Bar Exams, Law Schools

Which Law Schools Allegedly Paid Students Not To Take The Bar Exam?

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard allegations of a law school doing something like this.

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For many students at low-ranked law schools, the bar exam will be an unconquerable beast. Members of the administration at these law schools know this fact well, and cringe at the very thought of some of their students further sullying their already low bar passage rates. Let’s say, for example, that your law school’s July 2014 bar passage rate for first-time takers in your home state was hovering in the 50-percent range. That’s an ugly statistic that you’d probably want to somehow cover up in your marketing brochures.

But what if there were a way to ensure that students who were struggling academically would stay far, far away from the bar exam, thus enhancing your law school’s chances of posting less embarrassing passage statistics? If you were an administrator at one of these low-performing law schools, you’d probably jump at the chance to game your numbers. In fact, you know that cash is king for heavily indebted law students, so if you could offer them $5,000 to delay taking the bar exam, you very likely would.

The hypothetical situation described above is exactly what one recently filed lawsuit alleges occurred at several of the nation’s most reviled for-profit law schools.

Paula Lorona, a former assistant director of financial aid at Arizona Summit Law School, claims that starting in May 2014, all three of InfiLaw’s schools — Arizona Summit, Charlotte, and Florida Coastal — began offering $5,000 payoffs to students who were unlikely to pass the bar exam. Here’s more information from the National Law Journal:

According to Lorona’s suit, Arizona Summit developed a “bar exam failure predictor formula” that takes into account students’ LSAT scores plus undergraduate and law school grade-point averages. It offers students deemed unlikely to pass money and other benefits to delay the exam pending additional test prep.

“The effect of Infilaw and [Arizona Summit’s] actions was to prevent students who [Arizona Summit] predicted would fail the bar exam from taking the bar exam and thereby gaming the bar test passage rates in order to retain accreditation and receive other benefits, such as retain Title IV eligibility from the Department of Education,” her complaint alleged.

You may be wondering about the basis of Lorona’s claims against Arizona Summit. As a former employee and an alumna of the school, she alleges that this is exactly what happened to her prior to her taking and passing the February bar exam. “I needed to file this suit because I feel the school and Infilaw know they are taking advantage of students and potentially ruining students’ lives by saddling them with debt when they won’t be able to complete the program,” Lorona said in an interview with Karen Sloan of the NLJ.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of a law school that was allegedly paying students not to take the bar exam. Back in 2012, students claimed that CUNY Law was offering payments for their bar exam deferrals to prop up the school’s otherwise piss-poor performance. A spokesperson for the school denied that such payments had been made.

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Lorona, who was fired from Arizona Summit on April 13, 2013, also makes some disturbing allegations about the law school’s tax filings. Lorona claims that she was “pressured and harassed daily” to submit incorrect documents because the school had allegedly failed to pay sales tax for a three-year period.

For the record, these are the July 2014 home state bar passage rates for first-time takers at each of Infilaw’s schools: Arizona Summit (55 percent), Charlotte (56 percent), and Florida Coastal (58 percent). Ouch. If these law schools really were trying to buy better passage rates through student bribes, how could you blame them? In addition, if students can’t be bought off prior to taking a test that they’re almost sure to fail, at least these schools are offering $10,000 payoffs to their repeated bar failures as a consolation prize.

Lorona also claims that but for Arizona Summit’s “deceptive marketing,” she would never have chosen to attend the school. We searched for an example of the law school’s so-called “deceptive marketing,” and found one quickly. Here’s an excerpt from an Arizona Summit brochure that was likely produced ahead of the 2014-2015 academic year:

An 86 percent bar exam pass rate sure looks more palatable than the law school’s most recent pass rate of 55 percent, but this “statistic” — if you can really call it that — isn’t even remotely helpful for would-be students who are capable of reading carefully. (But then again, if these prospective law students were capable of reading carefully, they probably wouldn’t be considering applying to Arizona Summit in the first place.)

While Arizona Summit’s dean was quick to claim that its tax filings are prepared by an outside auditor, and that all of its marketing materials contain the type of bar passage information that’s required by the ABA, she didn’t say a word about whether the school had been paying off poorly performing students as an incentive not to take the bar exam.

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Arizona Summit is being represented by Quarles & Brady, and an attorney from the firm noted that “[t]he law school believes the claims are without merit. Like any lawsuit we believe is without merit, we plan to vigorously defend it.” If only more prospective law students knew that attempting to obtain a degree from a school like Arizona Summit was “without merit,” perhaps they wouldn’t be involved in situations like this in the first place.

(Flip the page to see Paula Lorona’s suit filed against Arizona Summit Law.)

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