Does (LSAT) Testing = Racial Discrimination? Forum

[flash21]

@acrossthelake, great post, I've been creeping this thread but I think you've made a great point. There are inequalities that occur well before the LSAT which lead to inadequate LSAT performances of minorities, so I'm not sure if blaming the LSAT is actually the way to go. There are some deeper structural issues going on here which I don't think will be eradicated any time soon.

[09042014]

What does it mean to call a test "racist" or "classist"? Is it enough to simply show that, on the whole, some races/classes do better than others? Or should we expect that the people making the claim be able to point to individual questions on the test that are somehow "flawed" or "biased" in favor of one race/class over another?

I don't want to get into a fight over affirmative action,and as a mod I'm going to caution that this thread *cannot* devolve into that.

Those are certainly 2 different standards. The designers of the LSAT actually take great care to make sure that the latter doesn't happen in regards to race. When we take the experimental sections, they can then look at the performance of people of different backgrounds on the experimental questions, and weed out questions that seem to be biased in favor of a certain race. We don't indicate our class background when we take the LSAT, so they can't control for that.

To call a standardized exam for law school admissions "racist" with the former standard is troubling. There are certainly a lot of inequalities that contribute to differences in academic performance, but they start really young. With a few exceptions, most people taking the LSAT are 21+, well over a decade worth of inequity can lead to differing performance by that point, and it's probably not quite fair to blame the test or perhaps measuring a difference in skill that simply exists.

I recall reading research a few years back when I was a 0L that the LSAT actually tends to overpredict performance of minorities in law school, on the whole.

If you're in support of some sort of leveling of the playing field for admissions to law school, getting rid of the LSAT isn't it.

IIRC it doesn't overpredict (As in predicts they do better than they actually do) but it's the most accurate for minorities.

[094320]

..

[SemperLegal]

The results of the analyses indicate that FYA [First Year Average] tended to be, on average, slightly overpredicted (i.e., predicted FYAs exceeded actual FYAs) for all three of the racial/ethnic minority subgroups studied here, with Black law students exhibiting the most overprediction and Asian American law students exhibiting the least overprediction. The combination of both LSAT score and UGPA provided the least amount of overprediction for racial/ethnic minority subgroups on the school level compared to the use of either single predictor alone. Overall, these results do not support the concern that LSAT score alone or the combination of LSAT score and UGPA may contribute to unfair admission decisions for the racial/ethnic subgroups studied here.

[Pancakes12]

I recall reading research a few years back when I was a 0L that the LSAT actually tends to overpredict performance of minorities in law school, on the whole.

This is interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if the law school curve plays a part. Because there are wide gaps in lsat scores between some urms and non-urms and because the curve prevents too many people from getting Cs or lower, everyone's grades are compressed while lsat disparity remains

Edit: actually my theory doesn't make any sense, if it were true the. Lsat would underpredict urm performance

[BillsFan9907]

What does it mean to call a test "racist" or "classist"? Is it enough to simply show that, on the whole, some races/classes do better than others? Or should we expect that the people making the claim be able to point to individual questions on the test that are somehow "flawed" or "biased" in favor of one race/class over another?

I don't want to get into a fight over affirmative action,and as a mod I'm going to caution that this thread *cannot* devolve into that.

Why can't that happen?

[BillsFan9907]

Most def racist

Racist AND classist.

Yeah unlike education in general which has nothing to do with class. Oh wait...

I'm actually ok calling the lsat classist, if that means those from upper classes are more likely to do well. I'm not ok with saying that your skin color affects your ability to read

This seems like you're being willfully ignorant - obviously there are cultural markers that are split among "racial" lines that clearly affect one's ability to read. The most obvious would be speaking in dialect. If literally all the adults in your life, including ministers, police, and teachers are using a grammar where tenses are expressed differently from formal English, and subject-verb agreement differs, it will be more hallenging to rigorously engage with formal, and especially academic, English.

I taught in a semi rural area in Europe, where the future laborer students literally could not speak the formal version of thei language, although they could read and write it. To pretend like skin color is unrelated to cultural factors isn't beneficial to discussion.

So then explain how speakers of the Yiddish dialect in Germany had little problem engaging in pursuits requiring the more mainstream German dialects?

Or for that matter, why did Yiddish speakers in the USA not have such problems? After all they came from communities in which only Yiddish was spoken.

[A. Nony Mouse]

What does it mean to call a test "racist" or "classist"? Is it enough to simply show that, on the whole, some races/classes do better than others? Or should we expect that the people making the claim be able to point to individual questions on the test that are somehow "flawed" or "biased" in favor of one race/class over another?

I don't want to get into a fight over affirmative action,and as a mod I'm going to caution that this thread *cannot* devolve into that.

Why can't that happen?

Because it's one of the forum rules that AA discussion is limited to the thread in the lounge specifically dedicated to that topic.

[cron1834]

Oh common Steve, why did you post this here in the LSAT prep forum? The issue has nothing to do with preparing for the test.

You know better, it's only going to create a $hit ton of nasty arguments and vitriol between posters that want to argue/fight to the death about the issue and distract from legit quality prep discussions. There are other areas of the forum for people to have endless angry pointless debates and this exact topic has been fought endlessly in other parts of the forum since the creation of TLS.

Just LOL.

[BillsFan9907]

What does it mean to call a test "racist" or "classist"? Is it enough to simply show that, on the whole, some races/classes do better than others? Or should we expect that the people making the claim be able to point to individual questions on the test that are somehow "flawed" or "biased" in favor of one race/class over another?

I don't want to get into a fight over affirmative action,and as a mod I'm going to caution that this thread *cannot* devolve into that.

Why can't that happen?

Because it's one of the forum rules that AA discussion is limited to the thread in the lounge specifically dedicated to that topic.

AHHHH gotcha. That makes sense. I read too much into it - I thought such discussion was prohibited on ALL of TLS.

[indo]

Most def racist

Racist AND classist.

Yeah unlike education in general which has nothing to do with class. Oh wait...

I'm actually ok calling the lsat classist, if that means those from upper classes are more likely to do well. I'm not ok with saying that your skin color affects your ability to read

WOW I did NOT know that the skin color affects our ability to read.

I thought our brain and working hard will affects our ability to read and do well in LSAT.

[UnicornHunter]

Most def racist

Racist AND classist.

Yeah unlike education in general which has nothing to do with class. Oh wait...

I'm actually ok calling the lsat classist, if that means those from upper classes are more likely to do well. I'm not ok with saying that your skin color affects your ability to read

WOW I did NOT know that the skin color affects our ability to read.

I thought our brain and working hard will affects our ability to read and do well in LSAT.

Nice reading comp fail right there.

[jkhalfa]

When did people switch from thinking "this is an obstacle, so I must work hard to overcome it" to "this is an obstacle, so I should complain that it's 'discrimination' and demand that other people remove it to accommodate me"?

All of this rationalizing with language dialects and such is nonsense. If you grew up in a community ignorant of proper English grammar, well then this is the time to learn proper English grammar. If your parents were crazy Zen mystics who didn't believe in logic, then now is the time to learn logical reasoning. If you have to work a full-time job during your LSAT prep to support yourself, well then this is the time to man up and sacrifice sleep for more important things. If you can't afford a prep class, then work hard on your own and self-study. Prep materials aren't that expensive, and you can borrow them from libraries or steal them off the Internet if you need to. You know what you need to do, and you can do it if you try hard enough. No excuses.

As for actual statistical predictions, no test is perfect, and the correlation between LSAT score and law school performance has already been beaten to death in DF's thread about people who "overstudy" for the LSAT. And we're not supposed to discuss AA apparently, but like I said above, if there's any bias against minorities it's certainly counterbalanced by schools' preference for URMs. Go play around with mylsn.info or read some URM threads here to see the crazy boost URMs get. I'd say there's an institutional bias in favor of racial minorities, not against them.

[Pancakes12]

Most def racist

Racist AND classist.

Yeah unlike education in general which has nothing to do with class. Oh wait...

I'm actually ok calling the lsat classist, if that means those from upper classes are more likely to do well. I'm not ok with saying that your skin color affects your ability to read

WOW I did NOT know that the skin color affects our ability to read.

I thought our brain and working hard will affects our ability to read and do well in LSAT.

I think you're confused. I think you agree with me?

[BillsFan9907]

When did people switch from thinking "this is an obstacle, so I must work hard to overcome it" to "this is an obstacle, so I should complain that it's 'discrimination' and demand that other people remove it to accommodate me"?

All of this rationalizing with language dialects and such is nonsense. If you grew up in a community ignorant of proper English grammar, well then this is the time to learn proper English grammar. If your parents were crazy Zen mystics who didn't believe in logic, then now is the time to learn logical reasoning. If you have to work a full-time job during your LSAT prep to support yourself, well then this is the time to man up and sacrifice sleep for more important things. If you can't afford a prep class, then work hard on your own and self-study. Prep materials aren't that expensive, and you can borrow them from libraries or steal them off the Internet if you need to. You know what you need to do, and you can do it if you try hard enough. No excuses.

As for actual statistical predictions, no test is perfect, and the correlation between LSAT score and law school performance has already been beaten to death in DF's thread about people who "overstudy" for the LSAT. And we're not supposed to discuss AA apparently, but like I said above, if there's any bias against minorities it's certainly counterbalanced by schools' preference for URMs. Go play around with mylsn.info or read some URM threads here to see the crazy boost URMs get. I'd say there's an institutional bias in favor of racial minorities, not against them.

Well said.

[nothingtosee]

When did people switch from thinking "this is an obstacle, so I must work hard to overcome it" to "this is an obstacle, so I should complain that it's 'discrimination' and demand that other people remove it to accommodate me"?

All of this rationalizing with language dialects and such is nonsense. If you grew up in a community ignorant of proper English grammar, well then this is the time to learn proper English grammar. If your parents were crazy Zen mystics who didn't believe in logic, then now is the time to learn logical reasoning. If you have to work a full-time job during your LSAT prep to support yourself, well then this is the time to man up and sacrifice sleep for more important things. If you can't afford a prep class, then work hard on your own and self-study. Prep materials aren't that expensive, and you can borrow them from libraries or steal them off the Internet if you need to. You know what you need to do, and you can do it if you try hard enough. No excuses.

As for actual statistical predictions, no test is perfect, and the correlation between LSAT score and law school performance has already been beaten to death in DF's thread about people who "overstudy" for the LSAT. And we're not supposed to discuss AA apparently, but like I said above, if there's any bias against minorities it's certainly counterbalanced by schools' preference for URMs. Go play around with mylsn.info or read some URM threads here to see the crazy boost URMs get. I'd say there's an institutional bias in favor of racial minorities, not against them.

There are large high schools in this country where the highest scorer of the graduating class scores a 24 on their ACT. There are schools where not a single student has scored a 26 in the past four years.

Were you the top student in your high school class? Were you the best of the three years previous to you? If you weren't the very best, it's wrong for you to assume that if you were in that position you would just study as hard as you do now. Because that would give you an 80th percentile score.

Granted this is high school I'm talking about, not college, but this whole "I studied hard for my standardized test so I deserve my score" ignores the fact that's the knowledge to study is in a way a privilege. Zero students at my high school studied for any college entrance test. Why? I didn't study be ause no one I knew studied.

In college terms, if you have already drastically outperformed your stock by attending a four year university, you will likely not have the striver drive to shoot for Columbia - no one you know has even attended Florida Coastal!

Granted, I am making some perhaps offensive assumptions here (couching a racial discussion in economic and social terms).

Your "you know what you need to do" assumption is false. One doesn't know, if one knows zero lawyers in real life who can tell you that an American university law degree is not a guarantee of financial stabibility.

And regarding AA screwing you over, I find it amusing that you get bootstrappy to one group, without going the same to everyone.

[BillsFan9907]

There are large high schools in this country where the highest scorer of the graduating class scores a 24 on their ACT. There are schools where not a single student has scored a 26 in the past four years.

Were you the top student in your high school class? Were you the best of the three years previous to you? If you weren't the very best, it's wrong for you to assume that if you were in that position you would just study as hard as you do now. Because that would give you an 80th percentile score.

Granted this is high school I'm talking about, not college, but this whole "I studied hard for my standardized test so I deserve my score" ignores the fact that's the knowledge to study is in a way a privilege. Zero students at my high school studied for any college entrance test. Why? I didn't study be ause no one I knew studied.

In college terms, if you have already drastically outperformed your stock by attending a four year university, you will likely not have the striver drive to shoot for Columbia - no one you know has even attended Florida Coastal!

Granted, I am making some perhaps offensive assumptions here (couching a racial discussion in economic and social terms).

Your "you know what you need to do" assumption is false. One doesn't know, if one knows zero lawyers in real life who can tell you that an American university law degree is not a guarantee of financial stabibility.

And regarding AA screwing you over, I find it amusing that you get bootstrappy to one group, without going the same to everyone.

So are you saying we excuse someone's bad behavior/decisions just because everyone around them did the same thing? I think we learned at Nuremberg that "I was just doing what everyone else was doing" is not an excuse.

This is a slippery slope. If we start accounting for and emphasizing how someone's environment contributes to their ability to do well on the LSAT, then why not start looking into their neurology as well? For example, IQ is hereditable. Why should we treat someone who has an inherited low IQ different from someone whose environment produced similar deficiencies? It boils down to external causal influences (as opposed to internal influences which opens up a whole 'nother can of worms because at some point the free will/determinism issue needs addressing).

[A. Nony Mouse]

When did people switch from thinking "this is an obstacle, so I must work hard to overcome it" to "this is an obstacle, so I should complain that it's 'discrimination' and demand that other people remove it to accommodate me"?

All of this rationalizing with language dialects and such is nonsense. If you grew up in a community ignorant of proper English grammar, well then this is the time to learn proper English grammar. If your parents were crazy Zen mystics who didn't believe in logic, then now is the time to learn logical reasoning. If you have to work a full-time job during your LSAT prep to support yourself, well then this is the time to man up and sacrifice sleep for more important things. If you can't afford a prep class, then work hard on your own and self-study. Prep materials aren't that expensive, and you can borrow them from libraries or steal them off the Internet if you need to. You know what you need to do, and you can do it if you try hard enough. No excuses.

As for actual statistical predictions, no test is perfect, and the correlation between LSAT score and law school performance has already been beaten to death in DF's thread about people who "overstudy" for the LSAT. And we're not supposed to discuss AA apparently, but like I said above, if there's any bias against minorities it's certainly counterbalanced by schools' preference for URMs. Go play around with mylsn.info or read some URM threads here to see the crazy boost URMs get. I'd say there's an institutional bias in favor of racial minorities, not against them.

BOOTSTRAPS.

[indo]

When did people switch from thinking "this is an obstacle, so I must work hard to overcome it" to "this is an obstacle, so I should complain that it's 'discrimination' and demand that other people remove it to accommodate me"?

All of this rationalizing with language dialects and such is nonsense. If you grew up in a community ignorant of proper English grammar, well then this is the time to learn proper English grammar. If your parents were crazy Zen mystics who didn't believe in logic, then now is the time to learn logical reasoning. If you have to work a full-time job during your LSAT prep to support yourself, well then this is the time to man up and sacrifice sleep for more important things. If you can't afford a prep class, then work hard on your own and self-study. Prep materials aren't that expensive, and you can borrow them from libraries or steal them off the Internet if you need to. You know what you need to do, and you can do it if you try hard enough. No excuses.

As for actual statistical predictions, no test is perfect, and the correlation between LSAT score and law school performance has already been beaten to death in DF's thread about people who "overstudy" for the LSAT. And we're not supposed to discuss AA apparently, but like I said above, if there's any bias against minorities it's certainly counterbalanced by schools' preference for URMs. Go play around with mylsn.info or read some URM threads here to see the crazy boost URMs get. I'd say there's an institutional bias in favor of racial minorities, not against them.

There are large high schools in this country where the highest scorer of the graduating class scores a 24 on their ACT. There are schools where not a single student has scored a 26 in the past four years.

Were you the top student in your high school class? Were you the best of the three years previous to you? If you weren't the very best, it's wrong for you to assume that if you were in that position you would just study as hard as you do now. Because that would give you an 80th percentile score.

Granted this is high school I'm talking about, not college, but this whole "I studied hard for my standardized test so I deserve my score" ignores the fact that's the knowledge to study is in a way a privilege. Zero students at my high school studied for any college entrance test. Why? I didn't study be ause no one I knew studied.

In college terms, if you have already drastically outperformed your stock by attending a four year university, you will likely not have the striver drive to shoot for Columbia - no one you know has even attended Florida Coastal!

Granted, I am making some perhaps offensive assumptions here (couching a racial discussion in economic and social terms).

Your "you know what you need to do" assumption is false. One doesn't know, if one knows zero lawyers in real life who can tell you that an American university law degree is not a guarantee of financial stabibility.

And regarding AA screwing you over, I find it amusing that you get bootstrappy to one group, without going the same to everyone.[/quot


http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... es/265411/

This is how the USA became ?

[Pancakes12]

When did people switch from thinking "this is an obstacle, so I must work hard to overcome it" to "this is an obstacle, so I should complain that it's 'discrimination' and demand that other people remove it to accommodate me"?

All of this rationalizing with language dialects and such is nonsense. If you grew up in a community ignorant of proper English grammar, well then this is the time to learn proper English grammar. If your parents were crazy Zen mystics who didn't believe in logic, then now is the time to learn logical reasoning. If you have to work a full-time job during your LSAT prep to support yourself, well then this is the time to man up and sacrifice sleep for more important things. If you can't afford a prep class, then work hard on your own and self-study. Prep materials aren't that expensive, and you can borrow them from libraries or steal them off the Internet if you need to. You know what you need to do, and you can do it if you try hard enough. No excuses.

As for actual statistical predictions, no test is perfect, and the correlation between LSAT score and law school performance has already been beaten to death in DF's thread about people who "overstudy" for the LSAT. And we're not supposed to discuss AA apparently, but like I said above, if there's any bias against minorities it's certainly counterbalanced by schools' preference for URMs. Go play around with mylsn.info or read some URM threads here to see the crazy boost URMs get. I'd say there's an institutional bias in favor of racial minorities, not against them.

There are large high schools in this country where the highest scorer of the graduating class scores a 24 on their ACT. There are schools where not a single student has scored a 26 in the past four years.

Were you the top student in your high school class? Were you the best of the three years previous to you? If you weren't the very best, it's wrong for you to assume that if you were in that position you would just study as hard as you do now. Because that would give you an 80th percentile score.

Granted this is high school I'm talking about, not college, but this whole "I studied hard for my standardized test so I deserve my score" ignores the fact that's the knowledge to study is in a way a privilege. Zero students at my high school studied for any college entrance test. Why? I didn't study be ause no one I knew studied.

In college terms, if you have already drastically outperformed your stock by attending a four year university, you will likely not have the striver drive to shoot for Columbia - no one you know has even attended Florida Coastal!

Granted, I am making some perhaps offensive assumptions here (couching a racial discussion in economic and social terms).

Your "you know what you need to do" assumption is false. One doesn't know, if one knows zero lawyers in real life who can tell you that an American university law degree is not a guarantee of financial stabibility.

And regarding AA screwing you over, I find it amusing that you get bootstrappy to one group, without going the same to everyone.

Well you just described my high school (99% white). I also didn't study for the SAT, because, like you, nobody else did. There was no encouragement from parents or school officials. They were focused on getting the kids who couldn't pass to graduate.

It was a different world when I went to college. An SAT score that was off the charts at my high school was typical at most others. I studied for my LSAT and it made a huge difference. I'm sometimes a little bitter that where I came from lead to my attending a "good" university instead of an ivy league school. But this is just how it works.

So I am on the same page with you that knowing to study is a huge privilege. But the LSAT's sole purpose is to predict performance in law school, and creating alternative tests for niche communities is not a solution to any disparities that arise along racial lines.

[jkhalfa]

There are large high schools in this country where the highest scorer of the graduating class scores a 24 on their ACT. There are schools where not a single student has scored a 26 in the past four years.

Were you the top student in your high school class? Were you the best of the three years previous to you? If you weren't the very best, it's wrong for you to assume that if you were in that position you would just study as hard as you do now. Because that would give you an 80th percentile score.

Granted this is high school I'm talking about, not college, but this whole "I studied hard for my standardized test so I deserve my score" ignores the fact that's the knowledge to study is in a way a privilege. Zero students at my high school studied for any college entrance test. Why? I didn't study be ause no one I knew studied.

In college terms, if you have already drastically outperformed your stock by attending a four year university, you will likely not have the striver drive to shoot for Columbia - no one you know has even attended Florida Coastal!

Granted, I am making some perhaps offensive assumptions here (couching a racial discussion in economic and social terms).

Your "you know what you need to do" assumption is false. One doesn't know, if one knows zero lawyers in real life who can tell you that an American university law degree is not a guarantee of financial stabibility.

And regarding AA screwing you over, I find it amusing that you get bootstrappy to one group, without going the same to everyone.

Before you get too defensive, I actually do come from what some would call a disadvantaged background. I'm a white male, but I'm not privileged. I don't own any corporations. I don't keep millions in off-shore tax havens. I've never played polo. I don't use "summer" as a verb, and as far as I know I've never oppressed a minority.

On the contrary, I'm pretty bad off, and bad off in exactly some of the ways you described. I'm the first person in my family to attend college, and my family is low/middle income. Like you discussed, I also went to a pretty terrible high school where the average SAT was like 1400 (on the 2400 scale), and I didn't receive any standardized test prep or much guidance in the college admissions process. I was lucky enough to score in the 99th percentile anyway and go to a good (but not great) college, but mistakes were made and I'll admit that I was ignorant of what success requires. I guess I just got lucky.

But that was high school. You shouldn't blame a kid for not taking control of his future, but you can certainly fault an adult for not understanding the LSAT or the law school admissions process. I'm an example of a person with bad circumstances and past mistakes learning from those errors and laying out a plan to overcome the obstacles life has placed before me. Sure, I wish I had been born into some WASP family, tutored into an Ivy, and set up for HYS, but I accept that I wasn't.

So I guess that's my biography, which may or may not be relevant to the discussion at hand (whatever that is). I guess my point is, people aren't equal, we're all in competition, you have to do whatever you can to get ahead, and life isn't fair. You can make fun of "bootstraps" all you want, but you must accept that—for most of us at least—no one will help you except yourself.

Regarding the possible double standard: I don't think it's morally wrong to benefit from AA. If I had an easy way of getting ahead simply by virtue of my skin color, of course I'd exploit that; anyone would be stupid not to. I am more bothered by the fact that AA exists, since it truly is authority figures being willfully racist. Accidents of circumstance or environment seem less bad than outright, voluntary racial discrimination.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Remember, folks: no AA commentary in this thread.

[jkhalfa]

Remember, folks: no AA commentary in this thread.

Sorry about that, though this thread was almost guaranteed to lead to that pretty quickly.

@indo I regard The Atlantic links as race/gender-baiting clickbait and not legitimate sources. It's sad that a respected literary magazine has become a peer of Buzzfeed and HuffPo.

[09042014]

So what causes the disparity?

[SemperLegal]

So are you saying we excuse someone's bad behavior/decisions just because everyone around them did the same thing? I think we learned at Nuremberg that "I was just doing what everyone else was doing" is not an excuse.

Because one is killing prisoners in the direct defiance of international law and the other is staying in on weekends to study.

This is a slippery slope. If we start accounting for and emphasizing how someone's environment contributes to their ability to do well on the LSAT, then why not start looking into their neurology as well? For example, IQ is hereditable. Why should we treat someone who has an inherited low IQ different from someone whose environment produced similar deficiencies?

We do account for neurology, if you have ADD, its understood that the LSAT is not as good an indicator of your success in law school or being a lawyer as it would be for someone else. So, we allow people with ADD and other similar issues more time to take the test.

It boils down to external causal influences (as opposed to internal influences which opens up a whole 'nother can of worms because at some point the free will/determinism issue needs addressing).

Da fuq is this? It boils down to the fact that we all know that the law school system, and higher education, is broke for various reasons. One of which is the lack of anything better than standardized testing to compare abstract skills and another being the inability provide resources to all students to give them the skills to perform on those same tests.

Since you would have to be a literal alien to not realize that certain populations have systematically, intentionally, and repeatedly been prevented from equally accessing the education system (to the point that multiple court orders and the 82nd Airborne had to be utilized), maybe we should make sure to fix the system where cracks are apparent.

If it turns out that standardized testing is a worse indicator for success in law school for minorities than it is for White people (which it turns out is the opposite of the truth, so this whole argument seems to just be a disguised AA debate), then we should lessen the LSATsimportance in the overall application of minorities*. Meanwhile, we should focus on making the test less classist (and therefore making it more effective) and trying to improve equal access to resources at public schools.

Or we can whine about it.

*And by definition the numbers of URM are low, so its more practical to be be holistic on URM applications than for every single application to be pored over looking for indication that the LSAT would be ineffective.