Grades & Race
The debate over the LSAT.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
September 5, 2001 9:55 a.m.

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.