How to Even the Score: Test Prep

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 fall: “It isn’t a great predictor of performance in first-year classes, but it’s still better than anything else I know.”

For prospective minority applicants, those are not comforting words. On average, 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 courses (kids who did not use them for the SAT don’t think of trying them for the LSAT) to affordability (the better programs run close to $1,000). But the difference in outcome can be crucial. Kaplan’s students average a seven-point jump in LSAT scores. And they tend to end up at the top 25 law schools. Of students at those schools who took LSAT-prep courses, three out of four went through Kaplan.

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 at Florida A&M, a black university; six sat for the LSAT in the fall, and five scored in the 150s–on level with the national average for whites. Christie Stancil took the course at North Carolina Central University after her junior year, and her LSATs went up eight points. Her score helped her get into Yale Law School.

The problem: the most enthusiastic supporters of giving test-prep courses to minorities–the law schools themselves–are barred from promoting it. Under the anti-preferences laws in Texas and California, universities cannot use race in their enlistment efforts. And publicly funded efforts to provide test-prep courses via vouchers would likely face challenges in the courts and political resistance from opponents who wonder why disadvantaged whites are not entitled. All of which means test-prep courses may offer only limited help to minority students until such state systems as California and Texas devise a more dependable way to make their student bodies diverse.

–By Romesh Ratnesar