As fairly successful members of society, all of us in the Ivy Leaguers like to believe that we have legitimately earned this place of privilege in the academic arena. Many of us are deeply wedded to the idea that we are living in a “meritocracy,” where we have been granted an elite status because of our merit and talent. Sadly this is not true if you’re white and middle class. (Granted there are plenty of white middle class kids who didn’t get into Cornell, so don’t feel too bad.)

I started thinking about this when I began applying to law school, and was turned off by the trend that I had noticed among my friends — specifically my male, white middle class friends. For example, let us examine Case A: The No-Good-Boyo. No-Good-Boyo has a very undistinguished high school career, but gets into a second-rate, yet still very fancy and expensive, liberal arts college. He squanders his undergraduate education fumbling in ill-lighted rooms with the female anatomy, drinking, sampling illegal substances and getting arrested for public disorderly conduct. Needless to say, his undergraduate record is less than stellar. He decides to take some adventure abroad for a year or so, while mommy and daddy pay for his soul searching. After discovering that he has no soul, he becomes a male model and wastes another year of his life chasing the perfect tan, while living rent free in one of his parents’ many homes. The male modeling thing doesn’t work out, so he spends an entire year swatting (Brit slang for studying) for the LSAT, gets a great score and is accepted into the Ivy League! Vindication!

Case B: Much the same as Case A of the No-Good-Boyo … let’s call him Young-M.C. (motivationally-challenged). Young-M.C. goes to university on a baseball scholarship, but falls into a funk when his coach doesn’t let him play. This disappointment, grave indeed, drives him to self medicate with booze and weed. Sound familiar yet? Young-M.C. nearly drops out of school, but manages to squeeze out a B.A. Promptly, he moves in with mommy and daddy because his job in construction doesn’t support his pot habit. Besides momma’s cooking is so good and the house is big enough that he has his own wing, with good ventilation, so the folks don’t notice the smell of marijuana. After years of this he is threatened with never getting laid again, because he is living with his parents at the age of 26, so he takes a year, crams for the LSAT, does great and ends up at a fabulous law school.

Clearly No-Good-Boyo and Young-M.C. have a lot in common, but notice the pattern: poor undergraduate record + lots of time and money + white + male + good LSAT score → incredibly bright future. Now, I think it is great to give young people a second chance to prove themselves, but I feel that the weight that law schools place on the LSAT is to allow spoiled white boys who screwed up in college to have a shot at the big time. The only noticeable trend regarding LSAT scores is money: there is a direct correlation between higher incomes and higher LSAT scores. To add insult to injury, according to Guinier and Strum in their book Who’s Qualified, a study “found a negative relationship between high LSAT scores and subsequent community leadership and community service.”

Therefore, I think LSAT stands for Legitimizing the Selection of Asinine Trustfunders. (I did pretty decently on the LSAT myself, so I guess I fall into this category, even though I am definitely not a trustfunder by any stretch of the imagination.) The test is flawed on so many counts, but most worrisome is that it favors certain socioeconomic, cultural, racial and gender groups. Furthermore, we are not just talking about any old opportunity, we are talking about the keepers of the law — potentially the most powerful people in society. And the LSAT is a flaming hoop to jump through to be a very powerful member of society — so the fact that it is so strongly biased is an enormous problem.

Despite the fact that studies show that women outperform men as undergraduates (based on GPA), there is a performance gap between men and women on the LSAT. I believe that this is a culturally induced performance gap. Certain tasks that have been given to women over many generations, tend to be contingent on endurance — childrearing, domestic duties, etc. I believe that this endurance benefits women in college because most grades are an accumulation of a sustained performance over many tasks. Conversely, young men may have more training in performing with short bursts of energy — focusing on one goal as in sports, hunting a wooly mammoth, ejaculation or performing well on one stressful exam. I think the fact that women may be more apt at performing well over a long period of time, while men may be trained by social constructs to perform well on short high-pressured situations, like the LSAT, makes law school admissions’ emphasis on the LSAT score biased in favor of men. I hate to buy into these gendered binaries, because they are totally over-simplistic and inaccurate, but I still believe (and statistics support this statement) that the law school entrance exam and law school in general is geared towards rewarding skills that are heavily influenced by culturally gendered constructions.

The gender bias of the LSAT aside, a study called the Bartow Survey conducted in the 1990’s, proved that although men and women entered the University of Pennsylvania Law School with the same qualifications, men were three times more likely than women to make law review. Now, I certainly do not want to intimidate or discourage any women from applying to law school (I myself am in the midst of the whole application palaver), but I think we should be aware of these issues before we enter law school so that we can support one another through this male dominated field and remember that this testocracy may be less about tests and more about testes.

Claire Readhead is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at creadhead@cornellsun.com. Silk Blue Stockings appears alternate Mondays.