September 21, 1993 MEMORANDUM 7 Program Review Team FROM: _ John F. RE: Admissions Policy Victor and | have been trying to get a handle on how to go about addressing the question of admissions policy for the Team. | fear that our approach may not be what the team wants or expects, but it seems to us to make sense, so | thought I should try to detail it in writing as best | could before we meet to discuss it.. Since | won't have time to run this past Victor, I'll simply put out my own views based on discussions he and | have had, and leave it to Victor to correct this separately if it distorts his feelings. My own sense is that we have an admissions policy that consists of, essentially, one primary objective: to admit students based on their demonstrated commitment to public service and the public interest, in order to maximize the likelihood that they will become public interest lawyers once they graduate. This criterion has a corollary (closely linked for many of us), that affirms that we believe that increasing representation in the Bar for those presently under-represented is itself a form of public service. Thus members of groups presently under-represented in the Bar have, to some extent at least, demonstrated Commitment to the public interest whatever their history or aspirations. Whatever we do in practice, this, | think, is our existing policy. The question is, do we want to change it, and if so, why? My sense of what people are concerned about is not that the policy should be changed but that many believe that we don’t presently genuinely embrace this averred policy; it’s a failure of practice, not objective. And the ‘eal this in wo distinct ways. One is that our admissions practices don’t necessarily yield the strongest class they might, evaluated on these criteria. That is, either by reason of failures in recruiting or by reason of failures in file reading and admissions deceision-making, we don’t offer admission or matriculate the applicants who most strongly uphold our sense of mission. This,however, is a package of concerns about admissions practices that Joyce and her sub-Team are to address. A second concern is tougher. It amounts to the notion that our mission is to produce public interest lawyers, not law students, and that we must measure our success by those who pass the Bar, not those whom we admit or matriculate, | tend to share this concern in ways | try to get at in a separate memo. Now, this second concern is squarely an admissions policy matter, in the sense that there are only two possible ways to address it: either we figure out a way to get people to be more able to pass the Bar, or we have to add a second element to our policy subordinating public interest commitment to a diminished risk of failing the Bar. | think there are good reasons to opt for the first—trying to focus on addressing the needs of highBasically, | thin! first is that admitting students whom other schools also admit is merely a shuffle between schools, not a net addition to the number of public interest Practitioners. So shifting over {ousing some form of demonstrated likelihoed of Bar passage would actually not help serve our core aim, even if we Sought out committed applicants who met the Bar standard as well, But more importantly, there is an empirical Suestion about whether we could find such People. One possible answer is that we cou it is true to a certain extent, but | have been involved with a lot of admissions processes over have had to Feject (the bottom 15 students in the class) and whom we would otherwise have admitted {roughly the 30 or 40 highest-LSAT rejectecs) to yield a similar-sized class © Team can assess these and decide whether they think the resulting class would be an acceptable one. | tend to think it would not. Printed September 22, 1993the highest risk on the Bar across the country (and here as well each time we have looked at the data) are those with the lowest academic predictors. Does this mean that we simply throw up our hands and say all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. No, that won't work. There are hairy programmatic implications if we keep our present admissions policies (again, the other memo). On the other hand, even if we assume that changes in our practices might improve Bar pass results marginally, we need to address the normative questions implied in making those changes, and be very conservative about our assumptions about how much control we have in the short term over the academic predictors of those who attend this law school. And if we accept the notion that academic predictors are the only way to address diminishing risk of Bar failure on entry, then we need to weigh the impact of valuing academic predictors more highly than we presently do. Alternatively, we need to think through whether we can serious ly commit to shifting our emphasis to risk at exit rather than risk at entry. To me, that’s about all there is to say about admissions policy. But | realize that the Team and the community may well feel that this answer somehow dodges the question. To the extent that that makes sense to me, | think it is because people feel that we should look at the people here who have failed the Bar repeatedly and ask whether we can identify anything about them prior to admission that would allow us to see the highest risks coming. People are skeptical that the LSAT and, to a lesser extent, undergraduate grades predict Bar success. These are legitimate questions, but | don’t think we have very satisfying answers. Part of the reason is that our Bar pass information is sketchy, another part is that our numbers are small (especially in absolute numbers of relatively low incicdence conditions like low LSAT score or minority group membership), and another part is that our grading information is not only sketchy but on a scale that has no variability (only Pass and Fail). We have, that is, data on only a limited number of variables, the variables have only a limited amount of variability, we lack data for many people, and the people we have data on tend to be too few to draw statistical conclusions from. On the other and, the studies we have attempted here in the past suggest that we do not differ from the national studies that have been done. And those conclude: LSAT is the primary pre-admission predictor of success on the Bar; undergrad GPA is second in importance, but adds only a bit to LSAT; that these taken together explain less than 25% of the observed variability in Bar pass; and that at the extreme ends of LSAT score distribution likelihood of success or failure on the Bar is more easily predicted. Does this all add anything? For me, not much. The real questions remain normative, not empirical. Within bounds, | think itis safe to say that we could decrease risk at entry by relying more on LSAT and GPA. | am unsure whether we can affect risk at exit by changing the program, or whether we would be willing to change the program sufficiently even to try the experiment. | don’t know how much difference recruiting would make, or how many more low-risk people we would have to admit, in exchange for rejecting how many more high-risk people, in order to bring our Bar pass rate up to an acceptable level (I don’t even know what that level is). Printed September 22, 1993 Page 3