Professor Wax’s claim about black student grades is well founded. The Law School Admissions Council, which represents over 200 law schools, tabulated the first year grade average for the largest 144 law schools. Its Figure 5 indicated that for 2008-2010, black students grades averaged more than two standard deviations below white student grades. Thus, fewer than 5 percent of black students had grades that would put them in the upper half of all students; exactly what Professor Wax stated. The study also looked at the individual law schools (Figure 1c) and did find that black and white students at 3 schools have virtually the same first year average and another 17 had only modest differences. However, differences were quite substantial for the remaining 124 schools. Given that Dean Ruger has made claims about the grades of UPenn black students, he should make public the data that he submitted to the Law School Admissions Council.
ROBERT CHERRY is the Brueklundian Professor of Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His email address is RobertC@brooklyn.cuny.edu.
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