The controversy surrounding Columbia Law School’s documentation of a “disturbing” decline in enrollment of minority students at law campuses around the country has deans and professors in New York state discussing a perceived cultural bias in the LSAT examination, combined with the test’s exaggerated importance as an element of the annual rankings of their institutions by U.S. News & World Report.
Although LSAT scores have actually trended upward during the past 15 years, according to the report, many in the New York legal academy contend that informal “cut-off” numbers set by law schools have simultaneously risen — as a means of gaming the U.S. News rankings to their competitive marketing advantage.
No one is more vociferous on the topic than Professor Douglas D. Scherer, director of the Legal Education Access Program at Touro Law Center, who said dependence on higher LSAT scores “demonstrates crass hypocrisy with regard to the expressed commitment to diversity” because the standardized test “has very little predictive capability” in forecasting students’ eventual success as students and practitioners, and therefore serves merely to “weed out” blacks, Latinos and other minorities presumed to be unprepared for the rigors of legal education.
“This is an outrageous form of institutional discrimination,” Scherer said in an interview. “If this were done in the employment area, you’d see disparate impact lawsuits.”
The Columbia Law study was released in January in conjunction with the Society of American Law Teachers. It found that although black and Chicano students have applied to law schools in relatively constant numbers over the past 15 years, their representation in law schools has fallen. The study concluded:
Even more worrisome is the fact that during the same period, African American and Mexican American applicants are doing better than ever on … undergraduate grade point average and LSAT scores. In addition, the size of law school classes and the total number of law schools have increased, making room for nearly 4,000 more students.
Despite all that, first-year [minority] enrollment has declined 8.6 percent, from a combined 3,937 in 1992 to 3,595 in 2005.
