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No African-American Lawyers Allowed: The Inefficient Racism of the ABA\u27s Accreditation of Law Schools
No full textEconomic analysis demonstrates that, continuing from its intentionally racist beginnings in the 1920s, the American Bar Association\u27s system for accrediting law schools excludes most African-Americans from the legal profession, while allowing whites to enter. The discriminatory impact of ABA accreditation takes two forms. First, the ABA accreditation standards inflict academic racism. The standards impose academic requirements that African-Americans tend to lack, eliminating most schools that would serve average African-Americans. For example, the ABA generally denies accreditation to any school for which the average LSAT score is below 143. The average LSAT score for African-Americans is 142, compared to 152 for whites. The ABA\u27s requirements of high undergraduate grades and high bar-pass rates are similarly discriminatory. Second, ABA accreditation imposes financial racism. The accreditation requirements cause law schools\u27 costs and tuition levels to more than double. Because African-Americans have far lower average incomes than whites, the requirements make law school affordable only for whites, not for most African-Americans. Affirmative action and the availability of student loans counteract only a small part of the accreditation system\u27s discriminatory impacts. Elimination of both accreditation and the bar exam would integrate the profession and provide many other benefits, while producing few harms
Effects of Screen Size, Screen Resolution, and Display Rate on Computer-Based Test Performance
No full textComputer-based tests administered in established commercial testing centers typically have used monitors of uniform size running at a set resolution. Web-based delivery of tests promises to expand access, but at the price of less standardization in equipment. This study evaluated the effects of variations in screen size, resolution, and presentation delay on verbal and mathematics scores in a sample of 357 collegebound high school juniors. There were 3 screen display conditions crossed with 2 presentation rate conditions: a 17-in. monitor set to a resolution of 1024 × 768, a 17-in. monitor set to a resolution of 640 × 480, and a simulated 15-in. monitor set to a resolution of 640 × 480 with items presented either with no delay or with a 5-sec delay between questions (to emulate a slow Internet connection). No significant effects on math scores were found. Verbal scores were higher, by about a quarter of a standard deviation, with the larger high-resolution display
Diversity Matters: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Legal Education
No full textThis Article presents more evidence of the inequality that persists in legal education for students. Based on a survey of University of Florida law students conducted in 2001, this study reaffirms the existence of differential experience and an inegalitarian culture in legal education. However, it also demonstrates the importance of diversity and the recognition by a significant majority of students of the value of race and gender pluralism. These competing findings provide a clear guide to the future direction of legal education
The Bar Examination in Black and White: The Black-White Bar Passage Gap and the Implications for Minority Admissions to the Legal Profession
No full textThis article explores 1) the phenomena of the Black-White Bar Passage Gap, 2) the reasons further study of the gap is required and 3) psychometric and cultural observations about the existence of this gap. The Black-White Test Score Gap is a term used to describe the observed differences in test results between black and white standardized test takers. When this concept is applied to similar differences in bar passage results, this article labels the phenomena as the Black-White Bar Passage Gap. Although the LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study clearly documented this gap, further study of the Black-White Bar Passage Gap is needed due to three converging trends. The trends are 1) the increasing use by state bar examiners of standardized multistate examinations, 2) the higher percentages of black student enrollment in and graduation from law school, and 3) the recent decrease in national and state bar passage rates. After examining the data indicating the continued need to study the Black-White Bar Passage Gap, this article explores the concepts of test validity and bias and later examines culture and race oriented theories which provide explanations for the differences in black and white test scores. The article concludes that the phenomena of the Black-White Bar Passage Gap will continue to slow the rate of minority admission into the legal profession without further study of its ramifications and causes
Teaching Law Students to Be Self-Regulated Learners
No full textThis article articulates a model of self-regulated learning for law students and lawyers, explains why law schools should aspire to teach their students to be self-regulated learners and details a curriculum designed to accomplish that goal.
The first section of the article explains self-regulated learning. Self-regulated learning is a cyclical model of the learning process. In fact, all learners self-regulate, although many new law students are novice self-regulated learners. Self-regulation involves three phases. In the planning phase, learners decide what they want to learn and how they will learn it. Expert self-regulated learners are more likely to strive for mastery, to consciously make strategic choices in deciding how to study, and to consciously plan when and where they will study. In the second phase, expert learners implement their adopted strategies while monitoring whether they are learning and maintaining attention, and they quickly act to rectify confusion or distraction. In the reflection phase, expert learners evaluate their learning process to determine whether it was as effective and efficient as possible, attribute successes to personal competence and effort and failures to specific strategic choice errors, and plan how they will approach similar tasks in the future.
The second section argues that law schools should include self-regulated learning skills among the skills they teach. This section details education studies from within and outside of legal education that show that expert self-regulated learners learn more, learn it better and enjoy the learning process more than their novice peers.
The final section describes a curriculum designed to teach law students to be self-regulated learners. The curriculum, designed to replace law schools\u27 traditional orientation programs, provides concrete ideas for teaching these skills and for reinforcing that instruction in students\u27 first-year courses
Incremental Bar Admission: Lessons from the Medical Profession
No full textThis article examines the use of incremental licensure for physicians and explores how a similar approach might improve the current bar admission process. In so doing, it follows the tradition of borrowing best practices from other professions. It also offers an improvement over the existing bar admission system that may be attractive to the practicing bar. (341
Employing Active-Learning Techniques and Metacognition in Law School: Shifting Energy from Professor to Student
No full textWhat is metacognition and why have your students engage in it? Metacognition is an instructional tool that shifts energy from professor to student. Researchers in fields of psychology and education have found metacognition to be an effective method to engage students in the learning process. Law students are diverse in their learning styles, according to assessments performed annually at St. John\u27s University School of Law. Law professors are encouraged to engage students in active learning and metacognitive exercises. This article presents examples of teaching techniques involving active engagement and metacognition
Thinking Out of the Bar Exam Box: A Proposal to MacCrate Entry to the Profession
No full textAlthough the written bar examination is of relatively recent vintage, for those of us who practice law or work in legal education, it seems always to have been there. I have encountered the bar exam personally as a student, litigator, law teacher, trial and appellate judge, and most recently as a law school dean. I have also reflected on the bar exam as a member of various bar association committees on legal education. Throughout these experiences, my opinion, like that of many other participant observers, is that the examination is both misguided in terms of what it purports to do, and pernicious in its effects. Yet despite the fact that lawyers are, above all, problem solvers, little has been done about the bar exam as a problem besides studies, hand wringing and modest tinkering. However, the problem has not gone unnoticed. In the last several years, the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) has undertaken a re-examination of the bar exam, holding a national conference, issuing a statement, and fostering several law review articles. The Carnegie Foundation has begun a multi-year set of studies on professional education which, in the initial volume on legal education, examines and proposes changes in the bar examination.
Much of the energy which could be employed to continue and expand this initiative has, however, been deflected into a defensive posture, in the face of a campaign to raise passing bar scores and thus lower the percentage of applicants who pass...The movement to raise bar passage scores is linked...to the current national obsession with standards. This obsession is unjustified in the context of licensing lawyers and, along with other disadvantaging factors, may create an even greater and unjustified barrier to entry into the profession for non-majority students than does the present bar exam. This additional danger underscores the need to think out of the box with regard to the bar exam.
I have, for some time, been thinking in this more expansive way about the bar examination and the role it plays-or doesn\u27t play-in legal education and admission to the profession. I have slowly developed, with a [lot of] help from my friends, a plan for modest, but potentially real change. My proposal is for a new, experience and performance-based bar examination which, because it would be conducted in a public service setting, I have called the Public Service Alternative Bar Examination (PSABE). The PSABE is intended to avoid many of the problems connected with the existing bar exam and, although not intended to entirely supplant that test (hence, the Alternative ), to better evaluate and certify law graduates\u27 minimum competence to practice law unsupervised
Admissions Rituals as Political Acts: Guardians at the Gates of Our Democratic Ideals
No full textEvery year, selective colleges and universities engage in admissions rituals to reconstitute themselves. Institutions presumably align these high-stakes moments of civic pedagogy with their educational agenda: to produce knowledge, to promote learning, and to help individuals realize their intellectual, athletic, or artistic potential. The moment when admissions decisions are mailed is also fraught with political consequences that reach beyond the classroom to the boardroom, the legislature, and the kitchen table. At selective institutions of higher education, admissions decisions have a special political impact: rationing access to societal influence and power, and training leaders for public office and public life. Those admitted as students then graduate to become citizens who shape business, education, the arts, and the law for the next generation. Admissions decisions affect the individuals who apply, the institutional environments that greet those who enroll, and the stability and legitimacy of our democracy. They are political as well as educational acts.
At the same time that higher education is considered a democratic and educational necessity to many, it remains beyond the reach of all but a few. Indeed, a variety of ideological, demographic, economic, and sociological forces have converged to make seats in college very dear and the criteria for obtaining them very stringent, in ways that correlate with class, geography, and race. As a result, the few who enjoy access to higher education tend to be already quite privileged, although more low-income students now seek college degrees than ever before. In short, higher education has become a gift from the poor to the rich
When and Where We Enter: Rethinking Admission to the Legal Profession
No full textThis essay uses several lenses, including professionalism, lawyer competence, and widespread concern about high stakes testing to question why the bar examination should be virtually the only means of admission to the profession. Drawing on two major criticisms of the existing bar exam regime-- that it tests only a few of the ten lawyering skills which the ABA\u27s MacCrate Report has identified as necessary to competent practice; and that it has an impermissible disparate impact on applicants of color, impeding the profession in its stated commitment to increasing diversity--I propose a new, alternative, experientially-based bar exam, the Public Service Alternative Bar Exam (PSABE). Applicants who elected the PSABE would spend ten to twelve weeks working in the state court system, providing badly needed resources for the courts\u27 justice initiatives while being evaluated on all the MacCrate skills in a real-life, real-time setting in what I argue would be a better bar exam. The proposal is grounded analytically in Title VII\u27s requirement that employment tests be manifestly related to job performance, and historically in a 1980 experiment by the California Committee of Bar Examiners which demonstrated that a clinical, performance-based exam can effectively assess an applicant\u27s minimum competence to practice law