Law Schools Duel For The Worst Bar Exam Passage Rates Ever
Yikes! This is pretty bad.
It’s not yet April, but thousands of law school graduates have started to frantically refresh websites and run to their mailboxes to see if they were able to pass the February bar exam. What fresh hell did the first round of results bring for recent law school graduates?
Yesterday afternoon, North Carolina unleashed its bar exam results. As Above the Law readers know, the state’s results are usually shrouded in secrecy. North Carolina does not publicly publish the number of people who have taken its exam, much less its overall passage rates, but thanks to a law school’s emails to students, we’ve been able to gather all of that information. North Carolina law schools receive this information every year, and this year, two of them were so eager to send out their mediocre passage rates to students and graduates that they did so before those awaiting their results even received them. Holy crap, what a way to find out that you likely failed the bar exam.
Thanks to an email from the dean of Elon University School of Law, we know that the February 2017 passage rate for first-time takers was 44.44 percent, while the overall passage rate was 36.73 percent. The average pass rate for first-time takers in February 2016 was 51.10 percent, so we’re looking at a decrease in passage for first-time takers of 6.66 percentage points. This year’s passage rates are both rather low, and because we’ve seen the school-by-school results, we think we know which schools may be the culprits — although one of them dragged down the pass rates more than the others.
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Three North Carolina law schools saw first-time and overall passage rates that either hovered at or fell well below 30 percent. Those law schools are North Carolina Central University, Elon University School of Law, and, of course, Charlotte School of Law.
We’ll get NCCU’s results out of the way first, because while they are concerning, they are not nearly as concerning as the results from Elon and Charlotte. NCCU’s pass rate for first-time takers was 27.27 percent and its pass rate for repeat takers was 26.98 percent, for an overall passage rate of 27.03 percent. While this is incredibly underwhelming, we’re dealing with other schools whose first-time takers can’t pass the exam at all, or whose first-time and repeat takers are failing in such large numbers that they likely had a hand in causing the state’s overall passage rate to plummet, so please excuse our brevity.
For Elon Law, seven graduates took the February 2017 bar exam for the first time, and none of them passed. The North Carolina Board of Law Examiners lists the school’s passage rate for first timers as “0.00%,” which is a rare sight to see. These results were sent in an email to Elon Law alumni from Dean Luke Bierman, and the seven first-time takers who failed the bar exam likely found out from the law school, not from the state bar. For what it’s worth, this is what Dean Bierman had to say about what will be done to improve the school’s passage rates (his full email, along with the school-by-school passage rates, are available on the pages that follow):
We are examining outcomes from this administration of the bar exam to understand individual results better. The Academic and Bar Support team has made significant adjustments to their program and will continue to do so. Likewise, the bar exam results will be on the faculty’s agenda for its next meeting in April. We continue our commitment to offer as much assistance as possible to help Elon Law students and graduates succeed in their professional goals, including success on the bar exam.
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That brings us to Charlotte Law, which was recently placed on probation by the American Bar Association and booted from the federal loan program by the Department of Education. Charlotte Law is obligated to do better when it comes to bar exam passage rates, lest its accreditation be revoked by the ABA (which may be a moot point, as the school will be forced to close if its ability to access federal loans isn’t reinstated). In February 2016, the law school’s passage rate for first-time takers was 34.70 percent. In February 2017, the law school’s passage rate for its 72 first-time takers was 25.00 percent, its passage rate for its 94 repeat takers was 18.09 percent, and its overall passage rate was 21.08 percent. This is so atrocious that we’ve officially run out of adjectives to describe the bar exam passage rates from Charlotte Law.
When the results of the July 2016 bar exam were released, Charlotte Law’s former dean spoke of the school’s “improvements … having an impact,” and noted that the administration would be “carefully analyzing the data in order to make further improvements for February 2017 and beyond.” We beg your pardon, but a 9.7 percentage point decrease in the school’s first-time passage rate is hardly an improvement.
Not to worry, Charlotte Law’s new dean, Scott Broyles, let students know via email (available in full on the page that follows) that the school’s first-time passage rate of 25 percent was “not at an acceptable level.” In fact, the school has “put in place (and promised to the ABA) improvements in both admissions and teaching that will significantly improve our pass rates in the future.” Charlotte School of Law has yet again posted its worst bar exam results ever. Posting the worst results ever in back-to-back administrations of the bar exam has got to be some sort of a record.
Take a look at Charlotte Law’s bar exam results over the years:
| Exam Date | First Time Bar Passage Rate | State Average Rate |
| July 2009 | 67.3% | 80.63% |
| Feb. 2010 | 73.3% | 68.86% |
| July 2010 | 87.0% | 79.8% |
| Feb. 2011 | 75.0% | 72.3% |
| July 2011 | 78.79% | 82.19% |
| Feb. 2012 | 53.13% | 60.24% |
| July 2012 | 68.22% | 78.76% |
| Feb. 2013 | 69.8% | 62.4% |
| July 2013 | 57.8% | 71.01% |
| Feb. 2014 | 60.0% | 64.15% |
| July 2014 | 56.0% | 70.6% |
| Feb. 2015 | 40.5% | 54.5% |
| July 2015 | 47.1% | 67.1% |
| Feb. 2016 | 34.7% | 51.1% |
| July 2016 | 45.24% | 65.90% |
| Feb. 2017 | 25.00% | 44.44% |
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Will Charlotte Law students be fooled again with promises of improvement? Does it even matter? Will Elon Law students actually be able to pass the bar exam on their first try this summer? Perhaps you don’t care about the answers to these questions because all you want to do is see the school-by-school breakdown of bar exam results for all other law schools in the state, which by comparison make NCCU Law’s, Elon Law’s, and Charlotte Law’s bar exam results look even more depressing.
Which North Carolina law school did the best on the state’s exam in February 2017? Flip through the following pages to see Dean Luke Bierman’s full letter to students, Dean Scott Broyle’s full letter to students, as well as the bar exam passage rates for the following law schools: Elon, Charlotte, North Carolina Central, Campbell, University of North Carolina, Wake Forest, and Duke.
Staci 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.
