Ever since the results of the July 2015 administration of the bar exam began to roll out, it was evident that there was a problem. Bar exam passage rates across the country have dropped precipitously.
As we’ve noted time and again, Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners was likely correct: today’s test-takers simply seem to be “less able” than their predecessors.
But what happened in a state that intentionally made its bar exam harder before all of this test-taking fallout began?
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In 2012, the Michigan Board of Law Examiners changed the weight it gave to certain essay questions, with the overall goal of producing lawyers who had a better understanding of state law. Test takers tanked on the exam that summer with an overall pass rate of just 55 percent, and it was so bad that even one of the top law schools in the country — U. Michigan School of Law — saw troubles with an 80 percent pass rate. On the other side of the coin, the Thomas M. Cooley Law School had a 42 percent pass rate.
Three years later, with a pool of candidates that were statistically less likely to pass, what do the results look like? Here’s the school breakdown for the July 2015 Michigan exam:
As you can see, Cooley Law’s pass rate for first-time takers was an admirable 53 percent (definitely worthy of a participation trophy), but its overall pass rate for the July 2015 administration of the Michigan bar exam was just 39 percent, successfully dragging down the state’s overall pass rate to 61 percent. Based on statistics from the Michigan Board of Law Examiners, this seems to be the school’s lowest pass rate in at least 15 years, and it may well be the school’s lowest pass rate ever. We have reached out to the Michigan Board of Law Examiners for confirmation, but have yet to hear back.
Not only does Cooley Law seem to be one of the only law schools that has been unable to overcome the burden of the tougher Michigan test, but its low pass rate may finally invoke the ire of the American Bar Association. To maintain accreditation, in three or more of the past five years, law schools must keep their first-time bar passage rates within 15 percentage points of the average passage rate for first-time takers in the state where most of its graduates take the exam. For Cooley Law, that state is Michigan, and for the past three summers, its passage rate has been more than 15 percentage points below the first-time taker average pass rate (18 percentage points below in July 2015, 18 percentage points below in July 2014, and 16 percentage points below in July 2013).
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Congratulations, Cooley Law, you did it! For an institution that once ranked itself as the second-best law school in the country, its graduates’ ability to fail the bar exam seems to be beyond compare. The school may have changed its name, but everything else is the same — low-performing students continue to be baited into taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to attend and have a middling (at best) of getting a job and passing the bar exam — and it’s terribly unfortunate.