<p>The bottom line is that black students who are overmatched by their student body peers unsurprisingly end up disproportionately in the bottom of their classes and fail the bar exam, not doing anyone a favor. Unfortunately, the ABA will only accredit schools that follow this bad policy.</p>
<p>“It is truly a vicious, mean agenda, where black students, who would be successes at a second- or third-tier law school, have been recruited and admitted to the highly competitive environment of first-tier schools in the name of diversity and turned into failures.”</p>
<p>The data and the conclusions don’t follow. There is no evidence that these same students would do better at “second or third-tier” law schools, and, in fact, it might be the case that they did BETTER at the first tier ones because of the impact of their peers. There’s just no evidence either way.</p>
<p>Meanwhile they had an 81% graduation rate (despite an average entry LSAT 10 points lower.) I would call that an extraordinary success.</p>
<p>But at any rate, the data are interesting, the conclusions speculation.</p>
I would call that an extraordinary amount of grade inflation. At engineering school if you came in a several standard deviations below average on the Math SAT (compared to the overall student body) you were probably looking at a 50-60% <em>fail</em> rate.</p>
<p>Wow, talk about convoluted statistics! Holy smokes. I’m going to use this in my class tomorrow it’s so bad. I guess law profs don’t have a lot of experience with statistics.</p>
<p>Mr. Payne, I’d expect more from an engineer…how did you come to the conclusion that a 10 point difference reflected “several standard deviations”?</p>
You’re right, I just went off the top of my head, it’s virtually impossible (statistically, for a normal distribution) for an entire group of students to be that far away from average. More like 1.5-1.75 standard deviations away from the mean. Remember, the standard deviation for the LSAT itself is 10 points, schools operate in a much more narrow range.</p>
<p>What should be remembered is that for most law schools they have a blind grading system. No that does not mean the professors are blind, it means that each student is given a number and when the student turns in an exam he or she places that number on the test answers. When a professor grades an exam, the professor does not know to whom the test answers belong at the time of grading. This means that grades and class rank in law school are not affected by race. </p>
<p>This rule applies to most classes, but not all classes such as when research papers are written. In those cases, the professors can sometimes figure out who the student authors are.</p>
<p>The Harvard upper quartile-lower quartile boundary is about 6 points, I think.</p>
<p>In any case, Williams point seems to be that affirmative action at the elite schools has a suck-em-up and spit-em-out effect because of the existence of quotas at all schools, which means that at the marginal law school, very few of the students in question are going to have success. (This may be true of non-blacks also, though)</p>
<p>Mr. Payne it might interest you to know that at MIT women are regularly admitted at a higher rate than men, but they do better once they are there. They may not get the 800s on the SATs, but they make up for it with other attributes. There may be more than one way to interpret this data.</p>
<p>You know the joke. What do they call the guy who graduates last in his med school class? “Doctor”.</p>
<p>besides which, how you do in law school has very little bearing on whether you pass the bar or not. Especially at the top schools, the focus is on theory and not on practice. You need to take bar review classes to learn all of the things that you weren’t taught at a T14.</p>
<p>Great. Williams simply reports something and the liar liar rant/chant breaks out. </p>
<p>Typical. </p>
<p>If the stats are right that 43% of the black students never pass the bar exam, someone ought to do some hard thinking. </p>
<p>[Frankly, any law school whose students don’t pass at above an 85-90% rate ought to be shut down or ineligible to to loan the money we get from our Chinese owners to these incompetents in order to keep their professors jobs. After all, we may be borrowing it, but we should certainly spend it wisely.]</p>
<p>No one (thus far) called Williams a liar, they just questioned his analysis. And was said earlier, the State Bar passage rate doesn’t neatly coincide with grade performance.</p>
<p>It is not a matter of liar, liar, it is a matter of managing the facts.</p>
<p>When Williams state that 43% of black students never pass the bar, are all of these students graduates of elite law schools? There is already a disconnect because 43% of the blacks in law schools do not attend elite law schools.</p>
<p>Are all of these students taking the bar in the state that they attended law school?</p>
<p>Are we talking about nation wide that 43% of blacks who sit for the bar never pass the exam or are we talking about particular states?</p>
<p>As ec1234 stated, going to an elite law school really has no bearing on whether or not you pass the bar</p>
<p>The fact that affirmative action supporters do not like Professor Williams’ conclusions does not mean the conclusions are poorly argued or ill founded. He is relying on the research of others.</p>
<p>I have never seen any research that would support the following conclusion:</p>
<p>If you read Richard Sander’s article “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools” published in the Stanford Law Review you can see his analysis. Some of his conclusions include:</p>
<p>Razorsharp, I’m confident that premise has been reviewed hundreds of times because “non-elite” (ugh, what a term!) schools that famously exceed their elite rivals in bar passage rates routinely announce and publish the superior passage rates of their alumni. For example, it is commonly known in New York City that Brooklyn Law School and St. John’s University Law School alumni consistently outperform Columbia and New York University graduates on the bar exam.</p>