Bar Exams, Law Schools

A Terrible Excuse For Terrible Bar Exam Results

It's good to know someone in academia is willing to point out the obvious.

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test exam lsatUniversity of Arkansas Little Rock – Bowen School of Law had a terrible bar exam passage rate for first-time test takers this past July — only 66 percent of those students passed the bar exam. This is especially problematic when you note that University of Arkansas School of Law at Fayetteville was 78 percent. That’s a big difference.

According to The Arkansas Project, Dean Michael Schwartz in a recent faculty meeting characterized the results as “less than satisfactory.” He also spun the results as not as bad as they could have been, noting worse results in 2009 and 2010:

This is certainly not our worst pass rate in recent history. On the 2009 and 2010 July bar exams we were at 64 percent both times. Nevertheless, I am sad for our students who did not pass and the alums and the law school.

Just because it wasn’t THE worst doesn’t mean it is good.

Dean Schwartz went on to say it was a “mistake” to blame the results on lowered admissions standards:

As far as admissions go, there has been no discussion of a decision about lowering admissions credentials since I arrived, and in fact we have not. The slight decline in our median LSAT for the past two classes before the current fall entering class, where it went up again, is the product of Bowen, like many law schools, continuing to admit students with the same credentials we always have. What has changed is that other law schools are offering more in scholarships to a greater percentage of the higher LSAT students than they have in the past such that we get fewer of those students. That fact is the sum total of what has changed.

That seems to be a lot of wishful thinking and doublespeak on the dean’s part. Law schools never want to lower admissions standards; what they want is a growing or at least steady stream of tuition revenue. The problem comes in when administrations prioritize those dollars over academic standards.

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Bowen Law Professor Joshua Silverstein is similarly skeptical. After all, Fayetteville was able to have a comparatively high bar passage rate, and whaddya know? That school cut the size of their classes when the admissions pool wasn’t as robust. At that same faculty meeting, Professor Silverstein noted:

(Fayetteville’s) admissions statistics, as I understand it, have not dropped as much as ours and so even though I completely accept that LSAT (and) undergraduate G.P.A. are far from all of the predictability… not even close. They may be a significant explainer of what happened this time. The fact that Fayetteville’s undergraduate G.P.A. and LSAT were measurably higher than ours this year. My understanding is when applications dropped and we kept our class close to the same size… it dropped a little… Fayetteville’s (class size) dropped dramatically. My understanding is that one year they only had 90-some students because they were working so hard to keep their admissions statistics up for U.S. News purposes. They weren’t the only school that did that. So, it is quite possible that one of the unusual factors this year was that the disparity between the two of us on LSAT and undergraduate G.P.A. was particularly large this time around in comparison to a number of past years.

Ding ding ding. We have a winner. It’s good to know someone in academia is willing to point out the obvious.

Bowen School Of Law Bar Passage Rate Drops To Lowest Level Since 2010 [The Arkansas Project]

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Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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