I promised to provide a bar passage update when this year’s bar passage reports came out, and they are available. You can access the individual school reports at https://www.abarequireddisclosures.org/BarPassageOutcomes.aspx
Here at the ABA Statistics Page, you can access the all school compilations.
As a reminder, the ABA bar passage standard, Standard 316, requires that law schools attain an “Ultimate Bar Passage” (UBP) rate of 75% within two years of graduation. The most recent reported results are for the class of 2019, the graduates of which had until the July 2021 bar exam to pass the bar. So far, the ABA has found only three schools to be out of compliance with Standard 316, so let’s take a look at those.
Let’s start with Western Michigan University Thomas Cooley School of Law. In a recent column, I predicted that the class of 2019 would fall short of the 75% UBP standard because the first-time pass rate for that class was 35.8%. Sure enough, the UBP for the class of 2019 was 59.51%. And there is little sign of likely improvement in the near future, as WMU reported that the first-time par pass rate for the class of 2021 was just 37.91% -- roughly half the 73.05% ABA weighted first time average pass rate for the jurisdictions where Western Michigan students took the bar exam.
Western Michigan has now been out of compliance continuously since the new standard was announced. (The Standard went into effect in 2019 for the class of 2017, after two years of tracking UBP rates.) For the entire time that UBP rates have been tracked, WMU has fallen well short of the UBP Standard: class of 2015 - 69.75%, class of 2016 - 69.0%, class of 2017 - 66.0%, class of 2018 - 62.3% and now, the class of 2019 - the lowest yet at 59.51%.
Western Michigan Thomas Cooley was already formally found out of compliance with Standard 316 by the ABA at its May 2020 meeting and ordered to report back in 2021. But the ABA has been curiously silent about WMU since. It is not clear what, if anything, the ABA has actually done to Western Michigan for its non-compliance. But surely, if Standard 316 is to be anything other than a complete joke, the ABA must do something now.
Golden Gate University School of Law was found out of compliance in November 2021, after the class of 2018 fell short with a 57.50% UBP. For the class of 2019, they have once again fallen short, with a UBP of 67%. Disturbingly, their first-time pass rate for 2021 was just 35.07% - even though California has lowered the cut score to pass the bar. Golden Gate’s first time rate fell from an already abysmal 44.07% in 2020 and is lower than the first-time pass rate for the class of 2019 (at 43.88%) which failed to make it to 75%. So, there is no reasonable prospect of Golden Gate meeting the UBP Standard anytime soon.
Western New England was also found out of compliance with Standard 316 by the ABA at its November 2021 meeting. But in February 2022, the ABA found the school to be back in compliance. The question is – why? According to the Western New England’s most recent bar pass report, the class of 2019 fell short of the UBP Standard at 74%. This was admittedly close, but still below the required minimum. And the class of 2021 had a first-time pass rate of 55.07%, 22.77% below the weighted ABA average, and down 8% from the school’s 2020 first-time pass rate. The class of 2019 had a first-time pass rate of 63.83% and still didn’t make it to 75%, so there is certainly no guarantee that the class of 2021 will make it. The ABA should reconsider its decision to find Western New England back in compliance.
Another school that the ABA should take a close look at, and which probably should be found out of compliance, is Appalachian. Appalachian was pretty close with the class of 2019, with a UBP of 73.33%, but their 2021 first-time pass rate was just 33.96%, down from a dismal 41.18% first-time pass rate in 2020, which was down from 48.00% in 2019. (Appalachian did make the UBP for the class of 2018, but had only 27 graduates that year.) Appalachian is clearly going in the wrong direction, and their admitted student numbers suggest that problems will continue, as Appalachian has been one of the 3 least selective law schools in the country in recent years.
The burning question for the ABA is this: Does Standard 316 have any teeth? So far, there do not seem to be any real repercussions for being out of compliance. I, for one, consider this to be unacceptable. At a minimum, the ABA must take firm and decisive action against Western Michigan and Golden Gate for their persistent non-compliance. A law school that can't prepare its students to pass the bar (or which admits students that simply don't have the aptitude) does not deserve to be ABA-accredited.
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