[blindlaw] Re Blind Would-be Law Student Says Test Discriminates -NPR

[ckrugman at sbcglobal.net]

you make some good points. Although I didn't go to law school I took the 
LSAT in about 1974 with an amanuensis as you did. and I took it mainly to 
find out what it was like. My score was fair the problem being that I did 
not have adequate time to prepare for the test as it was during a full-time 
internship with a court. Subsequently my career goals changed as a result of 
the internship which led me more in the direction of Social work at that 
time. The point is that at time and for many years prior to that there have 
been many blind law students and judges. I know several at that time that 
graduated from top tier law schools and did very well in spite of the LSAT 
guidelines. To play "the Devil's advocate" here perhaps having to 
individually deal with these factors gives the blind law school applicant 
preparation for functioning in the real world practice of law where lawyers 
have to use their own ingenuity and resources whether they are blind or 
sighted. Do we with all of this accommodation actually in some ways do a 
disservice to ourselves as legal professionals by not being adequately 
prepared to address these issues. When I made a career change and attended a 
paralegal studies program at a community college they never had a blind 
student enrolled and while the community college provided many services to 
disabled students the program chair as well as college disabled services 
staff were surprised how I totally took charge of the situation only 
requiring readers for test taking. Granted it was much easier this time when 
in school compared to the 70's and 80's when getting bachelor's and master's 
degrees due to the availability of on line resources and OCR software for 
reading printed material but there was a certain sense of accomplishment for 
blind students in earlier days as they had to develop a greater degree of 
ingenuity to succeed not only in school but in the real world of employment.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Elizabeth Rene" <emrene at earthlink.net>
To: <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2011 8:22 PM
Subject: [blindlaw] Re Blind Would-be Law Student Says Test 
Discriminates -NPR


>I too am appalled that aspiring law students are hindered in their efforts
> to gain law school admission by the structure of the LSAT and by the
> conditions on which the test is given and interpreted.
>
> But something about the NPR article bothers me, and it jumps up to bite me
> right in the first paragraph.
>
> Are blind college grads really getting low LSAT scores because they are
> invited to draw diagrams for themselves in order to ease their approach to
> complex questions?  Or is that just something an uninitiated reporter
> gleaned from a complex interview in hopes of reaching the general public?
>
> Only well into the article did I read that law schools are still warned 
> that
> an LSAT test taken with reasonable accommodations has questionable 
> validity,
> and that top-tier schools decline an option to disregard the LSAT
> altogether.
>
> Granted, one would think that the validity of standardized academic 
> aptitude
> test scores earned under the tightly controlled conditions on which 
> specific
> accommodations have been granted over the past 50 years or so should have
> been proven by now.  If not, why not?  And if there are pictures or 
> diagrams
> in the test questions themselves that can't be replicated tactilely for 
> blind
> students, why is that so?
>
> But if the whole thrust of a blind person's argument for higher education 
> or
> employment is that he or she can find alternate means to solve a sighted
> person's problems, why should that blind test-taker balk at being invited 
> to
> draw a picture to help him or her think more clearly?
>
> That diagram's only for ordinary people.
>
> If one doesn't think visually, noone can make him do that for a test.
>
> And what about this concern about top-tier law schools?  Didn't Jacobus
> Tenbroek graduate from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall?  Or was it Stanford?
> Didn't the NFB's own Peggy Pinder get her JD from Harvard or Yale?  What 
> did
> they do with the LSAT?
>
> I took the LSAT in early 1975.  I had to wait three years from leaving
> college for permission to take it in Braille, with an amanuensis to write
> the answers.  The dreaded warning went with my scores.  But I got accepted
> by three of the six law schools I applied to, and waiting listed by the
> other three.  Had my undergraduate grades been better, those other schools
> might have accepted me, too.
>
> After law school, I got to do the work I wanted.  And I had to deal with
> visual evidence, and to make visual evidence understandable to juries and 
> to
> appellate judges every day.  And as every lawyer knows, this had to be 
> done
> in an adversary setting.
>
> Yes, I agree that the LSAT, the GRE, and other such tests have to be made
> more accessible so as not to discriminate unlawfully.
>
> But maybe they're a wake-up call to those who might be confronted for the
> first time with what they'll encounter on the job.  And maybe that second-
> or third-tier law school, with a fat scholarship for those who excel, 
> might
> not look so bad.
>
> One great thing about there being more and more of us blind lawyers and
> other professionals is that no one needs to pull blind test-taking and
> lawyering skills from the air.  They've already been learned, and they can
> be shared.
>
> Elizabeth
>
>
>
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