More than thirty states, as well as numerous local school districts, have adopted some form of student minimum competency program. Such programs vary widely in their purposes which range all the way from instructional and curriculum planning to deciding whether students are promoted from grade to grade. Thus far, there has been little actual litigation over using minimum competency test scores to decide who gets a diploma. This is, however, mainly due to the fact that such programs were only recently conceived and few of them have come to the stage in their implementation where students have actually been denied diplomas on the basis of test scores. Oregon, for instance, which was one of the pioneers of the minimum competency movement, will not be faced with denying diplomas for lack of demonstrated competency until 1984. In this paper, data and analyses will be presented on each of the five major, legal problems that stem from minimum competency graduation programs; i.e., educational malpractice, racial discrimination, adequate prior notice, psychometric properties of the tests, and the match between the tests and instruction. (Author)