Proposal 2 and UofMich

[mae8]

im sure firms and judges have great faith in someones functionality after failing five times. the gap in law school grades is larger, is that an illegitimate measure as well?

[bandaidstick]

haha - this is hilarious.

[Ever]

im sure firms and judges have great faith in someones functionality after failing five times. the gap in law school grades is larger, is that an illegitimate measure as well?

Five failures doesn't mean much. You could go and take a bar course today, as a prelaw student, and have a reasonable chance at passing the bar; I *&^% you not. So the question is then; are bar passage rates an indication of mental capacity or is there a level of economic influence due to whites, more often then not, being able to afford expensive prep courses? If you want a law school to teach you to pass the bar on the first try, and by your reasoning establish yourself as a better lawyer than another who must retake the test, Thomas Cooley is accepting applications and I hear wonderful things about them.

Is a student's GPA an illegitimate measure of their ability? No, but the bar is, which was the thrust of your last post and the point which I then addressed.

[redemption]

I prefer a theoretical socioeconomic based affirmative action to a theoretical race-based affirmative action as more of a compromise position.

I think the studies you cite are interesting and I'd seen at least one of them before, but they're also superficial and not at all conclusive. You know that.

lol.

[bandaidstick]

alright, EVER, then what about the legitimate measure (According to you), GPA? Mae8 says that the gap is LARGER there. It is the thrust of this post - so please respond.

[redemption]

To answer your question about specific intellectual skill - it is a certain quick and sophisticated command of the English language along with a fast and deductively inclined mind (off the top of my head).

Okay. So you think that URMs, on average, are less deductively-inclined and have a lesser command of English?

Hard to explain the Asian-White score gap if that's true, but never mind. Hard to explain the variations in the results that we see depending on the background environment against which each group takes the test, but never mind that too.

Basically, you think that blacks and hispanics are dumber and/or more inarticulate than whites and Asians. It would have been much better for all of us if you'd just said so at the beginning.

[redemption]

even if one agrees with racial preferences in general, the problem specifically at law schools is adcomms are dishonest (at best) by accepting people with little or no chance of becoming practicing attorneys. first time bar passage rates for law students as a whole are 88%. for blacks that number is 61%. 22% of black law students will not have passed the bar after FIVE attempts, so how exactly did aa benefit them? it gave them the opportunity to waste three years of tuition and greater opportunity costs spanning 8 years? well meaning support of aa is carried to this ridiculous conclusion, hurting everyone including the small black minority that would not be accepted into law school in a race-blind system.

Oh, yes. The 'blacks at Harvard will fail to get a job' argument. Well done for bringing that up.

[Ever]

alright, EVER, then what about the legitimate measure (According to you), GPA? Mae8 says that the gap is LARGER there. It is the thrust of this post - so please respond.

Well, you're not going to like me because I'm going to continue to argue, in part, the same economic forces I alluded to in prep courses. I expect your side would counter that this would more honestly support your belief that an economic status standard would be more beneficial than one based on race; to which I would argue that such a standard ignores the weight of historical influences on race relations in this country and the social imbalance between wealthy whites and wealthy nonwhites. Which then brings us back to the point of AA being an effort to artificially create a new balance between the races in terms of wealth and access so as to counter the artificially created imbalances that all whites enjoy today and all nonwhites suffer under today.

But that would just be going around in circles, and I'd have to start acting like red. by being amused by the people who don't get it.

[bandaidstick]

RED: haha. Wow, there's a completely worthless argument.

If you'll recall, this is assuming that we can isolate all other variables. I never said we could. If you could isolate all those variables, and were SURE that they were not the relevant factor (or some combo of them), then yes, I think that it would appear that the skill required for the LSAT - whatever that is - is lacking from whatever group is scoring lower. Obviously there is a relevant skill set here. I don't know exactly what it is. I just hazarded a guess. Blacks/hispanics are obviously not "dumber" or less articulate than whites/asians.

As to the Asian gap, I would say that if all of the assumptions hold as we've said (which I am not at all pretending they do), then whites would appear to have less of that skill in general.

I never said anything about articulate. You are truly incredible - in a very bad way.

[bandaidstick]

Ever . . . your analysis is spot on. I won't go in circles. You're right - I don't "get it."