Sorry. Fewer bar passers, not fewer graduates.
If this list (or this one) is to be believed, there is not too strict a correlation. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Marquette, and Creighton have 100% of their students pass the bar on the first time despite not being among the most selective law schools, admitting students with relatively high LSAT scores, or having said students graduate with high GPAs. Yale, the perennially top ranked law school, sees “only” 94% of its students pass. Yale also has fewer students, and thus, fewer graduates who pass the bar in absolute numbers than any of the other schools. This is despite them admitting students with LSAT scores between 10 and 21 points higher than the previously mentioned schools. How do you explain that if you think both tests are an accurate measure of skill, aptitude, and intelligence?
No it doesn’t.
The supportable argument for race-based AA posits that equal opportunity does not eliminate average performance differences among SIRE groups. Therefore if one wants reasonably proportionate representation, race-based AA must be used.
Wrong, as always. The "supportable argument " is that AA is used as a means of equaling opportunity.
It’s not to be believed. Wisconsin has a “diploma privilege” system in which graduates of in-state law schools don’t have to take the bar exam, meaning graduates of Wisconsin law schools *all *have a ridiculously high bar passage rate - diploma privilege counts as “passing” the bar.
This may be true of quota based AA programs. (It is not necessary, but it is possible.)
It is not true of outreach based AA programs.
All opportunities are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Regards,
Shodan
Is the same true for Creighton? Either way, do you intend to provide any support for your argument that lower LSAT scores equals fewer bar passers? Even as a percentage? For example, North Carolina Central University (LSAT:148) has 86% of its students pass, Widener University School of Law (Harrisburg) (LSAT:149) has 93% pass, etc. Drake University (LSAT:156), Univ. of SD (LSAT:150), Univ. of Oklahoma (LSAT:158), and St. Mary’s Univ. (LSAT:154), all see a greater percentage of their students pass the bar than Yale, the top ranked, and one of the most selective law schools there is. If your supposition is true, how do you explain that?
Not so, for race-based AA.
Read the current Fisher v UT Austin case and the amicus briefs, for example.
The whole point is that Universities want to preserve race as a stand-alone criterion, independent of opportunity or SES level. They need to be able to admit a black student preferentially, simply because they are black, even if that student has had greater opportunity than a non-black student with better scores, grades and other qualifications.
Race-based AA is not about equalizing opportunity. As I’ve pointed out countless times, using opportunity does not work, because at every level of equivalent opportunity, blacks substantially underperform white and asian peer groups.
If you are saying that we are equalizing the number of blacks who have opportunity to get higher education, that’s true. And the way we do that is to ignore the opportunity they have had to perform equally to date, and focus on their race.
You may be interested in reviewing the LSAC Bar Passage study of 1998.
It has quite a lot of detail.
From Page 10:
With reference to LSAT/BarPassage rates:
Blacks above the LSAT mean (162 students): eventual pass rate 96%
Blacks below the LSAT mean (900 students): eventual pass rate 75%
Whites above the the LSAT mean (11,189 students): eventual pass rate 98.25%
Whites below the LSAT mean(7,455 students): eventual pass rate 5.6%
In short, the LSAT does correlate. One of its main values is helping to predict which students have a chance of completing the process through bar passage.
Sorry; should be Page 34 of the LSAC Bar Passage study.
Crap. The Pedant needs his afternoon nap.
Eventual pass rate for whites with LSATs below the mean is 94.4%, obviously; not 5.6% (which is the fail rate).
You are looking at passage rates for schools in different states. This is comparing apples and oranges for two reasons: one, bar exams vary in difficulty (sometimes considerably), and two, states don’t all report the same number. Most states report first-time passage rates only; some report all-time passage rates. I don’t know what source you are looking at so I can’t tell you if both the first and second figures apply.
Of course it’s not apples to apples, but your critique is mitigated by the fact that not everyone takes the bar where they go to law school, so you cannot assume what you assumed either. Either way, you are the one who made the claim that needs proof, so either cite it, or withdraw your claim.
Fair enough. From LSAC:
[QUOTE=NLBPS]
Both law school grade-point average (LGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score were the strongest predictors of bar examination passage for all groups studied.
Other measurement variables, such as undergraduate grade-point average (UGPA) and selectivity of the undergraduate school, failed to make a practical additional contribution to a bar-passage prediction model that already included LGPA and LSAT scores.
[/QUOTE]
From the ABA Admission Standards Review Committee itself:
Nothing in this should suggest that I don’t think affirmative action in law schools is necessary. Law is one of the whitest professions there is, in no small part because of the systematic exclusion of black students from law schools. I’m just saying that below a certain point it only harms students.
They do this largely because race is a fairly effective means of doing that, not only because it correlates well with culture, socio-economics, and experiences, but also because of people like you. There is a healthy percentage of racists like you in this country who assume someone who is Black is otherwise dumber and less capable than they would be if they were White or Asian. So it doesn’t matter too much if it’s Tom Cruise of Will Smith’s kid if the assumption is going to be that their blackness is a negative. For most Black people, the climate that your delusions create means that their skin color means more than almost anything else about them.
As long as people like you are alive and making decisions which affect the opportunity of others, then there will be no perfect means of equalizing opportunities that doesn’t rely on race as a crude measure to combat the destructive ignorance of people like you. If only because your worldview destroys more opportunities for minorities than preference or AA can ever create.
You can debate all you want about normalizing data, running regressions, or looking at stats to validate your racist garbage, but the reality is that the numbers rarely take into account the opportunities lost when people like you assume someone’s race makes them inferior.
After looking at the correlations based on regressions, do you honestly think the disparities that exist between the average scores of different racial groups that are admitted to various school would have a significant affect on bar pass percentages between groups going to the same law school? Again, your blanket supposition was that if test standards were low enough to allow a relatively large percentage of minorities into elite schools, the number of students who would pass the bar would be lower, correct? Please correct me if I am wrong.
I am saying that such a problem doesn’t seem to have arisen in the vast majority of circumstances, and that to think it would become an issue would only be a concern of yours if you assume that schools would knowingly admit incompetent people regardless of race, and that those helped by AA would be disproportionately represented in that group. Do you honestly think schools are in the habit of doing that?
This is ridiculous nonsense.
You haven’t come up with a single point of data to back up your assertion that race is a good proxy for SES. Your haste in labeling me racist and “destructively ignorant” is lovely inflammatory rhetoric, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the basic problem.
The basic problem is, that every single analysis ever done–at least, every single one I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen hundreds–shows that within every SES category, blacks underperform whites and asians. The problem is not that rich and privileged whites outperform poor and disadvantaged blacks in quantitative fields and standardized academic testing.
The problem is that rich and privileged blacks underperform poor and disadvantaged whites. Get it?
If you don’t think so, or you have some contrary data, cough it up.
I do not assume anyone’s “race” makes any individual “inferior.” I do hold that every study shows a marked average difference in SIRE group performance outcomes for standardized testing even when adjusted for SES. Therefore the only way to keep proportionate representation is to use race alone as an AA criterion.
If you insist on shorthanding that to “blacks are dumber,” fine. I am not personally convinced that quantitative testing is the be-all and end-all of “smart.” But I am convinced that different outcomes among different SIRE groups are genetically driven, and therefore cannot be overcome by focusing on SES.
I won’t be dissuaded from this by Egalitarians who trust mother nature to be fair, and who seem to believe we all started up about 5,000 years ago and have not had a chance to evolve along our historic migration patterns…
The personal references to Chief Pedant here aren’t necessary. Attack the argument, not the poster.