Free Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Page B

entry requirements for those students—admitting them with lower undergraduate grades and lower standardized-test scores than everyone else—it estimates that percentage would be less than 3 percent. Furthermore, if we compare the grades that the minority and nonminority students get in law school, we see that the white students do better. That’s not surprising: if one group has higher undergraduate grades and test scores than the other, it’s almost certainly going to have higher grades in law school as well. This is one reason that affirmative action programs are so controversial. In fact, an attack on the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program recently went all the way to the US Supreme Court. For many people it is troubling that an elite educational institution lets in students who are less qualified than their peers.
    A few years ago, however, the University of Michigan decided to look closely at how the law school’s minority students had fared after they graduated. How much money did they make? How far up in the profession did they go? How satisfied were they with their careers? What kind of social and community contributions did they make? What kind of honors had they won? They looked at everything that could conceivably be an indication of real-world success. And what they found surprised them.
    “We knew that our minority students, a lot of them, were doing well,” says Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the Michigan study. “I think our expectation was that we would find a half- or two-thirds-full glass, that they had not done as well as the white students but nonetheless a lot were quite successful. But we were completely surprised. We found that they were doing every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy.”
    What Lempert is saying is that by the only measure that a law school really ought to care about—how well its graduates do in the real world—minority students aren’t less qualified. They’re just as successful as white students. And why? Because even though the academic credentials of minority students at Michigan aren’t as good as those of white students, the quality of students at the law school is high enough that
they’re still above the threshold.
They are smart enough. Knowledge of a law student’s test scores is of little help if you are faced with a classroom of clever law students.
    4.
    Let’s take the threshold idea one step further. If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things—things that have nothing to do with intelligence—must start to matter more. It’s like basketball again: once someone is tall enough, then we start to care about speed and court sense and agility and ball-handling skills and shooting touch.
    So, what might some of those other things be? Well, suppose that instead of measuring your IQ, I gave you a totally different kind of test.
    Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects:
    1.a brick
    2.a blanket
    This is an example of what’s called a “divergence test” (as opposed to a test like the Raven’s, which asks you to sort through a list of possibilities and
converge
on the right answer). It requires you to use your imagination and take your mind in as many different directions as possible. With a divergence test, obviously there isn’t a single right answer. What the test giver is looking for are the number and the uniqueness of your responses. And what the test is measuring isn’t analytical intelligence but something profoundly different—something much closer to creativity. Divergence tests are every bit as challenging as convergence tests, and if you don’t believe that, I encourage you to pause and try the brick-and-blanket test right now.
    Here, for example, are answers to the “uses of objects” test collected by Liam Hudson from a student named Poole at a top British high school:
    (Brick). To use in smash-and-grab raids.