Bar Exam Failure Rates: The Worst Is Yet to Come

To keep money flowing, many schools dramatically lowered admissions standards beyond any acceptable standard.

My organization, Law School Transparency, released a report last week about our eight-month investigation into law school admissions practices. With law schools across the prestige spectrum facing extraordinary financial pressure — 1L enrollment fell 28% between 2010 and 2014 — dozens of schools confront a dilemma with each new 1L class: either lower academic standards or lose even more money.

Many healthy businesses have diversified revenue streams so that a dwindling customer base will not necessarily devastate their entire business. Not so for law schools. Law schools depend on tuition revenue to pay the bills, and much of that money comes from federal student loans. To keep money flowing, many schools dramatically lowered admissions standards beyond any acceptable standard.

Over the next month, I’ll explore our report from various angles. This week, I explain how we determined that many schools crossed the ethical line and why the worst is yet to come.

When we say that academic standards are lower, we mean lower LSATs and undergraduate GPAs. But across-the-board declines in LSAT scores for new students require something more compelling than schadenfreude to justify concern. After all, the LSAT provides a flawed window into an individual’s ability to help future clients. Indeed, one study on effective lawyering found that high LSAT scores correlate negatively with several competencies that form the basis for effective lawyering.

The LSAT is nevertheless a statistically significant predictor of bar exam outcomes — the best one law schools have for evaluating whether an applicant will pass or fail the bar. Not surprisingly, these tests reward similar abilities.

Failing to earn a license does not eliminate all of the value law schools provide, but that failure significantly decreases the value of a law degree for a typical graduate. Fewer students would undertake three years of law school and significant debt without the prospect of practicing law.

So when schools admit applicants with lower and lower LSAT scores, it’s natural to wonder about the line between exploitation and providing opportunities, especially when we know that schools are reluctant to enforce significant salary cuts, lay off large numbers of employees, or close.

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Answering what’s “too far” turns out to be a really thorny question. That makes it even more essential to confront it head on, and to wrestle with the proper balance between consumer protection and opportunity. Insofar as exploitative practices happen at law schools, stomping out those unethical choices through public pressure and regulatory action is a course of action the entire profession should get behind.

We use a framework developed by Professor David Frakt to do the heavy lifting for risk assessment. Frakt set risk bands based on multiple scholarly studies and his experience with higher-risk students at multiple schools. A sample of many thousands of students confirmed that he properly set the break points.

Still, the framework is just a starting point for assessing risk of bar failure. A student with a low LSAT score but very high undergraduate GPA, for example, has less risk of failing the bar than a student with the same LSAT score and a very low GPA. Some law schools have also been more successful than others in helping students with lower LSAT scores succeed on the bar exam. Where the student takes the bar exam matters as well because difficulty varies by state.

On average, however, students with LSAT test scores in each band are more likely to experience academic attrition or bar exam failure than students in the next higher band. Examining relative change in risk serves as a useful predictor for falling bar passage rates. Roughly speaking, if a school achieved a 75% bar passage rate with a 25th percentile LSAT score in the modest risk band, then we reasonably believe its bar passage rate will decline when its 25th percentile LSAT score drops to the high risk, very high risk, or extreme risk band.

When contemplating schools with concerning admissions and retention policies, we’re not talking about students who have achieved average scores. At least 25% of students at 48 schools in 2014 were in the bottom third of the LSAT distribution. These schools did not mitigate risk with higher undergraduate GPAs or drastically higher attrition. Moreover, we’re dealing with large populations, not individuals. Some people will succeed despite long odds, but the data do not support using tuition from thousands of students to support those success stories, nor to subsidize lower prices for those who are more likely to pass the bar.

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Above the Law has been part of the media chorus reporting that 2015 passage rates fell from already-lower 2014 rates. These students started in 2012, before schools made the deepest cuts. The chart below compares schools’ 25th percentile LSAT scores in 2012 (2015 bar exam) and 2014 (2017 bar exam). Black lines indicate a fall from 2012; green lines indicate an increase from 2012.

In other words, the worst is yet to come.

Describing the problem with fancy charts is not enough. Neither is blaming the LSAT or bar exam. Collectively, the legal profession has to demand that law schools that exploit students be better citizens of our profession. Whether you’re an Am Law 20 managing partner or solo practitioner, public defender or Fortune 500 general counsel, or even on faculty at an elite law school, don’t stand shoulder to shoulder with the minority of law schools trading on your reputation and the work you do for clients and the public. Lawyers need trust to operate, and we lose a little more of it with every new law school scandal.


Kyle McEntee is the executive director of Law School Transparency, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission to make entry to the legal profession more transparent, affordable, and fair. LST publishes the LST Reports and produces I Am The Law, a podcast about law jobs. You can follow him on Twitter @kpmcentee and @LSTupdates.