Law Schools

It's Hard To Pass The Bar: Unranked Law School Edition

How the other half (of bar takers) live.

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Here’s how most people pass the bar: they take a two month bar prep course, then they pass.

Sure, some people don’t take a course, but that’s a little bit like fighting Gregor Clegane without a helmet. On the multistate bar exam, you pass or you die. The reason all these courses work is because test taking is a skill that can be taught. It’s not about substantive knowledge or deep intelligence. It’s just about learning how to spot the traps and jump through the hoops designed by the test maker. If you can play Destiny, you can pass the bar.

Unless you can’t. Some people aren’t good at taking standardized tests. For these people, bar prep is less about learning a few tricks and more like electroshock therapy. It’s a brute force process that involves amassing enough information that you actually learn the answers instead of being able to noodle them out through all the clues in the question.

Not surprisingly, the people who are worst at the specific skill of taking standardized tests are disproportionally represented at the worst ranked law schools in the country. Doing poorly on the LSAT is a good indication that you aren’t good at standardized test taking. No more, no less. When you sit for the bar… well, here’s an analogy for you: LSAT is to Bar Exam as the sniffles is to AIDS.

From a certain point of view, preparing their testphobic students for the bar exam is the most important challenge for poor law schools. Their kids needs the help more than anybody else.

Enter Whittier Law School. Unranked by U.S. News, the July 2014 bar passage rate for the school was an apocalyptic 42.7%. That was the worst in the state of California. Can you imagine going to a law school where over half your classmates failed the bar?

Obviously, current Whittier 3Ls preparing for the July 2015 exam are… concerned. Last month, a student calling himself “The Realest 3L” penned a 14 page letter to the faculty about student concerns. It’s Scrib’d on the next page.

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The highlights include:

* Concerns over the school switching from a BarBri sponsored early bar prep course to a Kaplan sponsored early bar prep course. The school changed after the July 2014 bar exam. The administration initially communicated that Kaplan was “cheaper,” though it now says that Kaplan is better suited.

* Concerns that Whittier faculty spend more time berating students for the class’s poor performance, instead of teaching them. Reports one student after a class meeting “I mean we know how shitty things are. Why do they keep reminding us about it?”

* Concerns that more stringent bar prep homework requirements are incompatible with a full class schedule.

* And, incredibly, the feeling that low morale has led to decreased student participation in bar prep. The money quote here is: “I have found my morale greatly diminished. I no longer feel excited to graduate and take the next step in my life but rather disillusioned and beaten down.”

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Depending on where you are in life, you are going to find it easy to make fun of the letter. The administration can’t make people pass the bar. They’re already giving them a program to help them study during 3L year. Most schools, most good schools, totally ignore “bar prep” and let their students figure it out themselves in the few weeks between graduation and the July exam. Here, the school is at least emphasizing what the students should be doing. But the students are bitching about how much work there is, questioning the program, and feeling butthurt about the tone of the instructors.

But I’m sympathetic to their concerns. Again, Whittier knew or should have known that it was dealing with students with special needs when it comes to standardized test taking. If you ask me, one of the problems with poor law schools is that they rope in students who spend a lot of money only to later find out that they either can’t pass the bar or can’t get a job with their degree. Well, those kids are on the hook now, and Whittier needs to do everything it can to prop them over this hurdle.

Heck, why are they worried about balancing bar prep with 3L classes anyway? Everybody knows that 3L classes are a joke in the best of times. If you can’t pass the bar, those classes become beyond useless. Whittier should be assuring students that if they’re ever caught between class work and bar work, they should study for the bar and take a flamethrower to whatever Law and Penmanship coursework they’re missing.

I don’t have a great answer. But if you gave me 100 random people on the street and a year, I could get 50 of them to pass the bar exam using just time and pressure.

Near the end of the letter, Realest 3L says “We just want respect, positive energy, and open discourse.” I know, I know, I also had to pause a moment to gag on the hippie-dippy notion that passing the bar exam has anything to do with respect and positive energy. But it’s Whittier’s job to teach him that, somehow. They admitted him, they took his money, they assumed responsibility for telling him that the bar exam doesn’t give a damn about his feelings.

This is how the other half lives, folks. This letter is Jacob Riis shining a light on the plight of 3Ls that deans at low ranked law schools don’t want us to see. You can yell at them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even though they clearly don’t know how to enter their defective boots into evidence.

Or you can try to help them.

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