Steve Sailer writes a lot of extremely politically incorrect and fascinating stuff about race and culture. His discussion of the racial breakdown for LSAT scores contains one interesting piece of data that went unremarked: the people who didn't declare race ("No Response") were by far the most successful on the LSAT.
African Americans: 142.3I wonder if some racial scores suffered disproportionately because members of that group are more likely to refuse to answer questions about race. How do I go about getting a racial breakdown for people that don't like to discuss their race? :-)
Native Americans: 147.3
Asian Americans: 152.1
Caucasian: 152.7
Hispanic: 146.5
Mexican American: 147.7
Puerto Rican: 138.3
Other: 150.7
No Response: 155.2
3 comments:
According to the report linked to in the article ("LSAT Performance ..."), 0.98% "did not indicate their race/ethnicity".
Not to be outdone, I went and read (part of) the study too!
Interesting that the "No Response" group always gets the highest scores.
"The percentage of test takers who did not indicate their race/ethnicity had been fairly low in 1999–2000 (0.56%), 2000–2001 (0.41%) and 2001–2002 (0.47%), then increased for the 2002–2003 (2.54%) and 2003–2004 (2.66%) testing years, but decreased again to about 0.98% for both the 2004–2005 and 2005–2006 testing years. The No Response group had the highest mean LSAT score for all testing years covered in this report."
In terms of my original question, the absolute numbers suggest that if the "No Responses" were concentrated in a specific racial group they could move the average score by quite a bit (for many of the non-White groups). That concentration is of course unlikely, but who knows?
I think you're right that it's unlikely - I'm guessing they're mostly 'Caucasians', many of whom don't think there is such a thing as race or whatever and so are above answering such a question.
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