Law School Blames Lazy Graduates With Low GPAs For Abysmal Performance On Bar Exam

This law school's bar exam passage rates continue to sink lower and lower.

sad-upset-young-lawyer-summer-associate-law-student-stress-needs-help-300x199While law schools across the country have tried to find a solution to their graduates’ bar exam problems, be it through blaming the test for being unfair or too difficult or allegedly begging their graduates not to take the exam at all, passage rates in many jurisdictions have continued to drop precipitously.

Law schools in New York are still a bit tense, and with good reason — after all, the overall pass rate of 64 percent for the state’s first administration of the Uniform Bar Exam in July 2016 was only a modest improvement over the results from the July 2015 exam, which were the worst New York had seen in more than three decades. One New York law school seems to have pinpointed the exact reason why its overall pass rate was so low. The school revealed in a recent email to all students that graduates with low GPAs and students who refused to work hard on studying dragged down the school’s overall pass rate. Which law school could it be?

The school in question is Hofstra Law School, and its bar passage rate has progressively slipped from 84 percent in July 2013 to 64 percent in July 2016. You can be sure that any law school with a 20 percentage point drop in graduates capable of passing the bar exam would search for the root cause of the problem, but like many law schools that have lowered their admissions standards in recent years, Hofstra’s quandary may be of its own doing.

Last night, Hofstra’s dean sent an email to current students about the school’s abysmal bar passage rate. That email contained the following information:

The July 2016 New York State Bar results were released, and our pass rate for first-time takers was 64 percent, a decline of 3 percent from the previous year. The average pass rate for first-time takers at New York schools was 83 percent. …

Hard work is truly an important factor in Bar success. Studies have found that students who complete at least 75 percent of their commercial Bar prep work have a significantly higher chance of passing the exam. Also, the strongest indicator of success continues to be a student’s final law school GPA. If you are currently ranked in the bottom 50 percent of your class, I strongly encourage you to reach out to our academic success advisors.

It’s no wonder Hofstra graduates with low GPAs have suffered when it comes to passing the bar exam. Take a look at how the law school’s admissions criteria have sunk since 2010, particularly in the 25th percentile range. Students who entered the school with those numbers may well have become graduates with low law school GPAs, which have been shown to correlate strongly with success (or lack thereof) on the bar exam.

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To assist students with low GPAs, Hofstra performed a “comprehensive study to determine the factors that lead to Bar success,” which led to “numerous changes to how [the school] prepare[s] students for the Bar exam.” The school is now offering “revamped academic success initiatives” — perhaps these initiatives will help students learn how to work a little harder? A source, however, thinks that the school should shoulder some of the blame for these poor passage rates instead of blaming students:

I’m a 2L here, and Hofstra has a 3 credit hour, required 2L class called Foundational Lawyering Skills that “teaches” us things like how to interview a client, or how to write a professional email, or how to construct a chronological timeline. Except we have (mostly) all already done this through our gainful 1L summer employment. We spend three hours a week in this waste of a class where we could have those three hours put to use for a meaningful bar course.

Also, we are required to take Administrative Law or Transnational Law during our 1L year, before we even have the opportunity to take Con Law!

Hofstra’s academic curriculum is ass backward, and it looks like the administration is not willing to take even an iota of the blame for that in this bar passage email.

Maybe it’s time for Hofstra Law to change its curriculum to emphasize courses that will be tested on the New York bar exam, rather than classes that are no longer tested (Admin Law) or were never tested in the first place (Transnational Law). It would certainly be more helpful than casting aspersions on students.

(Flip to the next page to see the full email that was sent to all Hofstra Law students.)


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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. She’d love to hear from you, so feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.