ELIE MYSTAL: The Baylor Law Data Dump, Now With Race And Scholarships.

On Wednesday, we reported on Baylor Law accidentally releasing personal academic information for its entire admitted class. It was a massive screw-up, and on Wednesday, we showed you the GPA and LSAT scores for Baylor’s admitted students (with the students’ names redacted, of course).

But there were other fields available in the accidentally released spreadsheet, including racial categorizations for each student and scholarship information. I didn’t include the race field earlier this week because, frankly, I didn’t want the entire news story (of the screw-up) to be overrun by a discussion about race and affirmative action.

But, I ain’t afraid of you people. Getting a complete racial breakdown of the class to go along with their grades and LSAT scores is a look inside the law school admissions process that we don’t often get to see.

So, let’s play our game. Looking at the Baylor numbers, you can see the affirmative action “bump” in LSAT scores, and to my eyes, it really shows how foolish the opponents of affirmative action really are.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reader Steven Webb writes: “Looking at the range of data in their LSAT run, it goes from 156 to 173. If you cut off the top two and the bottom two outliers from this batch of 442 numbers, you get a range of 159 to 171, or 12 points of LSAT score. Contrary to the protestations of the author, a four point bump in a 12 point range is huge, and completely obliterates his point. A four point bump could vault you over literally hundreds of competing students.”