Let’s test the validity of the LSAT

By Gail J. Cohen
Law Times

The Ontario Human Rights Commission is urging Canadian law schools to conduct home-grown studies of their admission policies. The “suggestion” comes in a staff report on a complaint that Law School Admission Test scores discrimination against African-Canadian law school applicants.

“Canadian-specific and resp-ondent-specific validity studies are required to make conclusive statements about the impact on African-Canadians . . . .”

Much of applicant Selwyn Pieters’ complaint was based on studies done in the United States which showed the LSAT to be culturally biased toward those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, calling into question its usefulness as a predictor of law school performance by minorities.

The Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT, has conducted studies measuring the correlation between test scores and law school performance. However, as the human rights commission rightly points out, those studies caution that the analyses are “not necessarily representative of Canadian law students in general because the participants may not be representative of the population of Canadian law schools.”

The report goes on to say that Osgoode Hall Law School, one of the respondents to Pieters’ complaint, hasn’t evaluated its admission policies in light of 1999 LSAC guidelines created to assist law schools in dealing equitably with applicants. These guidelines include: avoiding using LSAT scores as the sole criteria for admission and evaluating the predictive utility of the LSAT at each school.

In 1998, Osgoode carried out a confidential review correlating LSAT scores and law school performance which concluded there was a correlation. The problem with that is the university is keeping it secret. How can applicants know if that study is valid without having access to the methodology. Osgoode has a new correlation study underway but it’s unclear if that’ll be any more open than the previous one.

But at least Osgoode has made an attempt. However, as professor Wesley Pue of UBC’s law school says, it’s shocking that in Canada there is hardly any evidence that the LSAT correlates to anything beyond the second year of law school and on into the “real world.”

Canadian law schools assertthat LSAT scores and grade point averages are not the only criteria they use in determining students’ applicability. None-theless, LSAT scores are still part of the determination process. What Canadian law schools — there’s not that many — need to do is come together and do a comprehensive study on the correlation of scores and performance, and as part of that assess how cultural minorities fare.

Canadian schools and students shouldn’t be relying on U.S. studies because our entire education system is completely different, most notably that it’s substantially more uniform because universities are all public.

— Gail J. Cohen