Of course it's ridiculous. UT arguably is the best law school in Texas. It doesn't have to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to admit minority law students. The best minority law students in Texas want jobs, just like everyone else. Thus, they gravitate to the best law schools.

I don't take it personally. Yeah, sure, you don't know me and you don't know who told me, why they had reason to know. So doubt away. I'm not going to give anything specific up as to who I verified it with. You don't have to believe me. My main point is that it's not an impossibility that it happened.

Is it a representative sample size? No. But that doesn't matter in the face of the event transpiring. Is it highly unlikely? Well, sure, but people win the lottery, too. Is the math behind it possible? Sure is.

When people hear facts that contradict their world view, they have big problems with it. Years back, when I first heard about it, it caused a stir in various circles. That's how I heard it. It wasn't in a chain e-mail, I promise. You might say it was public knowledge if you were in the right public.

I had three different conversations last weekend that basically went like this: "Was I smoking crack a few years back when I heard that no AA graduates from UT law passed the bar?" "No you weren't; that actually happened." "You sure?" "Yeah." Three different people, independently.

I don't think it's ridiculous at all that I did some due diligence on this when challenged and came up that it occurred. I think it's more ridiculous that I would cave to peer pressure, such as it is, on a forum filled with people I don't know personally who call me names. As to my friends misleading me, I have no cause to doubt these friends. There are a lot of other people out there who would have no cause to doubt them, either.

So it never occurred to you to ask how many AA students that supposedly was?

This isn't the McCarthy hearings where we need a list of names("well, there's Joe-Bob, Jim-Bob, and Billy-Bob") like putting a name to the story makes it less bull****.

Can you explain how they came to know this information? Because, here's the deal. We know that you can't. BS chain emails don't have that sort of technical details, because the people who read chain emails don't really care about that stuff.

Artist's depiction of "the right public":


Dude, we don't think you made it up. We're all on board that some racist dip**** started a bizarrely specific rumor about affirmative action and bar passage at UT. You heard that rumor and you told us about it.

Artist's depiction of those people:

I have done some due diligence* of my own and discovered a study that broke down the 2003 Texas bar exam by ethnicity. Blacks and Hispanics did significantly worse than whites.

I can see someone reading this study and incorporating the elements of "involved Texas" and "minorities do worse on the bar exam than whites" and then turning that pretty uncontroversial and boring anecdote into a nifty bit of down-home right wing conventional wisdom like "every single affirmative action admission at UT Law failed the bar! Every single one! (Haha silly libruls trying to help black people)"

*Which involved more** than just asking people if they had also heard the same story? How is that due diligence? If your boss tells you to perform due diligence on like, some financial documents I don't think he means read the same documents again.

**I googled "Texas bar exam results race"

The minorities who failed were obviously the affirmative action admittances. Ergo, all affirmative action admittances fail the bar exam EVERY year.

I don't much care about your sources, so feel free to keep your journalistic integrity to yourself. Why don't you just tell us (a) how many people we are talking about (i.e., the "n"); and (b) whether you believe those students likely would have met the race-blind admissions criteria for Texas Southern and Texas Wesleyan.

With those two pieces of information, we can just LOL the maths, and forget about your sources.

Also, by acknowledging that the math is "highly unlikely", you are coming very close to acknowledging that the answer to (b) above is yes, and that the result (i.e., 10 random people who could be expected to pass at a 68% rate all failed) is largely attributable to random chance, however unlikely. If that's what you believe, then you have no point. You are simply expressing amazement that a 1 in 88,888 random occurence actually occurred.

First post that started this
Then the thread happens

A few other questions -- why are we supposed to attribute more validity to a rumor you heard three years ago than a rumor you heard three minutes ago? Why does a rumor increase in credibility just because it is passed around among you and your friends? Are you suggesting that you and your friends heard the same information from different credible sources?

@ Fly - If you took the white hats and guns out of those pictures and replaced the white robes with black ones, you might be getting warm about who the right public would be. That's how I heard this bizzarely specific rumor. There's your big clue.

Out of curiosity, what were the real minority passage rates for the Texas bar in 2003? That might be relevant to calculating the odds on a given number of students, say between 8 and 20, failing the bar in a given year. Here's another hint... If the odds of passing are lower, than the probability that all will fail is more likely.

I think it's pretty commendable for you not to be labeling the authors of the 2003 study as racists. Bravo.

If I can locate solid data regarding this, and it is out there, I'll post it.

@rococo - No. You're obfuscating. I'm not the one who said "OMG it's so unlikely it's impossible." I was just going down that rabbit trail because it is clearly false. It can happen and it did happen.

I post:

Thread happens. Fly posts:

Please just answer these two questions. Seriously. For (a), please feel free to estimate if you don't know the exact number.

For (b), please just agree that the answer is yes. It has to be yes, right? Are you seriously contending that the race-blind admissions profile of your UT AA applicants was worse than the average admissions profile at Texas Wesleyan and Texas Southern?

Ignore everything and everyone else. Respond to this post.

So you're defending the systemic racist and factually inaccruate view points of the texas judiciary from being known? Thanks!

Riverman I think he is answering that question...Sub how can this be your view on math if you have over 2k posts in a poker forum? BTW people win the lottery because of the sample size. Millions of entrant make hitting winning numbers more likely kinda like how in this example 10 law students from the worst law schools in texas have a 1/90k chance of all failing. Mind you its pretty obvious that your sample size is at least 10.

Using the 2004 numbers, the statewide passage rate for the TBE amongst blacks taking it for the first time was 53%, and first time Hispanics was 69%. UT would have a better rate, as they would attract the best minority candidates and teach them with the best professors, but let's be charitable. We'll assume that minorities are state average, as these people only got into UT because of race. Hispanics more than triple blacks in the UT graduate system, but let's be charitable here, too. We'll assume equal numbers of black and Hispanic affirmative action admittances. And we'll assume there were only 8, 4 of each. The chances of all of them failing the bar exam:



So, do you think this number accurately represents the probability of all these people failing?

I think he's referring to academic doctoral robes, not judicial robes.

I could see that. Either way Exsubmariner is doing his duty to protect systemic racism in this country. And for that, I am proud. No nobler a task exists in this fair union.

Naw I'm definitely reading that as a racist judge. Or maybe Batman.

Exsubmariner if your source is actually Batman I take everything back


(I love how he's STILL acting like he's a journalist who is protecting his "source" but willing to hint that it was a judge like the issue is the credibility of that source, rather than the rather obvious fact that there was no such year that all the affirmative action students failed the bar)

Black robes? I'm thinking wizards of the harry potter variety. Possibly he who must not be named.

I guess it could be...



or

That sounds like it might be in the ball park. As you said, though, we're not talking about a generalized statistical approach taking a cross section of all the schools in Texas. We're talking specifically about UT and their passage rates. Your assumption about UT law school somehow having a higher percentage of passage may or may not be the case. I could see an argument either way. It's a tougher school, so students who struggle through it might, in fact, have lower passage rates than the average. Or, as you say, if they make it to graduation, they might be better prepared.

I find it interesting that the odds against are exhibiting an uncanny tendency to get smaller.

So, if this is a 1 in 2000 event, why are you suggesting that this was some grave miscarriage of justice rather than a rare statistical fluke? Why propose policy changes to ward off something that probably won't be seen again for another 2000-3000 years?

ehm ex, the fact that the odds against are getting smaller is because people are making increasingly friendly assumptions on your behalf to solicit a reaction, as you don't provide any numbers.