Word: lsats
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...sick--really sick--of the LSAT...
Within the next five or six years, many of us, if not most, will subject ourselves to an alphabet soup of similar ordeals of widely varying intensity, including the LSAT, the GMAT and the GRE. But as they return from their pilgrimages to test sites at U. Mass-Boston or MIT, most test-taking students refuse to evaluate their performance themselves. As we hail the conquering heroes, they merely say, "It's over...
Undergraduate-admissions officers in California and Texas may be downgrading--or ignoring altogether--the significance of standardized tests, but don't expect their law-school counterparts to follow suit. At some elite institutions, a candidate's score on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) can count for as much as half the total application. The exam is so integral to vetting applications that even supporters of affirmative action reject the idea of dumping the LSAT as a way of recruiting more minority students. Says Michael Sharlot, dean of the University of Texas Law School, where only four blacks enrolled last...
...African Americans score 10 points below white test takers on the 180-point exam. But there is an open secret about law-school admissions tests: the playing field is not level. Whites and Asians are more likely than blacks to take commercial courses designed to prepare students for the LSAT. Though the disparity is slight, experts point to an even more significant test-prep gap: while whites take high-end, intensive courses offered by Kaplan Educational Centers and the Princeton Review, minorities tend to settle for cheaper, weekend crash courses. The reasons vary from lack of familiarity with the fancy...
Backers of diversity are taking notice. Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit consortium of lawyers, provides 50 scholarships to minority undergraduates to attend a 16-session Kaplan LSAT course. Kaplan has set up a similar voucher program in California. The New York City-based Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund offers students at six historically black universities Princeton Review courses for $375--half the regular price. "In the short term," Sharlot says, "nothing could be more helpful in increasing the pool of competitive minority applicants than access to the prep courses." He may be right: last summer 16 students took a Princeton Review course...