Law School Once Again Destroys State’s Bar Exam Passage Rate

This law school's overall passage rate was 22.7 percent.

failedLate last week, we brought you news about the February 2017 administration of the Arizona bar exam. At about 41 percent, the pass rate for the exam was horrendous; in fact, it was once again the worst Arizona had seen for more than 10 years (and possibly even longer).

Today, we have the school-by-school breakdown of the February 2017 passage rates in Arizona, and as everyone suspected, one law school’s incredibly subpar results severely impacted the state’s overall pass rate, much like what we saw in the past several iterations of the exam. But in a surprising(?) twist, graduates of all ABA-accredited law schools who took the exam performed poorly.

To see what we’re talking about, 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 February 2017 Law School Statistics

While Arizona Summit Law School did not complete the trifecta of failure by meeting its sister schools’ 25 percent first-time test-taker passage rates, the school still put forth a stunningly low first-time passage rate of 29.5 percent. Arizona Summit has posted its worst February passage rates for the fourth administration of the exam in a row — and school officials somehow seem to think this is an improvement of some kind. (Yes, this is better than the school’s 24.6 percent first-time passage rate for the July 2016 bar exam, but looking at July results versus February results is an apples-to-oranges comparison.)

Arizona Bar Examination First Time Pass Rate Overall Pass Rate (includes repeaters)
February 2014 54.5 48.8
February 2015 52.6 46.4
February 2016 38.1 28.4
February 2017 29.5 22.7

Here’s more information from the Arizona Republic:

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Arizona Summit Interim Dean Penny Willrich said in a statement that the school has made major changes over the past 18 months that have resulted in pass increases on the state Bar exam.

“We are comfortable that Bar examination results will continue to improve and revert to previous levels of excellence,” she said.

Please keep in mind that this is a law school that is known for pleading with low-performing graduates to defer taking the July bar exam and take the February bar exam instead. In the past, the law school paid graduates $5,000 stipends to wait to take the exam and enroll in their “Unlock Potential” program, a bar prep program that would “extend[] [their] bar preparation from the usual 10-week program to more of a four-month program.” We now find ourselves asking what, exactly, the point of this program could be, since it doesn’t seem to be working. Is this program more beneficial to graduates who dream of someday becoming attorneys, or is it more beneficial to a law school with abominable bar exam passage rates that’s attempting — if however poorly — to save face?

AZ Summit is on probation with the American Bar Association for its atrocious bar exam passage rates. The school’s latest performance is sure to further reduce any goodwill it had left with the ABA’s Accreditation Committee and the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.

Let’s not forget that the school has entered into a questionable affiliation agreement with Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college. In a recent statement, Don Lively, the president of Arizona Summit Law School, said that the school is interested in “diversifying the nation’s least diverse white collar profession.” How can Arizona Summit possibly diversify the legal profession when its graduates continue to fail the bar exam in record numbers? As my colleague Elie Mystal so eloquently stated when he last discussed the schools’ affiliation, “[g]oing to a law school like Arizona Summit doesn’t help black people, it hobbles them.” We hope students are able to see through this farce.

As for the rest of the those who took the Arizona bar exam, 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 7.4 percentage points and 7.8 percentage points, respectively, between 2016 and 2017, and we believe they represent the lowest percentage of first-time takers and total takers from ABA-accredited law schools to have passed the exam since February 2005 — and possibly even longer (the state’s website goes back only to the year 2005). Until all law schools raise their standards (i.e., their entering students’ qualifications), we may continue to see bar exam performances like this.

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This all leads back to Arizona Summit’s continuing failed efforts to graduate classes that are capable of passing the bar. Arizona Summit may purport to offer opportunities to students that no other law schools would accept, but it seems that those “opportunities” include a lifetime of debt and an inability to pass the bar exam. One of the school’s own graduates once succinctly summarized the Arizona Summit experience: “It’s not a Summit; it’s Death Valley.”

Please do extensive research before investing in a law school education. You might be able to uncover facts like these that will make you change your mind.

On-probation Phoenix law school still struggling on passage rates for state Bar exam [Arizona Republic]


Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.