URM v. Non-URM Empirical Comparison

[JGConnection]

Here is a statistical analysis that I conducted using self-reported figures as ascertained from www.lawschoolnumbers.com. I do not wish to present any conclusive evidence or make any judgments regarding the use of Affirmative Action in law school admissions, I simply wish to provide some numbers that may assist some in making a determination about the issue.

Procedure:
I took the LSAT and GPA scores of the first 9 students who had been accepted to Yale c/o '09, controlling only for under-represented minority status (i.e. URM and non-URM indentification). I consider these scores to be randomized because there is not any order to how the pseudonyms are listed on the website, so I did not deem it necessary to further randomize the pool. Then I calculated the mean scores for each group and computed standard deviation for each group as well. I will not list the names of the students I used from the website in order to protect their anonymity.

Results:
URM LSAT mean= 170.7
URM LSAT standard deviation= 4.658
URM GPA mean= 3.895

Non-URM LSAT mean= 175.2
Non-URM LSAT standard deviation= 3.527
Non-URM GPA mean= 3.883

Note: I realize that there is a flaw in the methodology of this statistical analysis in that self-reported scores are subject to inflation or deflation. Therefore, I do not offer this as conclusive evidence of any kind of bias in admissions but the number trend is statistically significant given these limitations.

Feel free to comment or provide any additional insight pertaining to this matter. Thank you.

[Keeshi]

Ok...what's your point? What's your insight?

[JGConnection]

Addendum:

In addition to score inflation or deflation, minority status and notification of acceptance to Yale are also subject to manipulation, since neither can be verified by a third-party source.

To address Keeshi's point, I do not wish to say anything, but merely present some data that might contribute to the debate surrounding the role that Affirmative Action does or does not play in law schools admissions.

[Kirk Lazarus]

what is a JGConnection?

[JGConnection]

what is a JGConnection?

An inside joke from college (actually about law school) used to protect *my* anonymity.

[misery]

that sounds very lawyer-ish.

[philibusters]

hmm, this thread isn't what I expected it to be, though it is good somebody actually bothered to check the data, usually people just complain about AA and never bother to collect any data to show that race gives applicants a preference.

For some reason I thought this thread would talk about AA from a urm's perspective, where they see it helping socio-economically disadvantaged people and white people who only see it helping their rich urm friends.

Its kind of wierd to hear people talk about people of other races, white people on this board usually talk about other races as though they go through life the exact same as themselves, and non-whites on this board usally talk about whites like whites have never ever faced any hardship or disadvantage in their lives and are all happy smug people, upper middle class people...as a white person its wierd to hear it, so I find it believeable when people of other races so white people don't really understand what their lives are like.