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 ast
year (last school year, that is), Harvard University's distinguished
political theorist Harvey Mansfield attracted national attention
to his long-running battle against grade inflation by deciding to
hand his students two grades — an official but inflated grade
and a true grade. That double-grading system not only kept Mansfield's
students from being disadvantaged in a grade-inflated world, it
also shamed the nation's elite universities, by forcing attention
onto the reality of lowered standards. What got Mansfield into trouble,
however, was his claim that affirmative action had played an important
role in the rise of grade inflation. That claim is difficult to
substantiate, although in two pieces last school year, "Crimson
Truths" and "PC
Hits Anchorage," I presented evidence supporting the link
between affirmative action and grade inflation. Now it looks as
though, disguised as an argument against the alleged race-bias of
standardized admissions tests for law schools, some significant
empirical evidence on the link between affirmative action and grade
inflation may have surfaced.
A study released
last week by "Testing for the Public," a group critical
of standardized tests, found that white students scored higher than
their minority counterparts on the Law School Admissions test, even
when those students attended the same colleges and had the same
grade-point averages and majors. According to Testing for the Public,
that proves that the LSAT test is racially biased. The Chronicle
of Higher Education quotes William C. Kidder, a spokesman for
the group, slamming the LSAT for its role in forcing down minority
enrollments in law schools. Said Kidder, "I believe the LSAT
is the single largest contributor to resegregation in law schools,
especially those that can no longer practice affirmative action."
But wouldn't
a reluctance on the part of professors to give honest grades to
students admitted through affirmative action make perfect sense
of the results of this study? The study looked at applicants to
California's Boalt Hall Law School from 15 of the top undergraduate
colleges and universities in the country, including Harvard, Stanford,
and Yale. It is at just such schools where affirmative action is
practiced most assiduously, and where minority students are most
likely to be admitted without adequate preparation — and with
vastly lower SAT scores. If professors at these elite colleges hand
these students the same gentleman's B's and B pluses and A minuses
they give everyone else, it stands to reason that students with
the same grades from the same majors will nonetheless test out differently
when taking the LSAT's.
Yet Testing
for the Public has concluded from its study that "the continued
emphasis on the LSAT acts as an artificial barrier for students
of color aspiring to enter the legal profession." It might
better be said that, in attempting to lower or eliminate standards,
organizations like Testing for the Public have erected their own
artificial barrier to minority success — authentic success
based on honest achievement, that is.
The attack
on the LSAT's is an obvious follow-up to last
year's attack on the SAT's by University of California President
Richard Atkinson. And it has exactly the same source, as indicated
by the fact that the study in question focuses on the University
of California's law school. The elimination of affirmative action
by California's voters has now prompted an across-the-board attack
on standardized tests at all levels — exactly the wrong way
to go about raising the presence and performance of minority students
in higher education. But at least Testing for the Public has provided
us with some useful evidence. Either the LSAT test is racially biased,
or we now have important empirical proof of a link between affirmative
action and grade inflation at our nations most prestigious universities.
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