"Down Market" Diversity and Bar Passage

ABA Standard 212(a) requires law schools to

demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to providing full opportunities for the study of law and entry into the profession by members of underrepresented groups, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, and a commitment to having a student body that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.

For law schools near the bottom of the market for law students—those with lower LSAT profiles of entering classes—diversity often means taking minority students at high risk of failing the Bar.

The mean LSAT scores (and standard deviations) of the largest racial and ethnic groups for the 2009-2010 testing year were:

LSAT Testing Year 2009-2010 Means and Standard Deviations, by Ethnicity
Asian/Pacific Islander	152.4	10.74
Black/African-American	142.0	8.74
Hispanic/Latino	146.4	9.65
White/Caucasian	152.9	9.33

Susan P. Dalessandro, Lisa A. Stilwell, Jennifer A. Lawlor, & Lynda M. Reese, LSAT Performance with Regional, Gender, and Racial/Ethnic Breakdowns: 2003–2004 Through 2009–2010 Testing Years, at 20 tbl. 4B (2010)(LSAC TR-10-03).

Assuming normal distributions, the following table shows the percentage of 2009-20010 takers with LSAT scores above certain scores, by ethnicity:

LSAT Testing Year 2009-2010 Percent above LSAT Score, by Ethnicity
	140	145	150	155	160	165
Asian/Pacific Islander	88%	75%	59%	40%	24%	12%
Black/African-American	59%	37%	18%	7%	2%	0%
Hispanic	75%	56%	36%	19%	8%	3%
White/Caucasian	92%	80%	62%	41%	22%	10%

One would expect that the schools with highest LSAT profiles would enroll minority students with the highest LSATs. As schools above them take the higher-LSAT students, law schools with lower LSAT profiles would only be able to enroll minority students with increasingly lower LSAT scores. As discussed in The LSAT- free Illusion, those students are at increasingly higher risk of failing the Bar.

Data from the LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study shows exactly that. The following chart shows the LSAT mean (on the 10 to 48 scale) of students of each of the six LSAT groups based on the Bar passage Study law-school clusters (see Interpretation 301-6: Low LSATs and High Cut Scores):

Click on chart to enlarge.

Within each law-school group, the rank order of the LSAT means of the ethnic groups is consistent with the rank order shown in the first table above. As group LSAT mean falls, so does the mean of each of the ethnic groups. The only exception is in group 6, where the LSAT mean of Black/African-American students was higher than that in group 5.

Law schools at the bottom of the market for law students must often choose between diversity and maintaining Bar passage rates by trying to raise the LSAT scores of entering students. Here the first clause of Standard 212 comes into play: the commitment to diversity must be “[c]onsistent with sound legal education policy and the Standards”.

But more on that in the next installment.

Updated to add LSAT scores and to correct entries in second table.

Comments

[Ed]

I think there's something missing in the second table. I'm not sure how to interpret it.