In an effort to raise their U.S. News & World Report rankings and avoid trouble with accreditors, law-school admissions officers overemphasize standardized-test scores and thereby discriminate against African-American applicants whose scores, on average, are lower than those of their white peers, according to a report due out in March.
As a result, the numbers of African-American students applying to, enrolling in, and graduating from law schools continue to decline, even as the overall figures have remained fairly steady, said the report’s author, John Nussbaumer, an associate dean at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, in Michigan.
“Efforts during the past 10 years to diversify America’s law schools by enrolling more African-American students have failed because those responsible for law-school admissions and accreditation practices have created a de facto and racially discriminatory quota system that restricts African-American access to the legal profession,” he wrote.
The article, “Misuse of the Law School Admission Test: Racial Discrimination, and the De Facto Quota System for Restricting African-American Access to the Legal Profession,” is scheduled for publication in March in the St. John’s Law Review, a publication of St. John’s University School of Law, in New York.
Mr. Nussbaumer serves on the Diversity Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which accredits law schools. He is also in the Law Professors Division of the National Bar Association, which was founded by African-American lawyers in an era when they were barred from the ABA.
In the article, Mr. Nussbaumer charges that many law schools use an applicant’s performance on the LSAT as the main factor in admissions decisions in order to improve their U.S. News rankings.
For law schools to rely so heavily on the test score, Mr. Nussbaumer says, defies the guidelines of the Law School Admission Council, which administers the test. Its guidelines say the test “should be used as only one of several criteria for evaluation and should not be given undue weight solely because its use is convenient.”
The council also discourages law schools from setting cutoff scores for admission, which “may have a greater adverse impact upon applicants from minority groups than upon the general applicant population.”
John A. Sebert, a consultant on legal education for the American Bar Association, said accreditors have reason to be concerned when law schools accept many students with low test scores.
“It’s sort of a consumer-protection issue,” he said in an interview. “We want to be sure that law schools aren’t admitting a substantial number of students who are unlikely to be successful in their program or in their attempts to pass the bar.”
Admitted students’ median test scores are one of the factors the newsmagazine weighs in creating its annual list of the nation’s best law schools.
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 52, Issue 26, Page A37
