The Faculty Lounge

Law Schools Miss the Mark on Bar Passage - Will the ABA Act?

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 here. You can access the all-school compilations here at the ABA Statistics Page.

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 start by reviewing the results at those schools.

More on Law Profs Taking Bar Exams

Back in July, Orin Kerr shared his experiences about taking the California Bar Exam as a 46 year old law professor (here's the  Volokh Conspiracy link ). I was so happy to read his post because I realized I was not the only law professor taking a bar exam later in life: for me, it was the NY Bar and it was my first U.S. Bar Exam because I initially qualified and practiced in Australia. So in a sense, I was taking the exam as a "foreign lawyer", at least that's how the NY BOLE classified my status. 

I echo a lot of what Orin said in his blog post. I'm also getting a little jaded and grumpy about this stuff, but, at the same time I was fascinated because I've never taken an exam quite like the Bar before. Back in the day in Aus, we had an "articles of clerkship" system where you basically interned with a partner of a law firm for a year and the partner certified you as qualified at the end of the clerkship.

I took the exam in Buffalo and was immensely grateful for the proctors, most of whom had been working there for 10+ years and were very sympathetic and comforting to those of us with nerves (yes, even law profs get nerves in a highly charged exam situation). I have to also agree with Orin that I found the "wearing of the school sweatshirts" a little obnoxious, although I also understand why people do it because it helps them find their group during break time. I mean, I had NO ONE from Melbourne University to hang out with over lunch! I did manage to find some other "foreign lawyers" to chat with, though.

One thing I've realized in the subsequent months since taking the exam is that, while it's obviously cramming a huge amount of pretty basic material into a confined space of time, it did re-awaken my interest in certain topics that I haven't thought much about since law school. Obviously, not the rule against perpetuities. Like, I'm never going to think fondly of that one! (Sorry, law profs who teach it.) But I've found myself thinking a lot more about the ins and outs of principles of contract, tort, and property law that I've really just taken for granted in recent years. The experience has in a way rekindled my interest in a number of topics, and their relationships with each other, that I haven't thought much about lately. Despite the stress, in the aftermath, I guess I'm saying that I really did learn something, although I'm sure I'll forget more than I learned! And bear in mind that, as a foreign lawyer, I was fascinated by different emphases in familiar subjects between the anglo-Australian approach and the U.S. approach. I've been teaching in the U.S. for many years now, but there are a bunch of subjects I haven't taught or really thought about much since my days in practice.

In any event, it was both a frustrating and enlightening experience for me and, now that I've passed, I guess I can say I'm glad for the experience.

And, like Orin, I did what y'all do and took a Bar Prep course. I can definitely recommend Themis for anyone taking the NY Bar. (No, they didn't pay me to say that. I just found that following a clear guideline and actually DOING all the practice questions was what got me through. I suspect the other Bar Prep courses work pretty much the same way.)

 

 

One More Reason To Sanction Charleston School of Law

Charleston Law School was tied for fifth with Thomas Jefferson in my list of the least selective law schools in the country for the 2017 entering class, with LSATs of 148/145/142.   In another recent column, I noted that Charleston had a dismal 43.59% first-time bar passage rate in 2017, down from 58.60% in 2016.   South Carolina has just released information on the pass rate for the February 2018 bar and Charleston grads are still struggling.  Only 21 of 64 Charleston students who took the exam passed, for a 32.81% pass rate, as compared to the average for takers from all other schools at 62.5% (120 of 192).  South Carolina does not distinguish between first-time takers and repeat takers so we don’t know exactly what the first-time pass rate was, but it was almost certainly very bad.  And it is important to keep in mind that South Carolina has among the easiest bar exams in the country with a cut score of 266 on the Uniform Bar Exam.  If Charleston students can’t pass the South Carolina bar, they are unlikely to fare better in other states. 

Readers may remember that Charleston fended off advances from InfiLaw in 2014 out of concerns that Infilaw’s lower academic standards would damage the school’s reputation if InfiLaw took over.  But Charleston is now admitting students very nearly as weak as Charlotte School of Law and Florida Coastal did at their nadir, and Charleston’s bar pass rates are very nearly as bad as the nearest InfiLaw school, Florida Coastal.  Florida Coastal’s first-time bar pass rate was 40% for 2016 and 39.52% in 2017, but the Florida bar is tougher than the South Carolina bar.  Ironically, Florida Coastal is now turning things around, while Charleston is going in the opposite direction.  Florida Coastal has significantly raised standards (151/148/145 for 2017), and, significantly, refused to take most of Charlotte’s transfer students last year, enrolling only 4.  In contrast,  Charleston took in an incredible 58 transfer students from Charlotte.  Those students, primarily from the 2016 entering class at Charlotte, had incredibly weak entrance credentials, (LSAT 148/144/141  GPA 3.07/2.80/2.48), weaker even than the abysmal entrance credentials at Charleston that year. Predictably, these students did very poorly at Charlotte.  The median 1L GPA of the group of transfer students was an anemic 2.33.  Although students with first year law school GPAs below 2.5 are at very high risk of bar failure, Charleston took dozens of such students, virtually assuring a continued very low bar passage rate for the next couple of years. 

Clearly, Charleston is no longer worried about its reputation and seems to be following the InfiLaw/Thomas Cooley playbook of maximizing revenue for as long as they can get away with it. It is a shame that this once promising school has sunk to such depths. 

It is high time for the ABA to step in and put a stop to this exploitation. 

Detroit Mercy’s Unique Dual JD and Updated Bar Pass Numbers

When the ABA released its bar pass spreadsheet recently, there were a few surprises. One of the surprises was that Detroit Mercy, a respectable school, had the lowest ultimate bar pass rate in the country for the class of 2015, according to the spreadsheet.  Well, it turns out that this was not accurate.  Like several other schools (Northern Kentucky, St. Mary’s, Toledo and South Texas College of Law so far), Detroit Mercy initially reported the wrong data to the ABA, which resulted in some unfair negative publicity for the school, which by all rights belonged to Arizona Summit (aka Arizona Plummet).   The ABA has now issued its third revised bar passage spreadsheet, and it makes a lot more sense.  Arizona Summit now has taken its rightful place as the undisputed cellar dweller with the lowest Ultimate Bar Pass Rate (they are the only school below 60%) and Detroit Mercy has moved past 35 schools with a revised UBP of 80.53%.   (Detroit Mercy also revised their 2016 and 2017 first-time bar passage rate to  61.5% and 73.5%, respectively.)  In this third, and hopefully final, revision of the spreadsheet, there are now only 19 schools that failed to make the 75% UBP benchmark.  (Although I still think the numbers may be wrong for Wyoming and Syracuse.) And the national UBP mark for all takers from all ABA schools has been adjusted to 88.32%.  This sounds pretty good, until you realize that there are still nearly 4400 J.D.s from the nationwide class of 2015 who took the bar and still hadn’t passed it after two years.  That is a lot of wasted time, money and effort for a whole bunch of people.

As I was investigating these matters, I had the opportunity to speak to Detroit Mercy’s dynamic and thoughtful Dean, Phyllis Crocker, and learned more about her school.  A unique aspect of Detroit Mercy’s program is its one-of-a-kind cross-border partnership with the University of Windsor, through which the school offers dual U.S. and Canadian J.D. degrees in three years.  This program also helped to explain an anomaly I identified in this post, where I questioned why so many Detroit Mercy graduates were not taking the bar.  As it turns out, the vast majority of those not taking the bar are Canadians in the Dual JD program.  These students tend to take the bar in Canada, but the ABA only requires law schools to track and report bar takers in U.S. jurisdictions.  So, for example, of the 37 Detroit Mercy grads from the class of 2015 who did not take a U.S. bar in 2015, 32 were Canadians in the dual J.D. program.  Of the 39 2016 Detroit Mercy grads who did not take a U.S. bar, 39 were Canadian dual J.D.s.

Although the dual J.D. program seems to primarily appeal to Canadians, it is open to Americans, and a couple of U.S. citizens have completed the program.  Of course, getting your bar license in Canada takes longer than it does in the U.S. and requires more than just passing a bar exam.  Here is a description of what it takes in Ontario:

Ontario (Law Society of Upper Canada)

Ontario’s Bar Admissions Course consists of online self-study in the following subjects: Real Estate, Wills and Estates, Business Law, Professional Responsibility, Family Law, Criminal Law, Civil law, and Constitutional Law. You must then pass two major licensing exams covering these subjects – both self-study and open book. One is the Barrister Examination and the other is the Solicitors Examination. Each exam takes about seven hours to complete.

After finishing this step, you must complete a 10-month Articleship. During this time, you will work for a principal (licensed lawyer) who must approve of your work. You will be assessed midterm, at which time your principal must report your progress to the Law Society of Upper Canada. You must also complete an online Professional Responsibility and Practice Course during your articling period. 

Once you have completed all of these steps, you will be called to the Bar, conferred with the degree of Barrister-at-Law, and sworn in and enrolled as a Solicitor of the Court of Appeal and the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario.

Source.

According to Dean Crocker, Detroit Mercy is still accepting applications for this program for fall 18.  So, if you have been thinking about either going to law school to fight Trump, or moving to Canada to get away from him, here is a program that can keep both options open!   On a more serious note, having a thorough understanding of the Canadian legal system would be a real advantage for graduates seeking employment in firms that represent a lot of multi-national corporations that do business in Canada or in government agencies that deal with cross-border issues.  And Detroit Mercy has lower than average tuition for a private school, while the cost of living in Detroit is well below average for a major city.   If you are looking for something to do while procrastinating doing your taxes, check out what Detroit Mercy has to offer. 

Golden Gate Receives Out-of-Compliance Letter from the ABA

As reported in the ABA Journal, Golden Gate University School of Law this week received notice that they are “significantly out of compliance” with ABA Standard 501(b) and Interpretations, 501-1, 501-2 and 501-3.  This was not a result of an ABA site visit (the school is not due for a visit until 2019-20), but rather of the ABA’s monitoring of the school’s admissions figures, attrition rates, and perhaps to some extent, bar passage rates.  A review of the key statistics from Golden Gate demonstrate that the ABA’s action was absolutely warranted.  For the last four years, Golden Gate has admitted classes with at least 25% of students in my very high (145-146) to extremely high risk (144 and below) categories by LSAT, and their part-time classes have been even weaker.   As the entrance credentials have dropped, the attrition rate has predictably risen, and the bar pass rate has predictably fallen.  Golden Gate has significantly exceeded the presumptive exploitation standard of 20% non-transfer attrition for the last three years, and their bar pass rate has been greater than 15% below the state average continuously for the last four years.  

PART II: Improving Bar Preparedness Through Distance Learning

By David Frakt and Carolyn Gachet*

(Note - this is the second in a two part series on Distance Learning.  Read Part I here.)

Why do law school bar preparation programs need to improve?

Recently, the ABA released a bar passage spreadsheet for all ABA-accredited law schools across the country (read about it here).  This spreadsheet provided some useful new data, which was not previously or readily available, including the “ultimate bar passage” for the class of 2015.  This spreadsheet provided both the initial first-time pass rate, and the cumulative eventual or ultimate pass rate within two years of graduation.  As noted in another recent post, approximately 20 law schools failed to hit the 75% “ultimate bar passage” benchmark for the class of 2015.  75% is an important benchmark for the “ultimate bar passage” rate because 75% could become a requirement for law schools as part of a revision to Standard 316 in the near future. 

In addition, 2016 and 2017 first-time taker bar passage data was released for all ABA-accredited law schools on one spreadsheet, making it much easier for students to compare the bar passage rates of the schools they are considering.  Correctly interpreted (see caveats in this post), this data can help inform prospective law school students about the relative success of law schools in getting students like them to pass the bar, both on the first attempt, and within two years.  Although bar passage rates generally track the entrance credentials of the student (the more selective the school, the higher the bar pass rate), there is sufficient variation in pass rates at schools with students with similar entrance credentials that we can say with a high degree of confidence that certain law schools are doing a better job preparing students for the bar than others.    

Although the UBP rate nationally approached 90%, there is still significant room for improvement in both the first-time pass rate and ultimate pass rate at many schools, especially those schools admitting substantial numbers of at-risk students.  Theoretically, any student admitted to law school should be able to pass the bar.  Indeed, under Admissions Standard 501, law schools are not permitted to admit any students who do not appear capable of passing the bar.   Certainly, any graduates who have earned their J.D. should be able to pass a bar exam within a reasonable time.  Those students who appeared capable but turn out not to have the aptitude or sufficient motivation for the study of law should have been attrited before earning a J.D.. 

Yet thousands of law school graduates still are not passing the bar within two years of graduation.  For the graduating class of 2015, approximately 4400 J.D.s who took the bar at least once have still not passed the bar, and this represents an enormous waste of human capital, as well as being a huge personal setback for each of these individuals.  Despite what some claim about “J.D. advantage” jobs, almost all students go to law school to become lawyers (as demonstrated by the fact that over 97% of 2015 graduates took a bar exam at least once) and few would make the investment of time and money to attend law school if they knew they would not pass the bar within two years of graduating from law school.  Although at least some of these 4400 students probably never would have been admitted to law school in the first place if all law schools were using responsible admission practices, law schools owe it to the students that they do admit and retain to do everything possible to prepare them for the bar exam.  Law schools cannot simply rely on the efficacy of external commercial bar preparation companies to prepare graduates to pass the bar, however competent these companies may be.  We believe that at least some of these 4400 J.D.s would have passed, and many other graduates would have passed on an earlier try, if law schools had better in-house bar preparation programs.  Experience has shown that students with average or worse test-taking skills (as evidenced by their LSAT score) in particular can benefit immensely from bar preparation for the MBE and bar exam essays during law school.

Lessons from the 2018 ABA Bar Passage Data Spreadsheet: Part 4 - Anomalies and Deceptions

As I have reviewed the ABA Bar Passage Data spreadsheet, I've noticed some oddities that I thought worthy of sharing with TFL readers. 

What the heck is going on at Southern University Law Center?

For some time, I have been calling on the ABA to sanction Southern University Law Center for violating ABA Standard 316 on Admissions (see, e.g. here). Southern has had appallingly low admissions standards for several years, as low, and in several cases lower, than the 11 schools that have already been found in violation of this rule, as shown below:    

Southern ULC 75/50/25 percentiles LSAT and UGPA 2014-2017

2014 LSAT 147/144/142 GPA 3.20/2.82/2.52

2015 LSAT 147/143/141  GPA 3.16.2.79/2.53

2016 LSAT 146/143/141  GPA 3.16/2.86/2.52

2017 LSAT 146/144/141  GPA 3.17/2.91/2.58

Despite these horrific numbers, so far there has not been a public peep from the ABA (it may well be coming soon). At first, I thought the ABA might be reluctant to sanction Southern because it is an HBCU, but after the ABA has found both Texas Southern and North Carolina Central in violation of Standard 316, that theory was proven false.  My other theory was that, despite their low admissions standards, Southern's bar pass rate wasn't all that terrible, at least compared to some other schools that have been sanctioned, so perhaps the ABA was cutting them a break for that reason.  Southern's reported bar pass rate in 2014 was 55.75%; in 2015, it was 53.19%. In 2016, when the ABA started getting serious about exploitative admissions, Southern had a 61.59% first-time pass rate, followed by a 57.81% rate in 2017.   No other school has managed such high pass rates with similar students.  The spreadsheet reveals that something very strange is happening at Southern that may explain why their bar pass rate is higher than would be expected with classes made up entirely of high, very high, and extremely high risk students.

Lessons from the 2018 ABA Bar Passage Data Spreadsheet: Part 2

The ABA's Bar Passage Data Spreadsheet should put to bed, finally, any doubts about the correlation between LSAT scores and bar passage rates, and provides strong support for the ABA's recent enforcement actions against law schools with exploitative admissions standards.  It proves that schools that admit significant numbers of high risk students are virtually guaranteed to have very poor bar passage results three years later.  Let’s take a look at how the different pages of the spreadsheet prove this in different ways.

First, some definitions.  I define "very high risk students" as those with an LSAT of 145 and 146.  These students are at very high risk of flunking out of law school (academic attrition) and of failing the bar if they do manage to graduate.  I define "extremely high risk students" as those with a 144 and below on the LSAT.  These students are at extremely high risk of flunking out or failing the bar.

The first spreadsheet, Ultimate Bar Passage 2015, reports on law students who graduated in 2015.  The national average UBP among all ABA Law schools was 87.83%. The vast majority of these 2015 graduates started law school in 2012.  So I went back to take a look at the entrance credentials of all ABA law school in 2012.   (Note - the three ABA law schools located in Puerto Rico are excluded from the analysis in this post.)  This data is available at the ABA Standard 509 Report page by going to the Compilation -All Schools Data and creating a spreadsheet for the section GPA and LSAT Scores (calendar year).  In 2012,  there were 24 schools which enrolled an entering class with at least 25% very high risk students, that is, their 25% LSAT was at 146 or below.  Ten of these schools failed to reach an Ultimate Bar Passage rate of 75% for the class of 2015 within two years: Detroit Mercy (56.88%), Arizona Summit (59.75%), New England School of Law - Boston (60.26%), Valparaiso (69.35%), WMU Cooley (69.75%), Ohio Northern (71.88%), Florida Coastal (72.08%), South Dakota (72.73%), North Dakota (73.21%), and Barry (73.50%).  Another school that definitely would have failed is Charlotte Law, but since they went out of business and lost their accreditation, they are not included in the ABA's 2018 Spreadsheet.

The ABA Spreadsheet also includes date on first-time bar pass rates for 2016 and 2017.  I compared these spreadsheets with the data from the 2013 and 2014 entering classes to see how the very high risk schools fared.

Lessons from the 2018 ABA Bar Passage Data Spreadsheet: Part 1

Last week, the ABA released a new product, a spreadsheet which compiles data on bar passage from all ABA-accredited law schools.  The spreadsheet is supposed to provide more timely information for consumers, and make it easier for prospective law students to compare the performance of different law schools.  In this series of columns, I will provide some analysis of the data and the lessons that can be gleaned from it.  In this first column, I will provide an overview of the information contained in the various pages of the Spreadsheet.  In subsequent columns, I will do a deeper dive into the data.

Before I start explaining the Spreadsheet, let me make one general comment. The raw data on bar passage tells us very little about the quality of the education provided at any particular law school, or how well that school prepares its students for the bar.  One should not draw the conclusion that a school with an 80% first-time bar passage rate is “better” than a school with a 60% first-time bar pass rate.  It is critically important to have additional information to put the bar passage rate into context.  First, you must know the jurisdiction(s) where the majority of the graduates take the bar, what the average bar pass rate there is, and how strong the other schools are that provide most of the test-takers in the jurisdiction.  Second, in order to make a meaningful comparison between or among law schools, you must know the entrance credentials (LSAT scores and GPA) of the students from each of the schools you are comparing (which you can get by looking at the Standard 509 reports from three years earlier).   To illustrate this point, consider the example of Brooklyn Law School and the University of San Diego.  In 2017, these schools had a nearly identical first-time bar pass rate:  77.36% for USD and 77.37% for Brooklyn.   Virtually all of USD’s grads took the California Bar, while virtually all of Brooklyn’s grads took the New York Bar.  The California Bar is arguably the toughest in the country, with a 66.19% pass rate in 2017.  (Arizona’s rate was lower at 63.99%, but this was primarily a result of the extraordinary incompetence of Arizona Summit’s graduates, and does not reflect a higher cut score in Arizona.)  The New York Bar is among the easiest in the country, with an overall first-time pass rate of 83.92% in 2017.  (Only New Mexico, Missouri, Iowa and Oklahoma had higher first-time pass rates in 2017.)   So, the University of San Diego performed far above average, +10.51% on the 2017 California bar, while Brooklyn performed below average, -5.18%.   So, USD students really outperformed Brooklyn students, right?  Not so fast.  Remember, it is important to also compare the caliber of their students. USD’s entering class of 2014 was very strong with LSAT 75/50/25 of 161/159/155  and UGPA of 3.66/3.50/3.23. In comparison, Brooklyn’s entering class of 2014, although above average, was not nearly as strong as USD’s, with LSATs of 159/156/153 and UGPA of 3.53/3.31/3.05.   The extra 2.33 LSAT points and .17 GPA points per student is statistically significant.  To truly understand how these schools performed, we have to compare their performance to other schools in their home state.  Of the 15 New York law schools, only one law school with weaker entering students (and only slightly weaker), City University of New York, beat Brooklyn’s pass rate, while Brooklyn’s rate surpassed seven schools with weaker students.  Similarly, of the 20 California law schools, only one law school with weaker credentials (again, just barely weaker), Santa Clara University, beat San Diego’s pass rate.  USD’s pass rate surpassed all of the other California law schools with weaker or comparable students, and it beat one, UC Davis, that had slightly stronger entrance credentials, by one percent.  So, in essence, both USD and Brooklyn performed pretty much as expected, and we can't really conclude much about the quality of the legal education that these schools provide based on their bar performance in 2017.  Another important lesson is not to judge a law school based on one year’s performance.  For example, Brooklyn’s pass rate in 2016 was 80.66% while San Diego was at 72.45% in 2016.  Swings of 5 to 6% from year to year are not unusual and not necessarily indicative of a trend. 

Now, on to the Spreadsheet.

Thomas Jefferson Law School - On Probation For Good Reason

Last week the California State bar released some more detailed information about the July 2017 bar exam.

We already knew that Thomas Jefferson had the lowest first-time pass rate of any ABA-Accredited law school in California, at 30%.  (Whittier, now closed, was second lowest at 38%, with LaVerne the only other ABA school below 50%, at 41%.) But the latest data provides some more interesting nuggets of information about Thomas Jefferson's performance.

First, no less than five state-accredited (non-ABA accredited) law schools had higher first-time pass rates than Thomas Jefferson:

(School, first-time passing percentage, #of takers/#of passers)

• San Joaquin College of Law  59%  20/34
• Lincoln Law School 47%  17/36 
• California Northern School of Law 45%  5/11 
• Glendale University College of Law 41% 7/17
• Empire College School of Law 31% 4/13

In fact, San Joaquin College of Law had nearly as many first-time passers (20) as Thomas Jefferson (29).

The statistics also reveal that Thomas Jefferson's pass rate for repeat takers was also 30% (39/131).  Thomas Jefferson's bar pass rate has been so bad recently (Feb 2017 - 24%; July 16 - 31%) that the school had substantially more repeat takers (131) than first-time takers (96).  (The only other ABA-Accredited Schools in California with more repeat takers than first-time takers are Golden Gate (76:70) and LaVerne (35:34).)

These abysmal bar pass rates actually mask the truly horrific success rates at TJSL.  Consider that, based on TJSL's 509 reports, 192 full-time 1Ls started in 2014, while 149 part-time students started at TJSL in 2013.   In the normal course of events, one would have expected most of these 341 students to have taken the July 2017 bar.  But with an attrition rate well over 40% for these students, there were fewer than 100 first time takers, and only 29 first-time passers.  Even assuming a handful of these 341 students might have taken and passed the February exam, when the first-time pass rate was 24%, the overall success rate (defined as graduating on time and passing the bar on the first try) for this cohort is likely below 10%.  Let's not even talk about how many TJSL students are finding jobs. 

Clearly, the ABA had very good reason for placing Thomas Jefferson School of Law on probation. With the caliber of  students currently enrolled at the law school, there is little hope for substantial improvement in TJSL's performance, especially since the top- performing students are likely to transfer out this summer to nearby schools like Cal Western.   TJSL has an uphill battle, to say the least, to stay open.  

 

 

More Proof of the Correlation Between LSAT Scores and Bar Passage - InfiLaw Edition

For those of you who are still questioning the correlation between LSAT Scores and Bar Passage Rate, I recently compiled some statistics on the three InfiLaw schools which are extremely telling.

I looked at the Median LSAT score of the admitted matriculated students for five classes (2010 to 2014) at all three InfiLaw schools (Arizona Summit, Charlotte and Florida Coastal) and then looked at the first-time bar passage rate of the graduates of these schools three years later (2013-2017) in the state where the schools were located, which was where the majority of the graduates took the bar exam.  

ARIZONA SUMMIT SCHOOL OF LAW - Arizona Bar Exam

Year Matriculated	Median LSAT	Year Graduated	First-time Pass Rate
2010	151	2013	70.1%
2011	148	2014	54.7%
2012	145	2015	41.6%
2013	144	2016	32.4%
2014	144	2017	28.5%

 

CHARLOTTE SCHOOL OF LAW - North Carolina Bar Exam

Year Matriculated	Median LSAT	Year Graduated	First-time Pass Rate
2010	149	2013	60.4%
2011	148	2014	57%
2012	146	2015	45.6%
2013	144	2016	42.6% est.*
2014	142	2017	29.1% est.*

 

FLORIDA COASTAL SCHOOL OF LAW - Florida Bar Exam

Year Matriculated	Median LSAT	Year Graduated	First-Time Pass Rate
2010	149	2013	68.6%
2011	147	2014	60.8%
2012	146	2015	61.6%
2013	144	2016	47.4%
2014	143	2017	41.7%

I will let these numbers speak for themselves.  But I can’t help noting one other statistic from the two administrations of the Bar Exam in Arizona this year.  In July 2017, Arizona Summit had 17 of its 94 repeaters pass for an 18% rate.  In February 2017, 19 of 110 Arizona Summit repeaters passed for a 17.2% rate.  So any claims from InfiLaw that their students have a high “ultimate” pass rate should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Note - I extracted this data either from the school’s ABA Standard 509 report or from the State Bar’s published statistics, or both.   

*These numbers are estimated because the North Carolina bar released only the February and July pass rate, not the exact number of takers and passers, so I had to estimate the ratio of summer takers to winter takers.  I assumed three July takers for each February taker in 2016 and a 1:1 ratio in 2017 based on the best information available.  The February 17 rate was 25% and the July 17 rate was 34.1%.

Some Thoughts on the July 2017 New York Bar Results

 

The New York Bar Examiners released the results of the July 2017 bar results by law school earlier this week.  Overall the first-time bar pass rate for ABA schools was up (86% compared to 83% last year), and most New York law schools saw a modest increase in their results.  But, as might be expected in a state with 15 ABA accredited law schools, there were some outliers. These high and low performing schools were featured in an article by Staci Zaretsky at Above the Law.  Staci noted that a couple of schools saw dramatic increases while a couple of others saw significant decreases in their first-time pass rate. She sought comments from the schools to explain why these results.  In this post, I examine possible explanations for the schools with the strongest and weakest performances.

The ATL article reports that Albany Law School's first-time bar passage rate in New York dropped from 82.7% in July 2016 to 71.3% in July 2017.  Whenever I see a law school's bar exam results go down, the first thing I do is go back and look at the admissions statistics from three years earlier, then compare them with the prior year.  More often than not, a significant drop in bar passage rate can be explained by a corresponding decline in admissions standards. Not surprisingly, when we look at the incoming credentials of students Albany admitted in 2014 compared to 2013, we see a sharp decline.  In 2013, the 75/50/25 LSAT scores at Albany were 156/153/150, meaning that, at most, 24% were at 149 or below, the point at which law students start to be at high risk of failing the bar. (See LSAT risk bands chart below)    In 2014, the numbers declined across the board to 154/151/148, suggesting that somewhere between 30-40% were at 149 or lower, and therefore in a high risk of failure category. Undergraduate GPAs also declined across the board from 3.59/3.38/3.13 in 2013 to 3.51/3.22/2.90 in 2014.  This significant drop in the capability of the admitted students easily explains the drop in bar passage rates three years later.

UNT Stumbles on First Bar Exam

The University of North Texas opened in the fall of 2014, enrolling 153 students.   In the fall of 2015, in their second year of operation, the school applied for provisional accreditation.  The ABA conducted a site visit in February 2016.  Initially, the accreditation committee recommended denying provisional accreditation.  One of the reasons the committee cited was the poor academic qualifications of the admitted students.  Indeed, the July 11, 2016 letter to the school outlining the recommendation stated that the “Law School is admitting applicants that do not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar.”  The LSAT and grade profile of the inaugural class (entering 2014) was very weak, especially at the bottom quartile:  151/147/143 and 3.32/3.05/2.69.  Troublingly, these credentials declined slightly in 2015 to 150/146/143 and 3.36/3.04/2.66 even as the enrollment shrank to 137.  Under great pressure and amid claims that UNT was a new kind of law school with innovative programs designed to ensure that students of modest ability would succeed at greater rates than other law schools, the ABA caved in and granted provisional accreditation to UNT in June 2017, enabling its first class of graduates to take the bar in Texas and other states in July 2017.

The results of the July 2017 bar exam have just been released by the Texas Board of Bar Examiners and UNT’s results demonstrate that the concerns the accreditation committee expressed back in 2016 were right on the money.   (But way to go Baylor - 93%!)  UNT finished dead last out of the 10 law schools in Texas, with a first-time pass rate of 59.3%, an inauspicious start to say the least. The school was 21.6% below the state average for Texas ABA schools (80.95%), and 19.8% below the first-time average for all ABA graduates (79.1%).   In fact, only 35 of 59 UNT takers passed, which raises the question of what happened to the other 94 students who started in the fall of 2014?  UPDATE - I found this press release from UNT that says they had 74 graduates, so apparently less than half of those who started at UNT graduated on time.  To put UNT’s bar pass rate in context, UNT was over 4% below the 9^th place school, Texas Southern.  Texas Southern was recently ordered to take remedial measures after the Accreditation Committee found that the law school was violating Standard 501 on admissions (among other standards).   Texas Southern’s entering class of 2014 had similar (actually, slightly worse) credentials as UNT, especially at the bottom quartile: 148/145/143 and 3.34/3.02/3.72.  Of 166 Texas Southern students who started in the fall of 2014, 110 took the Texas Bar in July and 70 passed, for a 63.64% rate.   So, whatever its faults, Texas Southern got more of its high-risk students to graduate and pass the bar than UNT did this summer.   Based on UNT’s performance, there is no evidence that UNT’s specially designed curriculum was particularly effective at preparing students for the bar exam.  With the class of 2018 having even weaker credentials than their inaugural class, UNT will need to dramatically step up its bar prep game if it hopes to improve its bar pass results next summer and get into compliance with ABA Standard 316.  

Many schools have tried, and failed, to find a magic formula to get students with 144 and below LSATs to pass the bar at even marginally acceptable rates.  The truth is that few students who perform at this level on the LSAT are likely to thrive in law school.  The safer bet to ensure a pass rate within 15% of the state average would be to raise the bottom quartile to 147, and take students with (slightly) lower LSATs only if they had significantly better than average college grades.  UNT did raise admission standards very slightly in 2016 to 151/147/144 and 3.39/3.05/2.72, but this means that at least a quarter of its students are still at extremely high risk of failure (144 and below), and many more are at very high risk.  (No word on the credentials of this fall's entering class.  If anyone knows, please share.) UNT should not receive full accreditation until it raises admission standards further or demonstrates that it can get a high percentage of high-risk students to complete their J.D. and pass the bar.   Although UNT is to be commended for keeping the cost of law school as low as possible, if over 40% of its graduates fail the bar, it's no bargain. 

Florida Coastal Survives Irma, But Can it Survive Its Latest Bar Results?

Just when things in Jacksonville were starting to return to normal after Hurricane Irma, another disaster has struck, and this time, it's man-made.  Like Irma, this disaster, popularly known as the Florida Bar Exam, the results of which were just released, wreaked havoc in Naples (Ave Maria, 51%) and Orlando (FAMU, 51%), but hit hardest in Jacksonville, home of Florida Coastal School of Law. 

Back in April 2014, when I gave my infamous Dean candidate presentation at Coastal, (see also here) I predicted that the abysmal class that had just been admitted in 2014 (LSAT 147/143/140 and UGPA 3.20/2.93/2.63) would surely have less than a 50% bar pass rate in 2017. Unfortunately for Florida Coastal’s students, I was right.  On the July administration, 63 of 132 first- time takers passed, for a 47.7% rate, the lowest among Florida’s 11 schools and 23.6% below the state average.  This follows Coastal’s disastrous February 2017 bar results where only 12 of 48 first time takers passed (25%). Combined, for the year, the school’s graduates had a 2017 first-time pass rate in Florida of 41.7% (75 of 180), down from 2016’s already woeful rate of 47.4% (99 of 209) in Florida. 

NCBE Names Judith Gunderson President And CEO

The National Council of Bar Examiners has named Judy Gunderson President and CEO, succeeding Erica Moeser.  Gundersen was previously NCBE Director of Test Operations.  She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School.  Moeser, who resigned after 23 years at the helm,  created significant controversy when she argued that declining bar pass rates might be due to having a pool of "less able" test takers in recent years.  

An ABA Standard on Employment Outcomes? Part 4.

As described in previous posts, ABA law schools have been consistently graduating many more students than there are available law jobs, and entry-level salaries have decreased or remained stagnant over the past 16 years. During the same period, the cost of the J.D. degree at most law schools has increased substantially. The graduate employment outcomes at most ABA-accredited law schools are robust. However, some schools have been consistently placing fewer than 40 or 50% of their graduates in law jobs at 9-10 months after graduation.

The current ABA standards on admissions and bar passage do not constrain law schools from pursuing admissions policies that minimize reductions in enrollments without regard to the impact on employment outcomes. Many of the schools with persistently weak employment outcomes have reduced admissions criteria as law school applications have declined steeply over the past six years. The predictable result is that bar passage rates have fallen, and the schools’ graduates’ employment prospects are further diminished.

In my last post, I laid out my case for adopting an ABA employment outcomes standard, contending that it will better ensure that law graduates realize the promise of the J.D. program, and cover the gap in the current standards that allows schools to pursue admissions policies that ignore graduate law job employment rates.

I can anticipate three key arguments against the idea.

1. An Employment Outcomes Standard is Paternalistic

It may be argued that the market of law school applicants, not an accrediting agency, is the most efficient regulator of law school enrollments. Indeed, the law school applicant market has responded to the decline in the legal employment market, as evidenced by the sharp decrease in applications over the past six years. The argument continues, if a law school provides a legal education of sufficient quality to prepare students for admission to the bar and the practice of law, it should be no concern of the accreditor whether graduates of the school can actually use the degree. As long as applicants have access to complete and accurate data on a law school’s graduate employment outcomes, they can make informed decisions on whether law school is a good investment. It would be paternalistic to make that decision for them no matter how remote the odds of obtaining legal employment with a degree from a given school.

To assert that the applicant market rather than the accreditor is the more efficient regulator of law school enrollments fails to recognize that the higher education applicant market is anything but normally functioning. The market is not efficient in the case of higher education because the transactions involved create large external costs. The vast majority of law school students borrow to attend. Schools receive payment of their students’ borrowed tuition dollars up front and without assuming any of the risk that any individual student will be unable to repay her debt. The federal government makes and students obtain Title IV loans to cover the full cost of tuition at an accredited school without regard to the risk of non-repayment. The availability of loans without underwriting feeds an optimism bias on the part of student borrowers, and artificially fuels enrollments that would not occur in a private student loan market. The dysfunction of the legal education marketplace seemingly is confirmed by the fact that students continue to enroll in and pay very high tuition amounts at schools with persistently very weak legal employment rates notwithstanding substantial transparency in law graduate employment outcomes. If anything, a school’s persistently weak legal employment rates indicate that the employment market lacks confidence in the quality of the law school’s program, whether it be the quality of the faculty, students, academic program, career services, or some combination of these or other factors. Also, the paternalism argument fails to acknowledge the interest of taxpayers and other student loan borrowers in graduate employment outcomes because they foot the costs of the unpaid student loans.

2. Revised ABA Admissions and Bar Passage Standards Will Effectively Address the Law Graduate Employment Problem

It may also be argued that the law graduate employment problem facing legal education, if there is one, is that the number of law school matriculants has not declined commensurate with the number of applicants. As a result, the conventional qualifications of the matriculant pool have declined substantially. The solution to this problem is stricter admissions and bar passage standards, not regulating law schools based on employment outcomes. In fact, the ABA has done exactly this by moving to tighten the admissions and bar passage standards. Perhaps the revised standards would significantly reduce enrollments and the number of law school graduates will more closely align with available law jobs, making an employment outcomes standard superfluous.

Has Florida Coastal Finally Hit Bottom? And Can It Dig Its Way Out?

Earlier this week, Florida released the February 2017 bar exam results for first-time takers from Florida ABA-Accredited Law Schools.  Florida Coastal was the lowest by a considerable margin.  Twelve of forty-eight first-time takers passed, for a 25% rate.  Florida Coastal thus joins both its sister schools with the dubious distinction of having a 25% pass rate on its home state bar exam.  Charlotte Law grads also had a 25% pass rate (18 of 72) on the February bar, just edging Arizona Summit’s historically bad performance on the July 2016 bar in Arizona, where 18 of 73 first-time takers passed for a 24.6% rate.  (Arizona's February bar results will be released May 12.)

Florida Coastal remains the sole InfiLaw school which has not been placed on probation by the ABA, and according to an e-mail I received on March 27 from Dean Scott DeVito, “Florida Coastal has not received any information from the ABA that would indicate that the ABA is considering placing Florida Coastal on probation. Nor has the ABA provided Florida Coastal with any indication that it is thinking of beginning proceedings whose outcome could be probation.”  

Of course, that e-mail was sent before these results came out, so perhaps Dean DeVito spoke too soon.  But assuming Dean DeVito’s answer to still be accurate, my question is: why isn’t the ABA considering placing Florida Coastal on probation?

More Bad Bar Results from Charlotte School of Law

 

Last week, Charlotte School of Law had a pretty good week. Dean Jay Conison was fired and returned to the faculty, but since he wasn't assigned any classes this semester, he has no actual responsibilities. He reportedly was wandering the halls asking other faculty members if they had anything for him to do.  Dean Conison was replaced by faculty member Scott Broyles. Dean Broyles announced that students who had received federal loans for the 2016-2017 school year would have their spring loans disbursed to them.  And the ABA announced that it was not going to evaluate Charlotte's teach-out plan since the school had not determined that it was actually planning to close.  

But this week brings more bad news.  Charlotte was just informed by the North Carolina Board of Bar Examiners of the results on the February 2017 bar, and they were not pretty.  Charlotte's first-time pass rate was an abysmal 25%.   (18 of 72) For those counting on repeat takers to bring Charlotte's pathetic bar pass rates within striking distance of the ABA Standard, the February results don't look very promising.  Charlotte's pass rate for repeat takers was a mere 18.1%. (17 of 94) The overall rates in NC for February, significantly lowered by Charlotte's performance, were 44.4% for first time takers and 31.7% for repeaters.  Not including Charlotte, the state wide rate was 52.6% for first-timers (90/171) and 36.3% for repeaters (102/281).  In other words, Charlotte dragged down the state wide passage rates 8.2% and 4.7% , respectively, but still managed to be more than 15% below the state average, as they have now been for the last four administrations of the exam (the two before that they were only 14% below the state average).  

Last month it was reported that Charlotte was essentially paying its students to defer taking the July bar. In fact, in an audio recording leaked to the local public radio station, the Assistant Dean for Academic Success Odessa All could be heard explaining to other faculty members that if the school hadn't paid students to not take a previous bar exam, the school's bar pass rate on that exam would have been in the 20s.  Apparently, she knew what she was talking about.   

Although the July bar pass rate is typically much higher than the February bar pass rate, there is little reason to be optimistic about Charlotte's prospects for the July 2017 bar.  The current class, enrolled in 2013 and 2014, is among the weakest classes in American law school history by entrance credentials, and has been further weakened by academic transfers from the top of the class.  With the exodus of many of Charlotte's top students this semester after the double whammy of being placed on probation and losing federal funds in the fall, it is hard to envision how Charlotte's remaining students will pass at much more than a 30% rate, if that.  And Charlotte has also lost, or will likely lose this summer, its strongest 1Ls and 2Ls, making it unlikely that it will every get near a 75% ultimate bar pass rate for the foreseeable future.   Charlotte's only hope seems to be converting to non-profit status and affiliating with a University.  Reportedly they are in talks with an an unnamed university in the Northeast.  I'm not sure why any self-respecting university would want to affiliate with a law school with Charlotte's reputation, but perhaps Sterling Partners has made them an offer they can't refuse, as discussed in this recent ABA Journal article.

Full Disclosure -  Regular readers will recall that I was representing a faculty member in a wrongful termination dispute with Charlotte School of Law. I am pleased to report that that dispute was settled amicably.  However, I have been contacted by another faculty member about representation of a similar nature and will likely be taking on that individual as a client.  

 

UPDATED:  See the second paragraph for additional stats on the Feb NC Bar exam

Arizona Summit Placed on Probation by the ABA

Yesterday, the ABA announced that it was placing Arizona Summit Law School on probation. (See ABA Journal story here.)  Arizona Summit is following on the heels of its sister school, Charlotte School of Law, which was placed on probation back in November.  The ABA gave similar reasons for the action, namely, non-compliance with ABA Standards 301(a), 308(a), 309(b), 501(b) and Interpretation 501-1 and 501-2.  The ABA also noted the poor graduation rates (high attrition rates) and bar passage outcomes at the school. 

This action could very well result in the closure of Arizona Summit.  Arizona Summit had, as of December,  381 students, including 143 1Ls (down from 4501Ls in 2011 and 447 in 2012).  It is very likely that most students in good academic standing will try to transfer out this summer.  No student wants to be at a school that might lose its accreditation.  While those with just one year left are likely to have few options other than to remain, the bulk of the 1Ls and part time students who are less than halfway through their programs will try to leave.  Those with good grades and a reasonable prospect of passing the bar will be accepted at other law schools and will transfer.  The students that will be left behind will be the “worst of the worst” who are extremely likely to fail the bar, making it unlikely that Arizona Summit will be able to achieve the necessary improvements in their bar passage rate (Arizona Summit's most recent pass rates have been in the 20s and 30s).   If the top third or more of the class transfer, there will be virtually no students left who are likely to pass the bar on the their first attempt.  Meanwhile, it will be very difficult to recruit incoming students for the fall semester and virtually impossible to attract students with significantly better entrance credentials, which is what would be required to get back into compliance with ABA Standards and avoid losing accreditation.  Arizona Summit's 2016 entering class had an abysmal 148/143/140 and 3.31/2.96/2.55, meaning that the vast majority of the class is at very high or extremely high risk of failure.  Indeed, it is likely that many of the students already admitted who may have expressed an intent to matriculate or put down a deposit will change their mind.  Prospective students accepted to any other law school that is not on probation are likely to go there instead, and those only admitted to Arizona Summit may have second thoughts about attending at all.  The combined effect of huge numbers of transfers and a dramatic decrease in new matriculants will be a substantial reduction in revenues for Arizona Summit, which is already badly hurting after multiple years of rapidly dwindling revenues.  Based on recent history at other InfiLaw schools, I would expect the school's Dean to declare a Reduction in Force very soon, followed by firing half or more of the faculty at the conclusion of the spring semester.  Arizona Summit faculty members would be well-advised to start updating their CVs.

One interesting question raised by this action is whether this might cause Bethune-Cookman to reconsider its recently signed affiliation agreement with Arizona Summit.  It is hard to imagine that Bethune-Cookman would have entered into the agreement if they were aware that the school might be placed on probation in the near future, but it is also hard to imagine that Arizona Summit's President Don Lively wasn't aware that probation was a distinct possibility based on ongoing communications with the ABA.  This raises the specter that Arizona Summit failed to disclose this likely prospect to Bethune-Cookman, which would probably be a valid basis for voiding the agreement.  Whatever Bethune-Cookman's leadership was thinking when it signed this agreement, the ABA's determination that the school is not meeting the most basic requirements of the ABA Standards should give them pause about whether they should be encouraging their graduates to attend such an institution.  

 

While Arizona Summit has been among the law schools with the most exploitative admission practices in the country for the last few years, they are far from the only law school to take advantage of students with little or no chance for success.  I expect the ABA to take action against other predatory schools in the near future.  Thomas Cooley and Thomas Jefferson would be my candidates for the next schools most likely to be sanctioned.  (See comments for my reasoning.)

 

UPDATE:  One other issue raised by this latest announcement is this: When was Arizona Summit first informed that it was out of compliance with ABA Standards?  Readers will recall that Charlotte was disqualified from federal loans by the DOE in part because of failure to disclose to current and prospective students that it was out of compliance with ABA Standards in a timely manner, an omission which the DOE considered to be a violation of the school's fiduciary duty.  If Arizona Summit's road to probation followed a similar trajectory as Charlotte's then they were likely informed by the ABA several months ago that they were out of compliance (or at least that the ABA was considering finding them out of compliance), but it does not appear that the school did anything to alert prospective or current students to this possibility.  

 

 

 

A Message to the ABA House of Delegates: Approve ABA Standard 316 on Bar Passage

The ABA House of Delegates vote on the proposed new bar passage standard for law schools, ABA Standard 316, at the ABA mid-year meeting this week in Miami. This is an enormously important vote with significant repercussions for legal education and the legal profession.   I strongly support the proposed standard and urge those with a vote to approve it.  

Since 2010, law school applications have dropped about 40%.  In an effort to fill classes, the overwhelming majority of law schools, even our most selective institutions, have lowered their admissions standards.  This has meant that it is much easier to get into an elite law school than it has been in decades.  As top 20 schools have accepted students that, in a more competitive era, used to go to top 50 schools, top 50 schools are now admitting students that used to go to the schools ranked from 50-100.  In turn, these second-tier schools are taking the kinds of students who used to attend third-tier schools, and third-tier schools are actively recruiting students with grades and test scores that would have landed them at an unranked fourth-tier school five years ago.  But for the fourth-tier schools, those in the bottom quarter by selectivity, there was no lower-tier of schools from which to cherry pick students.  These schools, many of which characterize themselves as “opportunity” schools, were already admitting many moderate to high risk students and had little, if any, room to go lower.  Their admissions standards, in most cases, used to be carefully and honestly calibrated to admit only students with a reasonable chance of success in law school on the bar.  In 2010, with perhaps a couple of exceptions, almost all ABA-Accredited law schools were complying in reasonably good faith with ABA Standard for Admissions 501, which mandates that a law school “shall not admit applicants who do not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its educational program and being admitted to the bar.” Because law schools, by and large, followed this stricture, a very high percentage of students who were admitted to law school completed their degree and passed the bar.   So, in 2013 (when most students who started in 2010 took the bar), 81% of graduates of ABA-Accredited Law Schools passed the bar exam on their first try.  Even in California, infamous for the difficulty of its bar exam, 71% of ABA grads passed on their first attempt.

Sadly, it is no longer the case that almost all law schools are complying in good faith with Standard 501.  Dozens of law schools are now admitting substantial numbers of students at very high or extremely high risk of failure.  As a direct result of significant declines in admission standards, law school attrition rates are up, and law school bar passage rates are way down.  At a few of the least selective law schools, fewer than one in three students who start law school can expect to graduate and pass the bar the on the first try, and many will never pass, leaving them saddled with huge debt and little prospect of earning enough to recoup their investment.   That is unacceptable in a profession that purports to hold itself to high ethical standards, and it fuels the increasingly widespread perception that law school is a scam. 

The ABA Standards on Admission and Bar Passage are supposed to work in concert.  The Admission standard is a non-exploitation standard. It is designed to ensure that students without a reasonable chance of success are not taken advantage of by schools willing to take their tuition.  The Bar Passage standard is designed to ensure that students get what they are promised and what they are paying for – a legal education that adequately prepares them for the practice of law and gives them the knowledge and skills required to earn admission to the bar.   

If a law school admits only applicants who are capable of earning a J.D. and passing the bar, and the law school is providing those students a sound legal education, designed, at least in part, to prepare students to pass the bar, then a school should have a bar pass rate where a substantial majority of students pass the bar.  Based on my analysis of recent pass rates for repeat takers, a law school with a 60% first time pass rate will be able to meet the new standard of 75% passing within two years of graduation.  Every ABA-Accredited law school in America should have at least a 60% first time bar pass rate.  But right now, many don’t. And that is why there is significant opposition to the new standard.  Nearly half the law school Deans in the country recently signed a letter asking the ABA to hold off on the new standard.  Many of these Deans have good reason to be worried.  The Deans know that the weakest class ever admitted to most law schools was the class of 2014, the class about to graduate and take the bar this summer.  And at many schools, the classes of 2015 and 2016 were just as weak or weaker.  Based on the results on the bar exams in 2015 and 2016, and the strength of the classes in the pipeline, between 20 to 30 law schools will likely have a first-time bar pass rate in 2017 of below 60%, placing them in jeopardy of not making 75% within two years.   

The fact that a number of law schools are likely to be unable to meet the standard is not a reason to defer or withdraw the standard.  The standard needs to be made tougher immediately because the current standard has proven completely ineffective as a means of regulating either admissions or the quality of legal education.  In fact, while bar passage rates have dropped sharply over the past three years, with many law schools posting first-time pass rates well below 50%, not a single ABA-Accredited law school has been found to be out of compliance with the current Standard 316 during that time.

The ABA has recently started to crack down on law schools with exploitative admissions standards, ordering specific remedial action at Ave Maria, publicly censuring Valparaiso, and placing Charlotte on probation for non-compliance with Standard 501. In addition, the ABA declined initially to grant provisional accreditation to UNT in part over concern about non-compliance with Standard 501.  But these actions have not deterred many other schools from admitting students with similar credentials to those that the ABA has found did not meet Standard 501.  In fact, as detailed in a just-released update to Law School Transparency’s State of Legal Education, there are more law schools than ever admitting 25% or more of very high and extremely high risk students.   This suggests that until there is an effective bar passage standard, the risk of continued exploitative admissions practices remains high.

In their last ditch effort to derail the passage of this new standard, the Deans have cited the results of the July 2016 California bar exam, noting that schools with strong admission standards and good reputations, like UC Hastings and Chapman, had first-time pass rates in the 50s, which would place them in jeopardy of not meeting the new standard.  But what the Deans fail to mention is that graduates of a law school with much lower admission standards, Cal Western, had a first time pass rate of 61%.  Cal Western’s entering class of 2013 had an LSAT profile of 154/151/148 at the 75^th/50^th and 25^th percentile.  Cal Western’s results prove that a school can admit a reasonable number of high risk students (but not very high or extremely high) and still achieve respectable results on even the toughest bar exam. Incidentally, Cal Western has a very diverse student body, with 36% of students in 2013 identifying as racial minorities.   Dire predictions that the new bar passage standard will do grave harm to efforts to diversify the profession are unsupported. 

The exploitation of college graduates who dream of becoming lawyers, but have no demonstrated aptitude for the study of law, needs to stop.  Law school is not for everyone.  Law schools should admit only students with reasonable capacity for the study of law, and give them an education which gives them a strong chance to pass the bar.  If they can't do this, they don't deserve to be accredited by the ABA. 

 

 

The Overlooked Bar Passage Denominator

    As I discussed in an earlier post, to understand bar passage problems requires more than a consideration of the preparation of the applicants for admission. If the exam becomes more difficult or its grading becomes stricter, the bar passage rate will decrease even if the quality of the applicants stays the same. Even David Frakt acknowledges this. See Some Thoughts on the California Bar Exam. Between the two of us, we have raised concern that both Florida and California have done exactly that—made the bar examination more difficult.

    The purpose of this post is to add at least one additional state to this list: Colorado. Professor Scott Johns has posted an article on SSRN that compares the results students from his school, the University of Denver, have seen on the Colorado bar exam over the last years. See Scott Johns, Testing the Testers: The National Conference of Bar Examiners' LSAT Claim and a Roller Coaster Bar Exam Ride. After a particularly strong presentation about the statistical methodology he used in his study, he showed that the results on the Colorado bar demonstrate that it has become harder. The basic fact established in his study is that the students entering the University of Denver have become stronger on the objective measurements (particularly the LSAT) over the last years, but their bar passage rates have nevertheless declined. As he states:

        As a law school that serves in a U[niform] B[ar] E[xamination] jurisdiction, we have a unique opportunity to evaluate the N[ational] C[onfrence of] B[ar] E[xaminers]’s primary claim that recent lower first-time bar passage rates are the consequence of declines in LSAT scores in contrast to more successful bar passage years. Based on empirical evidence, we do not find statistical support for the NCBE’s claim with respect to LSAT scores because those scores have remained relatively consistent (or slightly better) since 2008 (and since advent of the UBE in Colorado in 2012), and, yet, first-time bar passage rates have fallen for our law school. Simply put, the NCBE’s claim is unfounded, based on our empirical evidence.

Id. at 1.

    The fact that Colorado is a Uniform Bar Examination state is significant. It is not an unfair assumption that the declining success among applicants taking the UBE around the country (now, half of the states plus D.C. use the UBE) has a source that is in addition to changes in the student population being admitted to U.S. law schools. Some of the declining percentage of success on bar exams must be attributed to the denominator changing as bar exams have become more difficult to pass.