the more his IQ correlates with his parents' IQs. As a given age group of the population ages, the formal and informal educational experiences of the group's individual members overlap to an increasing degree until there is a great deal of commonality -- thus leaving inherited traits to account for the remain difference in test scores. Anyway, I'm digressing a bit here, but I think that's interesting stuff.
All in all, I do indeed agree that intelligence is mostly genetic, that tests measure intelligence pretty well in the case of individuals (especially batteries of tests and "fluid g" tests like the Raven's Progressive Matrices) and extremely well in the case of averages over large populations, and that the races differ in average intelligence level. In fact, I think the events of world history -- who conquered whom, who invented what, etc. -- make a case for this that's nearly as strong as that made by modern psychological testing.