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As one of those who graduated at the lower percentile (you know, bottom) of their class has anyone done research on major vs. race? Prolly not.
The impact of mismatch on law school education is probably different than undergraduate, because it actually matters if you learn something. When it comes to an undergraduate degree, nobody seems to care about anything except the name of the college. Resumes don’t usually list grade point averages, much less any real indicia of educational success.
But won’t the effect of the mismatch show up in the after undergraduate college performance difference between those who learn something and those who learn something less than that?
The real difference with law school is that the standardized testing of the bar examinations provides some indicia of mastery of the material. Sample results in link clearly indicate that diversity law students don’t “catch up” over the course of three years of study. A fair percentage are really screwed because no one was honest enough to tell them “We can get you into and through law school, by hook or crook, but you are never going to pass the bar exam.”
California Bar Results (including race and ethnicity)
I’d like to rephrase this slightly:
The point is, we’re not going to fix poor preparation on the back end of someone’s education. The only reason to send anyone of any race to a prestigious school for which they aren’t prepared is misbegotten adherence to credentialism, which is rampant in our society.
As conservatives, we believe in what works, not what makes us feel good about our good intentions. Mismatching any student of any racial or ethnic profile is a tragedy for the student and a loss to society. I wouldn’t want my lily-white daughters mismatched for someone’s gender-affirmative action agenda.
Dang, these progressives are condescending and destructive.
One reason an undergraduate education—I say this as a recent college graduate and a current graduate student—is viewed with less efficacy than, say, a law degree, is because, as Larry3435 pointed out, there is no real way to determine how much one took from their undergraduate degree. GPA is pretty useless, as it doesn’t reflect institutional or curricular rigor. Since employers are becoming increasingly aware of this, standard bearers like GPA are becoming less important. The Collegiate Learning Assessment measures post-college learning where GPA, and possibly test scores, can’t always be of any help. Isn’t evaluating what you took from your college education more important than the score you made on a test that got you into college?
Can potential employers use this to assess entry level college grads? I know some small business employers who get pretty frustrated at the wide range of work-related competence in this population. Some of it is simply personal characteristics of reliability and dedication to excellence.
I believe so. Though it hasn’t exactly caught on in the workforce, I think a post-college assessment is a great predictor of success. What good is GPA when an entry-level graduate took the easy-A electives and cheated his way through undergraduate via his fraternity’s test banks? CLA is supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff because it relies not on test-taking ability alone, which isn’t always the best predictor of success in the workforce. I speak from personal experience. In high school, many of the supposed honor students—high GPAs and test scores—flunked out of college. The irony…
The short answer is no.
The employer would first have to document how the assessment was closely linked to the actual requirements of the job. “I prefer to have smart people working for me” won’t cut it. Various licenses and certifications work but not general education
Second the employer would have to demonstrate that there was no disparate impact on persons in a protected class in the hiring criteria.
Not what tests like CLA are supposed to accomplish. It’s used to determine a general level of aptitude GPA/test scores can’t always measure, not a replacement for specific skills needed for certain jobs. It’s more of a “Hey, I’m not a complete idiot, here’s my proof that I’m capable of being of general value to your company if you choose to hire me based on the skill set you are looking for.”
It’s more like icing on the cake, assuming that cake has been sufficiently baked with good ingredients.
We may be talking past each other. Any testing criteria has to be very specifically tied to job performance not proof of general aptitude or learning ability.
One of the reasons CLA hasn’t really caught on is most likely due to the reliance on general aptitude rather than specific job performance, which raises the question: Is college meant to be the place where students are trained for specific jobs?