DIDN’T EARN IT: Inside Cal Berkeley Law Review’s Admissions Team, Where ‘Diverse Life Experience’ Matters More Than ‘Editing Abilities.’

“When I first joined [Politico], I realized that the newsroom lacked the diversity necessary to reduce bias and improve our content,” Parthasarathy wrote in her application to the admissions committee. To fix the problem, she said, her team at Politico “did not consider grades,” instead creating a “holistic” review process that included, among other things, an editing test.

“For candidates on the borderline of a passing score on our test, we considered strengths they showed in other parts of their applications, and experiences they would bring to the table,” Parthasarathy said. “At the end of my tenure at Politico, our team had grown from just one person of color — me — to fifty percent hires from underrepresented backgrounds.”

Parthasarathy’s boasts were probably a legal liability for Politico, which did not respond to a request for comment, insofar as they described how the company sought to change the racial composition of its employees by de-emphasizing objective factors. But they were catnip for the California Law Review, which elected Parthasarathy to serve on the admissions committee in a journal-wide vote.

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