Op-Ed
Testocracy: Tests or Testes?
Email: 
Share: 
Silk Blue Stockings
November 26, 2007 - 12:00amAs fairly successful members of society, all of us in the Ivy Leaguers like to believe that we have legitimately earned this place of privilege in the academic arena. Many of us are deeply wedded to the idea that we are living in a “meritocracy,” where we have been granted an elite status because of our merit and talent. Sadly this is not true if you’re white and middle class. (Granted there are plenty of white middle class kids who didn’t get into Cornell, so don’t feel too bad.)
I started thinking about this when I began applying to law school, and was turned off by the trend that I had noticed among my friends — specifically my male, white middle class friends. For example, let us examine Case A: The No-Good-Boyo. No-Good-Boyo has a very undistinguished high school career, but gets into a second-rate, yet still very fancy and expensive, liberal arts college. He squanders his undergraduate education fumbling in ill-lighted rooms with the female anatomy, drinking, sampling illegal substances and getting arrested for public disorderly conduct. Needless to say, his undergraduate record is less than stellar. He decides to take some adventure abroad for a year or so, while mommy and daddy pay for his soul searching. After discovering that he has no soul, he becomes a male model and wastes another year of his life chasing the perfect tan, while living rent free in one of his parents’ many homes. The male modeling thing doesn’t work out, so he spends an entire year swatting (Brit slang for studying) for the LSAT, gets a great score and is accepted into the Ivy League! Vindication!
Case B: Much the same as Case A of the No-Good-Boyo … let’s call him Young-M.C. (motivationally-challenged). Young-M.C. goes to university on a baseball scholarship, but falls into a funk when his coach doesn’t let him play. This disappointment, grave indeed, drives him to self medicate with booze and weed. Sound familiar yet? Young-M.C. nearly drops out of school, but manages to squeeze out a B.A. Promptly, he moves in with mommy and daddy because his job in construction doesn’t support his pot habit. Besides momma’s cooking is so good and the house is big enough that he has his own wing, with good ventilation, so the folks don’t notice the smell of marijuana. After years of this he is threatened with never getting laid again, because he is living with his parents at the age of 26, so he takes a year, crams for the LSAT, does great and ends up at a fabulous law school.
Clearly No-Good-Boyo and Young-M.C. have a lot in common, but notice the pattern: poor undergraduate record + lots of time and money + white + male + good LSAT score → incredibly bright future. Now, I think it is great to give young people a second chance to prove themselves, but I feel that the weight that law schools place on the LSAT is to allow spoiled white boys who screwed up in college to have a shot at the big time. The only noticeable trend regarding LSAT scores is money: there is a direct correlation between higher incomes and higher LSAT scores. To add insult to injury, according to Guinier and Strum in their book Who’s Qualified, a study “found a negative relationship between high LSAT scores and subsequent community leadership and community service.”
Therefore, I think LSAT stands for Legitimizing the Selection of Asinine Trustfunders. (I did pretty decently on the LSAT myself, so I guess I fall into this category, even though I am definitely not a trustfunder by any stretch of the imagination.) The test is flawed on so many counts, but most worrisome is that it favors certain socioeconomic, cultural, racial and gender groups. Furthermore, we are not just talking about any old opportunity, we are talking about the keepers of the law — potentially the most powerful people in society. And the LSAT is a flaming hoop to jump through to be a very powerful member of society — so the fact that it is so strongly biased is an enormous problem.
Despite the fact that studies show that women outperform men as undergraduates (based on GPA), there is a performance gap between men and women on the LSAT. I believe that this is a culturally induced performance gap. Certain tasks that have been given to women over many generations, tend to be contingent on endurance — childrearing, domestic duties, etc. I believe that this endurance benefits women in college because most grades are an accumulation of a sustained performance over many tasks. Conversely, young men may have more training in performing with short bursts of energy — focusing on one goal as in sports, hunting a wooly mammoth, ejaculation or performing well on one stressful exam. I think the fact that women may be more apt at performing well over a long period of time, while men may be trained by social constructs to perform well on short high-pressured situations, like the LSAT, makes law school admissions’ emphasis on the LSAT score biased in favor of men. I hate to buy into these gendered binaries, because they are totally over-simplistic and inaccurate, but I still believe (and statistics support this statement) that the law school entrance exam and law school in general is geared towards rewarding skills that are heavily influenced by culturally gendered constructions.
The gender bias of the LSAT aside, a study called the Bartow Survey conducted in the 1990’s, proved that although men and women entered the University of Pennsylvania Law School with the same qualifications, men were three times more likely than women to make law review. Now, I certainly do not want to intimidate or discourage any women from applying to law school (I myself am in the midst of the whole application palaver), but I think we should be aware of these issues before we enter law school so that we can support one another through this male dominated field and remember that this testocracy may be less about tests and more about testes.
Claire Readhead is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at creadhead@cornellsun.com. Silk Blue Stockings appears alternate Mondays.
testocracy
You mention that women do better than men as undergraduates and that men do better than women in law school. Why is it only a problem when women are the ones underperforming? When women do worse its because "law school in general is geared towards rewarding skills that are heavily influenced by culturally gendered constructions." When men do worse it's because they're 'motivationally challenged.' Either its a problem whenever one gender does worse than the other or we accept that some jobs and tasks favor one gender over the other. You can't pick and choose which gender gaps are unfair. Also, your two examples at of males at the beginning (becaue only males have parents who support them, not females) talk about middle class families being able to pay for a son to go abroad for a year or live in his own wing of the house. I don't know how many middle class people you know but everyone I know with a family income of $50,000-$80,000 don't have seperate wings of the house. Your defination of middle class seems grossly inaccurate.
Your idea of what
Your idea of what constitutes 'middle class' is obviously very wrong. What you describe is more like the richest 5%.
Cornell (financial) curve
Both my parents make a combined $50,000 a year. We live in a small 3 bedroom ranch in western new york. We didn't always have money for frills but we made do, and were quite happy. I used to think of myself as middle class.
Then I came to Cornell, and met many people like your describe. After four years of these "middle class" lamenting their "struggles," I have redefined myself as "poor." Which is a shame, because I know I live a pretty good life compared to families in urban poverty, and in third world countries.
We Cornellians should be honest and clear a few things up:
-If your parents make more than $100,000, you are probably not middle class (i know cost of living varies, but this is national average)
-If you have a hedge or trust fund, you are NOT middle class
-If you have vacationed in Europe or have a summer home, you are NOT middle class
The "middle class" as you describe are more like the "merely" rich versus the SUPER rich
Do you really think that law
Do you really think that law schools are stuffed full of former scholarship baseball players? Why is it that females who perform poorly in law school are simply prey to bigotry and some mysterious LSAT bias when men who do poorly in undergraduate courses are lazy?
Alternate interpretation: These 'lazy' men do well on the LSAT, and also in law school, because they have strong analytical minds well-suited for logical reasoning. This type of performance gap is nothing new. I'd recommend observing the conclusion of both a freshman engineering prelim and a senior engineering prelim. One will be about 40% female and have roughly five young women crying outside of it, the other will be about 10% female and a distinct lack of crying.
Only when we understand why women seem to excel in the academic game of liberal arts education while falling by the wayside in fields that require concrete analytical thought will we begin to understand the issues you complain about.
Until then I hope you learn that, surprise, women also live off their parents and if Cornell is any indication seem to spend more than their fair share of time drunk in the dark. I'd like to see an apology.
faulty reasoning
Your reasoning is clearly faulty. Isn't rational thought and sound/cogent reasoning a key component of the LSAT and subsequently law school? You might want to take a logic course... and beef up your analytical/reasoning skills.
I'd like to respond to your
I'd like to respond to your article. I apologize if I've taken anything too seriously, or out of context. I agree that both LSAT scores and law school grades seem arbitrary, and that legal education and the legal industry both have a history of strong sexism. But I have a few points to make.
First, you say that, "[a]s fairly successful members of society, all of us in the Ivy Leaguers [sic] like to believe that we have legitimately earned this place of privilege in the academic arena." I imagine that most of your peers--both in Cornell and at quality colleges across the country--will become fairly successful members of society. But you're rushing things. Most college students, regardless of how great a school they attend, have yet to become successful members of society.
Second, you create and criticize two male caricatures. From their biographies, you infer the LSAT heavily favor men qua men. The first sentence reeks of sexism; the second, poor logic.
Third, you compare the relative performance of men and women as undergraduates and law students. Another poster has already noted the flaws in the conclusions you go on to make.
Fourth, you fail to note the correlation between LSAT scores and two important indicators of raw intelligence and education, and neither is sex: the quality of the test-taker's undergraduate institution, and the analytical rigor of the test-taker's undergraduate concentration. I can't seem to find a link to a table describing the first phenomenon. But here is one for the second: http://www.uic.edu/cba/cba-depts/economics/undergrad/table.htm.
Fifth, you accept gendered stereotypes of intellectual typologies and say that men outperform women at top law schools because tests favor the former over the latter. But studies indicate that males may excel in highly competitive analytical environments because the male intelligence distribution favors the extremes--both the pits and the peaks of ability. If you walk into an advanced and a remedial class, you should expect to find more males in each.
Sixth, you describe law as a male-dominated field. You correctly describe its past. But you conceal its present and its future. Legal hiring, at least at many of the largest firms, is now virtually sex-neutral. And, increasingly, so are law school admissions. For the former, see the table at http://www.nalp.org/content/index.php?pid=448; for the latter, http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/charts/stats%20-%206.pdf.