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Although it was 20+ years ago, when I was at UCLA Law School, the difference in the bar passage rates of regular students and minority students was large: IIRC it was 94% first time pass for 'regular admit' students, around 60% first time pass for blacks and around 50% first time pass for hispanics, giving the school as a hole an 85+% first time pass rate.

UCLA's Law Review was entirely write-on, but their were NO minority students on Law Review (let alone editors) while I was at UCLA, unless you count a couple of Asians.

With only a couple of notable exceptions, the minority students in my law school class were barely able to do the work, even with extensive tutoring and mentoring from other students and faculty.

I worked for a large, first-ranked law firm in NYC for a number of years. We recruited black students very, very heavily, although only from the "best" schools. Virtually none of the men could pass the bar exam on the first try. Finally, after one guy had gone through five tries, we had to institute a three-strikes-yer-out policy. We paid for Bar BRI courses (which most of them started but didn't finish), writing courses (which most of them didn't even take), and everything imaginable to get these guys through. PLus they had terrible work habits, objected to every assignment as being beneath them (first year assignments for anybody are essentially just the stuff that paralegals find too boring to do), and couldn't get along with the other attorneys.

The odd thing was that the black women we had did just fine - in fact, they had not really required a boost of any sort, because if you looked at their grades, their high school activities and background, they could have competed with anyone, using any standard.

The other odd thing is that most of our black male summer associates and first-years were not from poor households. In some cases, their own parents were attorneys (and remember, these parents would have grown up and even gone to law school BEFORE affirmative action).

As for Hispanics (of whom we had very, very few), in many cases they didn't pass the bar exam the first time, but they almost always passed on the second go. Most of them were not native speakers of English, and also came from families where they were the first person in their family to attend college or even graduate from high school.

In other words, affirmative action created a strange mentality among black male recipients in particular. But I never did figure out why. Any suggested solutions to this mystery are welcome.