MovieChat Forums > The Paper Chase (1973) Discussion > How Would A Kevin Brooks Even Have Been ...

How Would A Kevin Brooks Even Have Been Accepted?


Kevin Brooks' character exemplifies that one needs to be able to reason in an abstract manner in order to survive in law school. Now the LSAT is a long examination that tests that ability to abstract. Brooks' scores on that test would have been horrendously low and no law school would ever have accepted him, in fact he would have known not to even bother applying anywhere after seeing how poorly he'd done. How does The Paper Chase justify Kevin Brooks' character's even being in law school to begin with?

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[deleted]

Professor Kingsfield made it clear that a photographic memory served no use in his classroom, one had to make the mesh of facts MEAN SOMETHING. The LSAT tests that ability, to make facts mean something. A photographic memory is of little use on that test either.

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He probably used Powerscore for his lsat preparation.

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TestMaster ripoff.

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I haven't seen the movie since it came out so I don't remember the character but--this was 1973 (based on a novel set in the late 60s), and Harvard. People got into Harvard for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with scores on standardized tests. They might get into the law school for reasons like: student of a former student who is now teaching somewhere, child of a wealthy alumnus, insanely high grades combined with some other quality, etc. Even the LSAT probably was different 45 years ago. It would be interesting to know whether the character was in the novel, which presumably was meant to look very probable indeed to other Ivy League readers.

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The Kevin character is in the novel, and the plot plays out pretty much like in the movie.

Your points about non-academic reasons for admitting students are well taken. Some other things I'll add are that standardized tests, including the LSAT, are not perfect measures, they're just the best indicator of general academic aptitude anyone has been able to come up with so far. They don't indicate how hard a student is willing to work, but GPAs are supposed to provide some insight into that. Even then, admissions committees will consider other factors; some post-grad professors would rather have the 3.5 GPA student who got involved in the college's social life than the 4.0 student who spent the entire time in the library and classroom.

What it boils down to is, there's no way to precisely predict who's going to do well in post-grad study; schools can only make a general prediction and take their best shot. I suspect that the Kevin character was put in for another reason, though. Post-graduate study can have tremendous psychological pressure; the faculty are often merciless in pounding the myths into students' heads that anyone who drops out does so because of being not-quite-bright enough, and that students should spend every waking moment studying. Also, some programs are still designed with a built-in cut; say, 50 students are admitted, but only 25 get to stay in after the first year. There are very few arguments that can be made in favor of that kind of a system, but the blunt truth is that many faculty members had to go through such a system themselves, and so preserve it because "now we get to do it to them."

Add all that together, and some students do internalize the idea that their value as human beings is only as good as their grades. They end up sacrificing a lot to try to pursue the degree (the divorce rates among married grad students are shockingly high, for example). And some who flunk out, like Kevin, do take it very personally and "crash and burn."

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Thanks for all of your replies.

I asked this particular question because I had one year of law school, though not at an Ivy League school. I didn't make the cut/grade to the second year but believe me, I had far more of a capability to do the work than the Kevin Brooks character, who still made a total mess of things even when given some extra tutoring attention. That part of the movie, when that tutoring group totally guaranteed that they'd get him into shape and assured him that there was nobody whom they'd ever worked with who didn't pick things up later on, was what made me wonder how such a student couldn't have been spotted early on as somebody who wouldn't make it. Perhaps more of an explanation as to where he'd been and what he'd done as a student could have explored the matter. All that we really learned about him was that he had a photographic memory. I imagine that somebody with his lack of abstraction would have had trouble writing essays while growing up. Wouldn't something in that area have likely been caught at some point before admitting him?

Thanks

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The LSAT's a pretty solid measure of the kind of reasoning skills needed in law school. If he had done well on that, he wouldn't have the specific issues he had in the film. And there's no indication he's lazy.

The idea he slipped in through the back door somehow (legacy, etc.) makes more sense. Although it's of course just a movie.

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Essentially, the movie was trying to make exactly the point that you are making: that capabilities like a photographic memory, though they may be highly valuable in some pursuits, are useless in law school. Or, more broadly: law school isn't about learning a bunch of rules, it's about learning a way to think. The same point is made in other ways throughout the movie.

A movie is a very compactly condensed art form, and generally things - particularly little side "bits" that involve peripheral characters - have to be exaggerated so they get conveyed quickly and reasonably clearly. A real-life version of Brooks - i.e. someone who had the same flaws, but less so - would've been too subtle, unless a lot more time were devoted to him. But then the movie would've been about Brooks, instead of Hart.

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Apologies for the long post, but I thought the points deserved some elaboration.

> I asked this particular question because I had one year of law school, though not at an Ivy League school. I didn't make the cut/grade to the second year but believe me, I had far more of a capability to do the work than the Kevin Brooks character

Oh, I believe you. I went to a doctoral program and made it out the other end (with the degree and a fierce determination to never set foot within a hundred miles of academia again) ... but believe me, I believe you. :) Read on. With respect, it looks to me like you're laboring under some misconceptions ...

1) The educational system can detect who will succeed in post-graduate study and who will not. The truth is, they can't. Letters of recommendation don't do much; as one of my professors said, any moron can scrape up three people who will write glowing letters of praise. As for standardized tests and GPAs, well, consider this. How much does an IQ score -- one number -- really tell about a person? With LSATs, GREs, MCATs, or whatever plus GPAs, admissions committes have maybe five numbers to work with.

That's not much, considering that post-graduate study is radically different from anything the student has done before. I know we're talking about a movie here, but Kingfield had it right with one line -- "you come in here with your heads full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer." Translation -- everything you've learned up to now is useless, at least as far as what you're doing here. So, if the only evidence of the student's academic ability comes from an environment completely unlike law school (or working on a dissertation, or whatever) ... and the admissions committee is trying to decide whether the student can succeed in law school ... what real evidence do they actually have to work with?

2) Grad schools consider it important that all their good students make it out the other end. They don't. They're interested in putting out X number of degrees per year, and in making sure those degrees go to people who won't embarrass them. As for those students who leave the program voluntarily, flunk out, or don't make the cut, the attitude is generally "screw 'em." (Don't believe me? Hang around a post-grad faculty and listen to the contempt sometimes displayed toward those students who don't finish the degree.)

Now, there are two types of mistakes a grad school can make. They can either grant a diploma to someone who doesn't deserve it, or they can deny a diploma to someone who does. Any grad school gets far more applications than they have open spots. Harvard Law is flooded each year with more 4.0 GPA applicants than they can possibly admit; they also are flooded with applications from 2.5 GPA students who reason, "why not? -- it only costs me the application fee." And if the Community College of Outer *beep* started offering law degrees, they'd get flooded with applications from 0.2 GPA students who didn't deserve to be there.

Add in the fact that once students are admitted, dropping them without some sort of a hard, defensible reason exposes the school to a lawsuit, and the end result is that it's much easier for schools to admit a lot of students who all "look good" (i.e., have high numbers), then structure the environment so that most of those will fall by the wayside. In some programs, natural attrition does the job. In others, there's the cut. Professors love it because they had it done to them when they were students (and with the tenure system, as long as professors don't engage in fraud, sexual harassment, or a few other cardinal sins, they're completely unaccountable). But they also love the numbers game for another reason; it relieves them of much of the responsibility of making judgments about students' academic merit, and provides a sound defense against legal challenges. In your case, let's say there were 50 students admitted to the law school, with the warning that only 25 would go on to the second year. Maybe 35 of you were really capable of doing the work. So one of the fifteen losers slipped by and made it to the second year; meanwhile, you and ten other worthy students were discarded. But if you sued the school, they could always say, "he knew what he was getting into, there were 25 spots open, and he was number 28."

(On a side note, professors also love the cut system for another reason. Law school does not, to the best of my knowledge, have teaching requirements -- a student doesn't have to be a teaching assistant for undergrad classes. Ph.D. programs do. The cut system ensures that there will be a lot of first-year student slave labor to teach the department's introductory "101" classes.)

3) Grad school rewards people fairly. It doesn't. Being the brightest student in the class is no guarantee of success, and being the dullest is no guarantee of failure. For that matter, achieving a post-graduate degree often has little to do with integrity and morality. Fraud in ones own work is verboten, of course, although it does happen (I saw some pretty blatant plagiarism happen a few times). On the other hand, proving that one student has sabotaged another's work is nearly impossible, and many students, under intense pressure, will happily put the screws to their classmates if given the chance. (Not to mention that many professors tacitly approve of that sort of thing as "weeding out the weaklings.") I'm sure that you have a few stories to tell -- perhaps some student was studying one night in the law library, got careless and left his belongings lying on a table while he went for a bathroom break, then returned to discover that an entire semester's worth of contract law notes had sprouted legs and walked off. Although the "cut" absolutely guarantees that those things will happen, not having the cut is no guarantee that they won't; my school didn't have it, we certainly had our share of slanderers and thieves, and students who left their lab space unlocked got nasty surprises. Most of my undergrad classmates who went on to grad school had similar experiences.

To give you one data point on what academia's end product is -- my school had a small program, about a dozen people admitted every year. In my class, the three brightest people dropped out shortly after getting the M.A. Of the five of us who finished, one is now a tenured professor. Two went into the private sector, where they blatantly lie about their qualifications. The fourth became a mouthpiece for a lobbying organization; she spends her time testifying before Congress, where she offers articulate, incisive, and erudite comments like "air pollution is a bad thing." (In case you're wondering, one doesn't have to be invited to testify before Congress; any citizen has the right to make his or her opinion known to a legislative inquiry committee.) As for me, I'm nowhere near academia, and I'm doing something that has absolutely no relation to my degree, but my dignity, self-respect, and integrity are all intact. If success depends on anything at all, it's a desire to stick with it no matter what -- a desire that, to be blunt, lies somewhere between "fierce determination" and "pathological obsession."

> Perhaps more of an explanation as to where [Kevin had] been and what he'd done as a student could have explored the matter.

Well, the movie was about Hart, not Kevin. :) It's been a while since I read the book, but Kevin's problems run a little deeper there; by the time he has his breakdown and drops out of school, the study group is falling apart and exams are looming near. The group members have split the courses between them and each has constructed an outline of one course; the plan being that they'll use each other's outlines to help prepare for exams. Kevin, who doesn't need his outline anymore, sends it to the group to get whatever use they can out of it. Despite the fact that he's supposedly been working on it all year, it's nothing more than a few badly scribbled pages.

> I imagine that somebody with his lack of abstraction would have had trouble writing essays while growing up. Wouldn't something in that area have likely been caught at some point before admitting him?

Probably not. It certainly wouldn't have been caught in high school, where a student gets a "B" just for writing an essay with properly formatted footnotes and citations, that demonstrates that s/he has actually read the source material, and that's phrased in grammatically correct English. In college, freshman and sophomore level courses are mostly about mastering a base of factual knowledge to support further study. Higher level courses can require some degree of abstraction and critical thinking, but a "Kevin Brooks" can do quite well anyway; many term papers come down to little more than "take questions 1 through 6 and apply them to situations A through E," and a student who can wield a checklist and ensure that there's at least a paragraph addressing "1B," "4D," "6C," etc. will usually get a good grade. Even in test questions which appear to require critical and integrative thinking (e.g., "would you agree or disagree with _____ -- Defend your answer.), the teacher has usually already telegraphed what the "acceptable" arguments on each side of the question are.

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I'm sure that you have a few stories to tell -- perhaps some student was studying one night in the law library, got careless and left his belongings lying on a table while he went for a bathroom break, then returned to discover that an entire semester's worth of contract law notes had sprouted legs and walked off.


Well, the only one that I remember was when I had left my copy card, with x amount of money still remaining on it, somewhere in the law library, and yes, it got turned in but with no money left. I would have rather that the person had just stolen the thing, returning it reeked of loudly proclaiming "I am a thief." And the person was in law school? Hmmmmm.

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A few points:

1. First off, the LSAT is in fact a strong measure of the intellectual abilities needed to thrive in law school. It measures very specific intellectual skills, which are the most important ones for law school. If you do well on the LSAT -- like most top law school admits -- you should have no trouble getting through law school, presuming you have any motivation and willingness to work. (This is what udergrad grades tell you.)

It's possible that someone may still be emotional unstable, despite being motivate, and intellectually capable. Causing a breakdown. (I saw this happen once.) But those are unusual cases.

2. Aside from a few bottom-feeder schools, no law school wants any attrition these days. Especially not top schools. It's possible this was different in 1973, but it seems unlikely. HLS would more likely pride itself on only admitting the most capable students.

3. Law school, at least, does reward people pretty fairly. Exams are graded blindly, etc.

I can't speak for any other graduate program (many of which seem pretty pointless to begin with), but law school is a pretty solid meritocracy for the most part. Your grades will tend to reflect your abilities, your effort, and your ability to hold it together emotionally under pressure.

And even if you struggle academically, you can still ultimately graduate, and become successful professionally. Because being a successful lawyer is even more about work (and marketing, and schmoozing), and less about intellectual ability.





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Yes, Kevin might have developed depression. Perhaps he attained his goal of getting into Harvard Law. Now maybe he's not sure it's what he really wants. His outline was only three pages because he didn't want to write the outline after all!

Clinical depression (which I've struggled with my whole life) can seriously diminish patience, focus, cognition, and recall. I remember having a 3.8 GPA one semester, getting hit with a major depressive episode the next, and being on academic probation by the end of the next semester.

There could have been some of that going on for Kevin.

Oh, I thought it was interesting how nobody called the police or took Kevin to the hospital after he tried to kill himself. I guess it was different in 1973.

Also, when Asheley lets Hart into the house, you can see the birthday cake on the table, and the candles are burning!

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Pretty much everything BullSchmidt wrote above is true.

Here's my 2 cents: The fact is, the reason the Kevin Brookses of the world get into Harvard Law is because on paper they are highly qualified applicants. Kevin is not stupid -- he is probably of above average intelligence, with above average reasoning skills and writing ability.

The problem, in my interpretation, is that he has what psychologist Carol Dweck terms an "entity mindset." He spent his whole life depending on his photographic memory, confident that it would get him through. The first time his memory failed him, it crushed his confidence. Without confidence, he couldn't motivate himself, and he just kept falling further and further behind. Eventually he was trapped in a vicious cycle.

That was the point of the later scene where Kingsfield asks him some basic questions about a case, and he can't summon up the answers. Earlier in the year, he probably would have been able to do it. But by that point, he didn't have the confidence or the will, and the uber-competitive atmosphere ate him up.

Who knows, maybe under different circumstances -- or in a different kind of program -- Kevin could have graduated at the top of his class. He himself said it best:

"I mean, y'know, I got a photographic memory. I'm a walking, talking encyclopedia. I got facts at my fingertips, facts on the tip of my tongue ... but I just don't have the kind of mind that can, uh, I don't have the kind of mind that can make the grade."

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[deleted]

It's possible a Kevin Brooks character could have been admitted, since he's a like he would have accumulated a strong academic/personal resume when applying, coupled with who knows what types of connections (his father in law had work lined up for him in the summer).

I would like to say I found BullSchmidt's post fascinating. You research about graduate/law schools and you get all these puff and stock responses from the academic industry (because when it boils down to it, that's exactly what academia is) about what to expect. It's nice to hear some of the unfiltered realities for a change.

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I didn't read every post, so excuse me if repeat points other posters have already made.

Kevin seems like he has ADD, the non-hyper kind. He constantly procrastinates and is never prepared for class.

If he does have a photographic memory, then this could have allowed him to mask and overcome his other problems/flaws as a student and do really well in college.

Maybe his gift helped him with the LSAT (was it the same back then as it is today?) and get great scores. Or maybe he really prepared for it, with the help of tutors, studying, etc. while his wife worked, and aced it.

Keep in mind that students do drop out of law school and graduate school because they crack under pressure or can't meet the work load.

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[deleted]

Good point.

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