It should be fun watching affirmative action lawyers suing affirmative action doctors in malpractice suits overseen by affirmative action judges
/
self-identify as a black, transgender hawaiian?
According to information released Tuesday by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Black candidates continue to have the lowest first-time test-taker pass rate, which was 57% in 2022, compared with 61% in 2021.
Out of 33,721 first-time bar examinees in 2022, 2,510 candidates were Black, according to ABA data, which parses out pass rates by race, ethnicity and gender.
Among other first-time test-takers:
• The pass rate for Native Americans was 60% out of 183 candidates.
• The pass rate for Hawaiians was 69% out of 45 candidates.
• The pass rate for Hispanics was 69% out of 4,201 candidates.
• The pass rate for people who were two or more races was 74% out of 1,186 candidates.
• The pass rate for Asians was 75% out of 2,199 candidates.
• The pass rate for whites was 83% out of 21,553 candidates.
Also, section data shows the 2022 first-time pass rate was 77% for women and 80% for men. For people with another gender identity, the first-time pass rate was 79%; and for those who did not disclose their gender, the pass rate was 63%.
Additionally, the data examined two-year bar-passage rates. [Second tries].
Based on 2021 graduates, those pass rates were:
• 51% for Hawaiian candidates.
• 72% for Black candidates.
• 79% for Native American candidates.
• 81% for Hispanic candidates.
• 85% for candidates who were two or more races.
• 86% for Asian candidates.
• 90% for white candidates.
From Reuters:
Racial disparities in bar exam scores worsened in 2022
The gaps in bar pass rates between white and minority law graduates widened in 2022 for the second straight year, according to new data from the American Bar Association.
The first-time pass rate for white test takers last year was 83%, while 57% of Black examinees passed on their first attempt — a difference of 26 percentage points — the ABA said Tuesday. In 2021, that gap was 24 percentage points…
Bar exam critics have long pointed to racial gaps in results as evidence that the attorney licensing exam is biased against minority test takers—a charge the national conference has consistently refuted.
A national conference spokesperson called the differing pass rates “troubling” on Wednesday, while noting that those disparities are not new and are the result of many factors.
“We know that education was significantly disrupted by the pandemic, and that the effects of the pandemic were significantly worse for Black Americans and other historically marginalized communities, often exacerbating existing disparities,” said national conference spokesperson Valerie Hickman.
The LSAT can be difficult: it requires a good grasp of logic, writing skills, and reading comprehension for success. Some of that can be taught, but if a student has already graduated college and still lacks those skills, he isn’t going to suddenly develop them during the summer(s) between college and law school.
The bar exam is administered after after law school graduation is different, because it tests specific knowledge of the law you should have learned in law school, not the ability of a potential student to learn those things. It lacks the logic games and somewhat difficult reading passages that the LSAT does. Split into two days and covering national and state jurisdictions, it demands proof that you did learn the rules of evidence, civil procedure, broad, basic legal principles and the case law that defines them. It’s black and white, you should pardon the expression, and there is no question contained in the exam that requires an understanding peculiar to a specific culture or background to answer correctly. If someone flunks, it’s because he simply doesn’t know the law; nothing to do with whether he was hugged as a child or ridiculed for being Hawaiian.
So these dismal pass rates for blacks and the aforesaid Hawaiians (and what’s up with that, anyway?) reflect, I think, the performance of people who were accepted into law school when they were unprepared, and allowed to matriculate and graduate without ever receiving that training. Good luck to their clients when some mean prosecutor introduces damning evidence against them when the rules, had they been asserted, would have barred it, or when their own lawyer is blocked from introducing exculpatory evidence by a bogus rule invented by the opposing lawyer and agreed to by an ignorant judge. (To be fair, that judge may once have known the law, but forgot it after one of our new generation of brain surgeons went to work on him.)
But that’s the problem with a meritocracy and it’s why the levelers hate it: merit and ability are not distributed equally, and results will differ; the levelers reject this obvious truth because it deprives them of the ability to control outcomes for their favored classes, so they claim that equity is equality, and distribute rewards accordingly. It’s the victims of that spurious, participation-trophy policy who suffer, while the levelers gain the power and wealth they think they deserve.
