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

[Russell J. Thomas, Jr.]

>From what little I have read about this case, I do have concerns:

1. Did the applicant ever ask for any form of accommodation, and if so, was
it offered, offered in part, or denied. 

2. Do we know if the applicant was otherwise qualified for admission, or put
another way, had he been sighted would the admission decisions have been any
different?

"bad cases make bad law"; is this such a case?



Respectfully,

 

Russell J. Thomas, Jr.

Law Office of Russell J. Thomas, Jr.

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-----Original Message-----
From: blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Elizabeth Rene
Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2011 8:23 PM
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
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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