Law School Posts Worst Bar Exam Passage Rates In Its Existence, Drags Down Entire State's Passage Rates

Holy crap.

'Why can't we pass the bar exam?'

‘Why can’t we pass the bar exam?’

This summer, we regaled our readers with the tale of one for-profit law school’s plan to keep its low-performing students from taking the bar exam — and then failing the bar exam — immediately following graduation. The law school now requires that all students with GPAs below a 3.33 take and pass a mock bar exam as a graduation requirement, knowing full well that such a requirement may preclude countless students from being able to graduate and further sully their otherwise abysmal bar exam passage rates.

Prior to implementing this plan, the law school allegedly offered graduates a four-month, intensive bar preparation program with a $5,000 stipend and called graduates the day before the exam and offering a $10,000 stipend for them to defer taking it. The institution in question is Arizona Summit Law School (formerly known as the Phoenix School of Law), and now that the results from the July 2016 administration of the Arizona bar are out, it’s time to see if anything this school has done to better prepare its graduates for the test has worked out. Thus far, nothing has helped Summit graduates:

Arizona Bar Examination First Time Pass Rate Overall Pass Rate (includes repeaters)
February 2014 54.5 48.8
July 2014 54.8 49.5
February 2015 52.6 46.4
July 2015 30.6 26.4
February 2016 38.1 28.4

As we noted previously, according to a press release from the Supreme Court of Arizona’s Committee on Examinations, the overall pass rate for the July 2016 exam was allegedly 53 percent. As it turns out, the overall pass rate was even worse than that — the true overall pass rate for the July 2016 exam was 52.9 percent. At the time, we wondered whether Arizona Summit had yet again derailed the results to allow for the state’s worst bar-passage rate in more than a decade. The school-by-school pass rates were released yesterday, and we can now confirm that this is indeed what happened.

Just how poorly did Arizona Summit Law graduates perform on the July 2016 exam? Here are some of the emails we received from others who witnessed the carnage:

* “OMG…. OMG.”

* “HOLY SHIT.”

* “JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH!!!!!”

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Holy shit is right. For the sake of comparison, take a look at this breakdown of results by in-state law schools, courtesy of the State of Arizona Committee on Examinations:

Arizona Bar Exam July 2016 Law School Statistics

This is Arizona Summit’s worst bar exam performance to date. This is atrocious. “It’s despicable that this school continues to admit students, many taking on $100,000+ in debt, knowing that their chances of ever practicing law are slim to none. I hope AZ Summit loses their accreditation after this,” said one Arizona attorney. Here are some thoughts from one of the school’s graduates as to who may really be to blame:

It’s not a Summit; it’s Death Valley. The time has come for Dean Mays to pursue other endeavors. Since Dean Mays came onboard in the fall of 2010, bar pass rates have gone from 82% for first time writers in February of 2011 to 24.6% for the same group in July of 2016. The game is over and the students and alumni are the ones that are losing.

We’ve even heard from a professor who once taught at the law school, who said, “My former students tell me they walked out of the exam knowing they had failed… they felt totally unprepared…” If they’re not being prepared for the bar exam, a statement like this makes you wonder what Arizona Summit students are actually being taught.

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Regardless of who may be to blame for the school’s problems, note that it’s not just Arizona Summit whose bar exam passage rates sank dramatically since July 2015. ASU Law’s first-time pass rate fell from 83.7 percent to 76.8 percent (a 6.9 percentage point decline), while U of A Law’s first-time pass rate fell from 83.6 percent to 74 percent (a 9.6 percentage point decline). While admissions stats, like LSAT profiles, dropped for the class that sat for the July 2016 administration of the bar exam (Fall 2013) at both ASU and U of A, according to a recent U of A graduate, something else may have contributed to the school’s poor bar exam performance this summer:

Along with the regular downturn that has effected most law schools, we also have increased the number of international students that get what they call an “AJD” degree. I think it stands for advanced or accelerated JD, but they report their statistics along with traditional JDs. They don’t have to take the LSAT to be admitted because they’re considered transfer students, I believe. They usually complete their degree in two years. My entering class had ~105 traditional JDs and ~30 AJDs, and that was approximately the next couple years’ breakdown as well.

It’s a fairly widespread rumor that the AJDs do worse in law school and on the bar. Some members of the career office have even complained to my classmates that our job numbers and bar pass rates would be much higher without the AJD students. I was friends with a lot of AJDs and a lot of them are very smart, but I’d do a lot worse on a test if it was in a second language, too.

While that may be true (recall that foreign-educated candidates passed the July 2015 New York bar exam at a 33 percent rate, thus dragging down the overall pass rate and overall pass rate for first-time takers), the pass rates for all first-time takers from ABA-accredited law schools and all takers overall from ABA-accredited law schools don’t lie. Those numbers dropped by 1.6 percentage points and 4.1 percentage points, respectively, between 2015 and 2016, and they represent the lowest percentage of first-time takers and total takers from ABA-accredited law schools to have passed the exam since July 2005 — and possibly even longer (the state’s website goes back only to the year 2005).

This all leads back to Arizona Summit’s continuing failed efforts to graduate classes that are capable of passing the bar exam. As we’ve said of this law school in the past, “it’s shameful and disgusting that a law school — for-profit or otherwise — would subject its students and graduates to behavior like this.” Arizona Summit has plans to affiliate with a “major” university in the future, but with horrendous bar exam passage rates like these, those plans may not be long for this world.

Please, please do extensive research before investing in a law school education. You may be saddled with student debt that’s the product of what ultimately proves to be a useless degree for the rest of your life. It’s your future — please be careful with it.

Earlier: This State Just Posted Its Worst Bar Exam Results In More Than A Decade


Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. Follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.