Bar Passage Rates Research Articles

Are Law Schools Cream-Skimming to Bolster Their Bar Exam Pass Rates? A Multilevel Regression Approach to Estimate How Attrition and Transfer Rates Affect Bar Passage

Law schools are held accountable on many fronts to achieve and maintain high bar passage rates. While the course of legal education itself, along with various interventions, is a key driver of bar exam performance, Bahadur et al. (2021) suggests that obscure institutional practices might be inflating institutional bar passage performance. Such practices could include recruitment and admission of transfer students and academic attrition. We examine this hypothesis to assess the influence of both attrition and transfer on law schools’ bar passage differential using fixed-effects and between-within models. We also utilize Poisson regression to explore the effect of geographical proximity to other law schools on transfer rates. We find that, on average, neither attrition nor transfer activity substantively affect bar passage performance, and that although geographic proximity to other schools is related to transfer rates, this relationship does not result in notable differences in bar passage.

STOP THE COUNT; The Historically Discriminatory Nature of the Bar Exam Requires Adjustments in How Bar Passage Rates are Reported, If at All

STOP THE COUNT; The Historically Discriminatory Nature of the Bar Exam Requires Adjustments in How Bar Passage Rates are Reported, If at All

Examining the Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Bias in the Uniform Bar Examination

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). We find that higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students in a law school’s entering class are associated with lower first-time bar passage rates for that school in its reported UBE jurisdictions three years later. This effect persists after controlling for other potentially causal factors like undergraduate grade-point average (UGPA), law school admission test (LSAT) score, geographic region, or law school tier. Moreover, the results are statistically robust at a p-value of 0.01 (indicating just a 1% chance that the results are due to random variation in the data). Because these are school-level results, they may not fully account for relevant factors identifiable only in student-level data. As a result, we argue that follow-up study using data relating to individual students is necessary to fully understand why the UBE produces racially and ethnically disparate results.

Reexamining Relative Bar Performance as a Function of Non-Linearity, Heteroscedasticity, and a New Independent Variable

One might think that if a law school’s graduates do better on the bar exam than their credentials on entering law school would have predicted, the law school’s faculty must have done a good job. Indeed, some scholarship makes that claim. But it is empirically untrue. What actually yields such superficially impressive results is not pedagogy but rather prestidigitation. When law schools manipulate their matriculant pools via academic attrition and transfer, that sleight of hand improves their bar performance rates. This article reveals the math behind the magic. We challenge the assertion that effective pedagogy is the primary driver of a school’s overperformance on the bar examination by demonstrating the model misspecification of the linear regressions in support of that assertion. Our analyses, based on original code written for the program Mathematica, generate regression equations that clearly illustrate the error of applying linear regression to heteroscedastic, non-linear data, and the bias in favor of schools with mid-range LSAT and UGPA matriculants this misapplication causes. Over and under performance on the bar examination, relative to the entering credentials of a school’s matriculants, can be explained in large part by combining the institutions’ academic attrition and net transfer rates into a single independent variable. We demonstrate the marked difference in the value of this variable between schools identified as overperforming and those identified as underperforming their matriculation credentials on the bar examination. The article concludes by emphasizing the harm to legal education that stems from the unwarranted attribution of bar success to pedagogy and especially the harm this causes to untenured academic support faculty. We also raise the question of whether ABA standard 316-mandating a certain level of bar passage by law schools’ graduates-is ethically and morally supportable given the ability of schools to manipulate bar passage rates by modulating academic attrition and transfer rates.

Curricular Change in Legal Education

This article surveys basic changes in legal education from 1973 to 2017-2018, using a comparison of the sizes of the student body with the professoriate, and changes in the allocation of faculty resources over this period. It offers evidence on the reasons for declining bar passage rates and the decline in preparation for business and transactional law practice. The paper documents law school enrollments over this period. In summary, student enrollments have been on a roller coaster, and now have declined to 1973 levels after a 40% increase. At the same time, faculty numbers have increased by 70%. While this has resulted in more favorable faculty-student ratios, bar passage rates nationally have declined from 82% to 72%. This is a classic picture of a failing industry, which high fixed costs due to the fixed cost of tenured faculty and cyclical revenues, forced to raise tuition to support what has become a bloated faculty. It also raises questions of whether declining bar passage rates are caused by the declining academic credentials law school applicants, or modern failures in teaching. I will not cover the blame placed on U.S. News ratings or ABA changes (expansion) in costly curricular requirements, so ably covered by Professor Victor Gold. The study documents that resources have been diverted (disproportionately) from foundational and required courses to more academic and “boutique” courses. Some of this may be attributed to the increased number of law faculty members who hold advanced degrees in other fields, which may divert part of their teaching to courses with an affinity for their graduate training, rather than professional preparation. The proliferation of such courses, and of courses driven by political and cultural choices dilutes any focus on preparation for the practice of law or bar passage. It also sends a message that professional preparation is no more important than the research interests of various teachers, or than their interest in “social justice.”

Analyzing Pathways to the J.D. with National Student Clearinghouse Data

The lack of diversity in legal education and the profession is a well-established fact. Data and rich commentary from law school scholars clearly illustrate barriers to entry for historically underrepresented groups. Yet, we continue to see persistent gaps in law school and bar admission among ethnic minorities—particularly, Black and Latinx students. And although information on first-generation and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups is harder to obtain, we also find inequitable access for these students where data are available. Although discussions of law school diversity necessitate examination of students’ racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, they also require an analysis of the pathways students must navigate to obtain law school admission. Conceptually, the law school admission process is depicted as a single, linear and uniform path for all students; in reality, it is a series of paths that can lead to disparate outcomes depending on the student and the route taken. Observing these pathways and where they lead can help us better understand how students of all backgrounds come to access legal education, and how we might improve these paths to advance diversity and equity in law school admission and enrollment. At a time when our nation is embroiled in social unrest, racial injustice, and political discord, ensuring that law school graduating classes reflect the diversity of society is even more paramount. Utilizing data from the National Student Clearinghouse (“Clearinghouse”) and the American Bar Association (ABA), this paper describes undergraduate pathways to the J.D. and how those pathways lead to different law school destinations. We use Clearinghouse data to conduct a retrospective analysis of the 2017-2018 cohort of law students and graduates to examine their demographics, undergraduate majors, undergraduate institution types, and educational experiences before and during law school. To examine law school destinations, we utilize ABA data to categorize law schools based on first-time bar passage rates, scholarship generosity, law job placement, and student retention. Each school is scored based on its combined performance on these metrics, then grouped according to its relationship to the mean score. Hereafter, these law school groupings are described as follows: Above Average, Just Above Average, Just Below Average, and Below Average. Law schools that have since closed are grouped separately. Part I of the report disaggregates and summarizes the cohort by student demographics, pathways to law school, and law school destination. Part II examines law school destinations by student demographics and pathways. Finally, Part III discusses the results and their implications, offering suggestions for broadening pathways to law school and improving outcomes for underserved groups who successfully enroll.

QUANTIFYING THE IMPACT OF MATRICULANT CREDENTIALS & ACADEMIC ATTRITION RATES ON BAR EXAM SUCCESS AT INDIVIDUAL SCHOOLS 99:1 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. Online 1 (forthcoming October 2021)

A scatterplot displaying bar passage rates vs. academic attrition, across all law schools, suggests that bar passage rates and academic attrition rates are not positively correlated, and may even be slightly negatively correlated. This means that according to the data in the scatterplot there appears to be a slight trend where the higher an institution’s academic attrition rate, the lower the bar passage rate. Such global statistical observations obfuscate the true relationship between attrition and bar passage at individual schools. Academic attrition rates have a significant positive impact on an individual school’s bar passage rate. There are confounding variables which prevent us from seeing the true relationship between academic attrition and bar passage rates in the global scatterplot. This brief article quantifies the impact of academic attrition on bar passage for individual schools. We tangibly demonstrate the impact of academic attrition and matriculant credentials on bar passage at individual schools.

Legal education's difficulty with “desirable difficulties” and its impact on student success and bar passage rates.

Legal education's difficulty with “desirable difficulties” and its impact on student success and bar passage rates.

Organizing a Business Law Department Within a Law School

This article argues that legal education needs to get its act together by getting organized. Unlike the rest of the university, law schools are over a century behind in recognizing the need for the greater organization that departments can provide. Specialization, which did not exist many years ago, has become so universal that some members of any faculty either cannot understand or care about, much less govern wisely, what goes on around them. Ignorance is compounded by non-professional agendas driven by ideologies and interdisciplinary interests. One probable result of disorganization in legal education has been a decline in bar passage rates and enrollments. This article provides a road map to a cure.

Legal Education's Difficulty with “Desirable Difficulties” and its Impact on Student Success and Bar Passage Rates

Legal education has difficulty with desirable difficulties. Despite priding ourselves on providing an infamously rigorous experience, many structures in legal education create incentives for students to avoid methods that would optimize learning and disincentives from using methods that seem more cognitively taxing. For instance, our obsession with summative assessment leads students to believe that testing is meant only to assess the student's ability, knowledge, and aptitude. Students thus postpone, and ultimately reject altogether, using testing as a learning event because they cannot fathom the idea of self-testing unless they are fully prepared for the real exam. In this paper, I explore these and other phenomena that lead law students to avoid the benefits of describable difficulties. I also describe the Academic Excellence Program at Florida International University College of Law, which seeks to unteach these phenomena, and I then discuss what obstacles still exist and how to start addressing them.

Teaching Social Justice Through 'Hip Hop and the Law'

This article queries whether it is possible to teach law students about social justice through a course on hip hop and its connection to and critique of the law. We argue, in these dedicated pages of the North Carolina Central Law Review, that yes, hip hop and the law offer an excellent opportunity to teach law students about social justice. But, why publish an article advocating that national law schools offer a legal education course on Hip Hop and the Law, or more specifically, Hip Hop & the American Constitution? Of what benefit might a course be that explores hip hop lyrics and hip hop artists’ critique of United States law and policy? In an era where bar passage rates are slipping across the nation and law schools are struggling to attract students to their hallways and classrooms, is there space and time in a law school curriculum to offer a class on hip hop and its critique of the law? I argue here that time and space must be created to offer law students an opportunity to embrace hip hop’s critique of the U.S. Constitution and its critique of the laws and policies that have always been developed, since the nation’s founding, from the top down — that is to say, developed from an elite, straight, wealthy white male perspective. Here is why: Hip hop music and culture have conquered the world. Born in New York City (the Bronx), this quintessential American cultural phenomenon has captured the hearts and minds of two generations of U.S. residents as well as enthusiasts across the globe. This hip hop takeover, ne revolution, is so recognized in literature and culture, that it bears no further explanation. Suffice it to say, that today, the U.S. law professoriate is infused with a stirring population of hip hop aficionados. Further, current law students are overwhelmingly individuals that know, love, and are deeply impacted by hip hop music, art, and culture. Additionally, hip hop music, at its core, offers a provocative critique of United States law, particularly the criminal justice system. This critique, offered from the bottom up — that is to say, from the perspective of those that have been historically oppressed and voiceless — presents a knowing appraisal of how the law as promulgated, practiced, and enforced in the United States harshly impacts and does positive injury to communities of color and people living in poverty in the United States. Today, more than ever, those that teach, enforce, and practice the law should be paying attention to the critique emanating from faces at the bottom of the well, particularly from hip hop faces. Further, this article seeks to contribute meaningfully to the existing literature and debate that considers and addresses the inclusion of race and inequality within the legal education landscape and law school curriculum.

Leveraging Noncognitive Skills to Foster Bar Exam Success: An Analysis of the Efficacy of the Bar Passage Program at FIU Law

With falling bar exam passage rates, many law schools have implemented bar exam preparation programs but are still struggling to improve bar exam passage rates. The increase in law school matriculants with LSAT scores below 150 had a statistically significant negative correlation with national mean MBE scores, and with the new ABA standard 316 mandating a 75% bar passage rate, law schools are facing mounting pressure to ensure that their graduates are ready and able to pass their bar examination expeditiously or risk losing ABA accreditation. Law schools have been frustrated by the lack of results with their internal bar exam preparation programs. They often struggle to identify why their students continue to fail the bar exam. Not much has been written about the theory, design, implementation, and evaluation of an effective law school bar exam preparation program. This paper will discuss each of those areas with the goal of helping law schools achieve an important milestone: increasing bar passage rates for their students and maintaining ABA accreditation. This paper will discuss what has caused a decrease in bar exam scores nationwide and how the bar preparation program at the FIU College of Law has counteracted declining pass rates. The focus of the bar prep program at FIU will be discussed in detail, so other law schools may utilize those same concepts.

Supplemental Material for Legal Education’s Difficulty with “Desirable Difficulties” and its Impact on Student Success and Bar Passage Rates

Supplemental Material for Legal Education’s Difficulty with “Desirable Difficulties” and its Impact on Student Success and Bar Passage Rates

A Blueprint for Using Assessments to Achieve Learning Outcomes and Improve Students’ Learning

For over a decade, there has been agreement among legal educators that assessments are a critical tool to improve students’ learning. We are beginning to understand that the types of assessments we use have the greatest influence on how and what students learn. As a result of recent ABA accreditation requirements, there is now a scramble in law schools to adopt assessments that improve students’ learning and bar passage rates so as to satisfy these new requirements. Nevertheless, there has been no clear methodology to assist doctrinal faculty in creating an effective assessment program. After twenty-seven years of developing assessment programs that have improved students’ learning and bar passage rates, this article is an attempt to provide faculty and administrators a blueprint for incorporating an effective assessment program. The article is divided into four parts. Part one recounts how the assessments the author has used over the years have evolved to become an assessment program to help students improve their learning skills, perform better in law school, and pass the bar exam. Part two describes how to design assessments that relate to course learning objectives and help students in developing critical analytical and self-learning skills. Part three describes the difference between general and individual feedback, explains why individual feedback is the most important feature of an effective assessment program, and enumerates the characteristics of effective individual feedback. Part four includes specific steps that faculty, administrations, and academic achievement professionals should take in order to create an assessment program to improve students’ self-learning and analytical skills.

Building a Better Bar Exam

In the wake of declining bar passage numbers and limited placement options for law grads, a new bar exam has emerged: the UBE. Drawn to an allusive promise of portability, thirty-six U.S. jurisdictions have adopted the UBE. I predict that in a few years’ time, the UBE will be administered in all states and U.S. territories. The UBE has snowballed from an idea into the primary gateway for entry into the practice of law. But the UBE is not a panacea that will solve the bar passage problems that U.S. law schools face. Whether or not to adopt a uniform exam is no longer the question. Now that the UBE has firmly taken root, the question to be answered is: “What can be done to make sure that the UBE does less harm than good?” This Article will, in four parts, examine the meteoric rise and spread of the UBE and the potential costs of its quick adoption. Part I will survey the gradual move away from state law exams to the jurisdictionally neutral UBE. Part II will identify correlations between recent changes to the multistate exams and a stark national decline in bar passage rates. Part III will address the limitations of the UBE, including the misleading promise of score portability and the consequences of forum shopping. Part IV will propose additional measures that can coexist with the UBE to counterbalance its limitations to make a better bar exam for law graduates and the clients they will serve.

A Statistical Exploration: Analyzing the Relationship (If Any) between Externship Participation and Bar Exam Scores

Relatively recently, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) claims that experiential legal education might negatively harm bar passage performance. Nevertheless, experiential learning opportunities, and, in particular, externships, are some of the most meaningful educational opportunities available to law school students. That raises an important empirical question, given the increasing emphasis of legal educators in providing more experiential learning opportunities for law students and the widespread participation of students, especially in externship programs, as one type of experiential learning opportunity. Do externship experiences have demonstrable value in positively influencing bar exam outcomes, or, as the NCBE seems to suggest, do externships negatively impact bar exam outcomes? This article walks step-by-step through the process of evaluating whether externship participation at our law school has any statistical relationship to bar exam scores, particularly for academically-struggling law school students. Initially, using longitudinal bar passage data over a three-year period, this study observes that students participating in externships positively outperform non-participants in bar passage rates, particularly for those students that struggled academically in law school. However, based on further statistical evaluation using regression analysis, this article finds that externship participation (to include number of externships taken) has no observable statistical relationship to bar exam scores, either positive or negative, leading to the conclusion that the NCBE’s claim, at least based on our bar takers with respect to externship participation, seems to be without merit.

New AALS President, Vicki Jackson: 'The State of Legal Education is Excellent': A Reply

This essay is a reply to AALS President Vicki Jackson's statement that state of legal education is excellent. This author thinks that her statement is extremely naive and demonstrates a complete ignorance of the state of legal education. The author criticizes her statement on the grounds that: 1) bar passage rates are dropping significantly, 2) minorities and low-income students are having even greater problems with bar passage and finding jobs, 3) high tuition is putting law students into high debt, 4) many law schools are having financial problems, 5) many law schools are not adopting effective teaching approaches. In sum, legal education has been in a state of crisis for over a decade, and it desperately needs strong leadership to make the necessary changes. Someone who buries her head in the sand cannot provide that leadership.

Institutional Effects of Higher Education Acquisitions: The Case of Texas A&M School of Law

This study analyzes the acquisition of the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law by Texas A&M University. In particular, institution-level effects are examined by measuring selectivity, tuition prices, job outcomes, and bar passage rate before and after the law school changed names from a hyperregional institution to one of statewide eminence and national recognition. Difference-in-differences estimations and synthetic control analysis are used to measure effects of the acquisition on various institutional metrics. Results show an increase on school selectivity and null effects on tuition price and job outcomes, suggesting heterogeneity in response to the acquisition. Implications for higher education and legal education, specifically, are discussed.

Giving Students a Seat at the Table: Using Team-Based Learning to 'Teach' Criminal Law

Perhaps in no other time since the release of the MacCrate and Carnegie Foundation Reports has the need for innovation in legal education been so critical. Since 2010, most law schools have faced challenges meeting their enrollment targets as the total number of students entering law school have dropped. With a drop in applications, many law schools have seen the traditional metrics of LSAT scores and median undergraduate G.P.A.’s drop as schools have struggled to fill classroom seats. Nationally, the percentage of first-year law students with scores of 149 or lower on the LSAT rose from 14.2 percent in 2010 to 22.5 percent in 2013. Unsurprisingly, as it has become easier to be admitted to law school, bar passage rates have dropped. Faced with declining bar passage rates, most law schools have added academic success programs that offer students assistance in preparing to take the bar exam. Seeking a way to address these challenges in the 1L year, in 2016 I redesigned my 1L criminal law class using the Team-Based Learning (TBL). Introduced at the undergraduate level more than twenty years ago by Professor Larry Michaelsen, TBL is now used in a wide variety of disciplines. The appeal of TBL is that it structures classroom learning to “go beyond simply covering content and focus[es] on ensuring that students have the opportunity to practice using course concepts to solve problems. Teaching a large 1L class with close to 100 students, TBL offered me a way to ensure that all my students were engaged with analyzing and applying the course material, rather than simply writing down notes. In a TBL classroom, lecture time is minimal, as students spend the bulk of the class time working in groups on problem-based exercise. The instructor’s main role is not to lecture, but rather to design a constructive learning environment. The primacy of group learning in TBL classrooms leads to higher levels of student engagement, increased excitement in the classroom, and higher level of performance on standardized exams. It is important to note that, although use of TBL in law school classrooms is not yet widespread, other faculty have pioneered its use.

Deep Learning that Lasts: Transforming Law School Learning with Some Help from Science

What happens to law student learning after a course ends? This question has become increasingly important in an era of challenging bar passage rates and demanding law practice. While traditional legal education usually focuses on substantive law coverage and pedagogies of the professor, support for emphasizing learning that lasts has emerged in unexpected places, including the American Bar Association (A.B.A.) and learning science. The new A.B.A. assessment standards requiring learning outcomes, formative assessment and meaningful feedback align with learning science, which offers law students better strategies for advancing durable encoding, storage and retrieval of knowledge. Of equal importance for law teachers, creating a narrative of deeper student learning that lasts can be achieved without transforming the professor’s pedagogy or substantive coverage.