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Welcome Message from the President
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The Keyscore System
One of the many innovations I brought to legal education was a new way to decide who gets into Law School and who doesn’t.
By common agreement, all law schools require that applicants take the Law School Admissions Test administered by the Law School Admission Council. The test is a measure of acquired verbal and reading skills, and is officially recommended as one, but not the only, measurement of law school admission.
Legal educators have long harbored a love hate relationship with the LSAT. On the one hand, they regard it as an important measure of the quality of a law school applicant. It is common for law schools to boast about the high average LSAT scores of their entering classes. On the other hand, especially if their average entering LSAT score does not put them in the top tier of elite schools, law professors often denigrate the LSAT, calling it culturally biased, and irrelevant.
We always required the LSAT as part of our admissions process. But like many schools, we had no objective criteria beyond the LSAT, so we read the applicant’s essay and letters of recommendation, examined their extra curricular accomplishments, and pretty much guessed at whether they would do well in law school. Whether they admit it or not, that’s they way many law schools do it.
Somewhere around 1979 or 1980, I decided to quantify those factors in addition to the LSAT score which we considered important in the admissions decision. Among these were post graduate degrees, scholarships, and the sponsorship of a member of the legal profession. I dubbed the process the Complete Evaluation Admissions System. The acronym was CEAS, and after we began talking about applicants’ CEAS score, it soon became known as the keyscore system. It began with the applicant’s LSAT score, to which we added points for a post graduate degree, for a scholarship, and for a sponsorship agreement signed by a member of the bar.
I thought the sponsorship agreement was a good idea. Every law school invited letters of recommendation. I thought they were pretty useless. I had written many myself during my days on the bench, and I knew that such letters were often written by a friend of a friend who hardly knew the applicant or remembered recommending him or her.
I felt that, if a lawyer really knew and cared about an applicant, he should be willing to agree to maintain a meaningful relationship with the student, perhaps providing a place for the student to study, or periodically meeting with, and advising the student. Having an interested sponsor, I thought, would auger well for the student’s chances of success in law school.
Similarly, eligibility for a scholarship should help a student. If nothing else, being relieved of some of the financial burden of a legal education ought to permit the student to spend more time on the books, and less time working to pay tuition.
Certainly, earning a masters’ or other post graduate degree creates a presumption that an applicant is capable of doing graduate level work. Giving points for a post graduate degree made sense to me.
You can imagine my surprise when the 1981 ABA inspection report devoted twenty pages to our admissions system, concluding that our keyscore program "appears to have a racially discriminatory impact."
I disputed the conclusion vigorously. I pointed out that our minority enrollment compared favorably with the Detroit schools, even though Detroit’s minority population was over a million, and Lansing’s was under 20,000.
When Dean Hey responded to the ABA inspection report, he attached a letter from Claude Thomas to the ABA’s Jim White. It read:
"Approximately two weeks ago, I became aware of the American Bar Association inspection team report on Thomas M. Cooley Law School dated March 9-11, 1981. Of particular concern to me, as a black member of the Michigan bar, judiciary and graduate of Thomas M. Cooley’s first class in January 1976, was your analysis of the school’s admissions program and conclusion that the program has a "suggested adverse impact upon minority groups."
"I was admitted to Cooley Law School’s first class in January 1973. At the time of my admission, there existed no CEAS (Complete Evaluation Admissions System.) However, some time around my senior year or shortly thereafter, but before the CEAS was implemented, the then Dean, Thomas E. Brennan, met with me, explained the new admissions program and asked me if I thought the program would be helpful in increasing minority enrollment. My answer was "yes" then and I still maintain that position. I have known President Brennan for almost ten years and, in that time have come to know him as an individual strongly committed to fair and equal treatment of minorities. In fact, when President Brennan discussed the idea of the new admissions program with me, the very thought he had in mind was to provide a means whereby a minority student with less than the stellar academic background required by many other law schools, could obtain a legal education that he or she might otherwise be denied."
In the years since 1981, Cooley as achieved the largest minority enrollment of any law school in America. Whatever the American Bar Association may now complain about, that issue is off the table.
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This Page was last updated on:
07/21/2006