Bar Exams

The Trouble With Bar Results

Finger-pointing at the bar exam taker and law school is fun, but we need a deeper understanding of where the problems lie.

By LawProfBlawg on January 12, 2016 3:16 pm

Ca-Bar-ExamI was recently at an American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting, passing by vendor booths. I asked the bar review courses the following question: Do you have data regarding your bar passage rates versus your competitors?

The answer is no. No one has that. The law schools are trying to get a lot of data by contacting their students. Did you take a bar course? Did you study? Let me look up your GPA….In other words, please stop making us look bad!

I doubt that’s a sufficient level of understanding. Yes, individual law schools SHOULD be doing everything possible to ensure that students who bestowed them with cash pass the bar. Some schools have gone the way of identifying the weak in their classes and helping them by cajoling them to take more prep classes. Others have tried to get us doctrinal faculty to change what we teach or how we teach it (good luck with that). Others are identifying holes in their curriculum in the face of faculty denial. Sometimes, it is difficult to effect meaningful change.

Indeed, the law student is blamed along with the law schools. They are of lesser quality, therefore can’t pass the bar. This assumes that the bar is of the same quality and that bar prep courses are of the same quality.

Regardless, I feel that is asking the wrong question. It is law-school-oriented and not law-student-oriented. The real question should be how do law students know that the bar prep course they are taking is the best one for the state exam they are undertaking? And what tools do students need to pass the bar?

I want facts, not opinions. I’m not going to get them.

What do I want? I want this list, at a minimum:

  1. Bar passage rates, for each bar prep course, by state. I know this is in itself rife with problems, because some courses give freebies out to top students. But what if some bar exam courses are failing students in different ways in different states? How will we know?
  2. LSAT and GPA by test taker and by bar review course. This gets into a whole bunch of FERPA issues, but I feel there could be ways to get that data without disclosing the individual student identity.
  3. Data about whether students are systematically bombing subjects at particular schools. Is a faculty member at least in part to blame?
  4. The worst to get: How much work did the student put into it? Was it all watching videos, or was some active learning taking place? Not that I’ll ever get any of this information, but this one is not likely to be reported accurately.
  5. Did the student have a traumatic or major life event, such as wedding planning, funeral planning, or some other life-changing event? Those events don’t pair well with studying.
  6. I want access to the questions bar examiners have been posing. All of them. Then we can compare level of difficulty.
  7. I want all of the above for the last 10 years.
  8. I want more transparency in bar exam grading. Sure, a bar exam taker can potentially get a ton of information, but it’s not going to be useful for determining issues in the aggregate.
  9. And, most importantly, I want a means to compel such disclosure. I’m not sure that is politically possible. It ought to be. People invest a lot of money in bar exams and law school. There needs to be some truth in legal education laws out there.

Finger-pointing at the bar exam taker and law school is fun, but I want a deeper understanding of where the problems lie. I suspect the problem is more complicated than it is being portrayed. A lot of us would love some deeper tools to investigate whether or not that is true.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter (@lawprofblawg). Email him at [email protected].