The law school mismatch
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Law-School 'Mismatch' Is Worse Than We Thought
Our findings are even stronger than we expected. A student’s degree of mismatch in law school is by far the strongest predictor of whether he or she will pass a bar exam on a first attempt. ..
I wrote an oped on a related subject almost twenty years ago, and I heard from several law school deans and administrators (none of whom wanted their names or schools identified, naturally). Each of them told me that there was a "cutoff," known at their law school, below which the odds of student bar passage plummet. You can see this effect in the mid-150s at UCLA, the low 150s at UC Davis, and the mid-140s at UA Little Rock.
They added that if they resisted accepting URM students with LSATs below that threshold, the ABA accreditation people threatened them with being placed on probation for having an insufficiently diverse student body–even though ABA rules required law schools not to admit students that they thought would not succeed academically.
In other words, the ABA prohibited them from taking white or Asian students with LSATs below a certain threshold, knowing that those students were unlikely to become lawyers, but required them to admit at least some Black or Hispanic students with those scores. Worse yet, no one informed the students admitted with those LSATs that their odds of ultimately passing the bar were low.
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Why even make them go to law school?
It only leads to heartbreak.
Just give them the law degree.
Give them the passing grade on the bar exam.
Is there any other path to equity?
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Interesting.
With the exception of Louisiana, don't they all take the same bar exam? If that's so, why are the low LSAT students failing the bar if they graduate from an elite school vs. graduating from a non-elite school?
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It’s an easy efficiency argument to make to say “always group the geniuses together” and “always group the idiots together” when it comes to running schools and educating people.
But if you want to educate a generation of public policy professionals to serve the general public, it makes sense to make sure that they shape their world view and develop their professional ethics in an environment where they get to work with people from many different backgrounds and of many different calibers. The geniuses need to have a good grasp of how the mediocre people think and behave and vice versa.
In that process, indeed some geniuses and some idiots will be sacrificed in the micro sense, e.g., some geniuses won’t get into “elite” schools to make room for some idiots, some idiots who got into elite schools will drop out because they fall too bar behind the geniuses. But the macro picture of having only genius technocrats who never deal with mediocrity up close set and administer public policies is perhaps even more disconcerting.
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@Axtremus said in The law school mismatch:
“always group the idiots together”
They group themselves.
Idiots are idiots, that is the sad truth.
Grouping them does nobody any good.
No matter how many times you group Jolly he is not going to play quarterback for the Saints.
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@Copper said in The law school mismatch:
No matter how many times you group Jolly he is not going to play quarterback for the Saints.
Note that in my previous post I restrict my comment to educating/developing public policy professionals.
I have no problem with “grouping the geniuses” and “grouping the idiots” separately in some other contexts, e.g., entertainment, fine and performing arts, R&D of high technology not yet meant for public consumption, specialized operations with little interaction with the general public, theoretical just-about-anything.
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Glenn Loury spoke to a fellow black academic and intellectual with the last name of Gates a few days ago. I'd never heard of him, but he is apparently a big deal physicist. He attempted to hand wave a theory by which one needs "diversity" for further scientific discovery. That gatekeeping by test scores won't get you there, but diversity initiatives will. He was not convincing. The closest he got to convincing, was when he said that we don't really understand intelligence or genius fully, and given that lack of full understanding, diversity initiatives are moral.
You will take my mask when you pry it off my cold, dead face.
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@Horace said in The law school mismatch:
we don't really understand intelligence or genius fully
We understand Jolly not playing in the NFL fully.
That part of diversity is settled science.
That is a good beginning.
The next part of diversity is very similar.
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@Copper said in The law school mismatch:
@Horace said in The law school mismatch:
we don't really understand intelligence or genius fully
We understand Jolly not playing in the NFL fully.
That part of diversity is settled science.
That is a good beginning.
The next part of diversity is very similar.
Well, despite the fact that I last wore pads in 1976, need a sundial to time my 40 and have a noodle arm, I can dream, can't I?
