Bar Exams, Law Schools

Bad Bar Exam Results Prompts Law School To Write Long Letter About Diversity

This response misses one really, really important point.

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test-anxietyThe Florida Coastal School of Law, one of the oft-maligned InfiLaw programs, is not very good at getting its students to pass the bar on their first try. In fairness, many more of their graduates do eventually pass the bar, it’s just that only around half of them are capable of doing it the first go-around.

So when another exam came and went with the school’s students still struggling to pass, Dean Scott DeVito wrote a nine-page letter laying out what he thinks is the real problem with the school’s abysmal first-time passage rate… people asking them to raise their admission standards.

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Look, it would be easy to dismiss this letter out of hand and pile on Florida Coastal for its students struggling, but the truth is the letter makes several good points… and then misses one very important one.

Dean DeVito’s central argument is that he refuses to accept the “150 Checkpoint” and set a hard cutoff at a 150 LSAT score because, statistically, that does violence to the important effort of diversifying the legal profession.

There are 15.5% fewer Asians, 50% fewer Blacks, and 48% fewer Hispanics that pass the 150 LSAT checkpoint than we would expect given the population of college educated 25-34 year olds.

That’s compelling evidence that the LSAT is serving as a roadblock to prospective law students of color. Now his take is that he refuses to establish a cutoff that could unfairly keep a good student from a legal education just because they tested poorly before going through the coursework.

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Moreover:

The only group that outperforms expectations under the 150 LSAT checkpoint is 25-34- year-old Whites with a four-year degree. Eight point two percent more of them get through the checkpoint than we would expect

That’s a suspicious result. No one’s calling for the abolition of the LSAT or anything, but it’s more reason for schools to take LSAT scores with a grain of salt.

And he highlights the troubling fact that many critics of the legal profession just don’t care about making the profession more diverse:

Let me be clear. I am not saying that we should admit students to the legal profession that we do not think can succeed. What I am saying is the only solution to the bar results problem that I currently have, using higher LSAT scores as a checkpoint, will harm another outcome—diversity in the legal profession. That is deeply frustrating.

The problem is that if you ask the majority of our critics which is more important, first- time bar passage rates or a culturally diverse student body, I feel comfortable wagering the former would be considered more important.

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When I penned our not-entirely-unserious bid to replace the ABA as the national law school accrediting body, I also rejected hard cutoffs for exactly this reason. Professional educators should be free to see promise in individual students in spite of a bad test score.

But there’s got to be a limit. In my proposal, I pitched a cutoff average — basically schools can take on the occasional student of promise in the 140s, but they have to balance that with students boasting better scores. Not only does this ward against schools who might take advantage of swaths of students without hope of passing the exam, but education is collaborative and more students with positive indicators can help ensure that those below the magic number have colleagues who the school can rely upon to raise the bar.

But the key point that this letter overlooks is Florida Coastal is too damn expensive to be delivering these results. Per Law School Transparency, tuition at Florida Coastal is $44,620 with an additional $21,902 in living expenses. Yes that’s a discount from the likes of Yale, but it’s a hefty chunk of change for students with a 50-50 shot of passing the bar on the first try and with job prospects hovering around 36 percent.

We need to be honest about what law schools are trying to accomplish. If Florida Coastal is looking to mirror what UNT-Dallas was trying to do — before the ABA unceremoniously shanked them in the back — and serve low-income communities by affording more legal education opportunities to traditionally underserved groups, then it needs to be a lot cheaper. UNT-Dallas charges around $14K and seeks out a diverse student body shut out of many other schools based on their scores. That’s the sort of model the legal academy needs to tackle this problem.

Of course UNT-Dallas is a public institution and Florida Coastal is a for-profit school. It’s hard to imagine InfiLaw’s investors have much stomach for drastically slashing tuition.

And that’s the big problem overlooked in the letter. When law schools aren’t bringing down the cost it’s not fair to say LSAT cutoffs are hurting minorities… instead, they may just be saving those students (and white students with low scores as well) from a mountain of debt with little means to pay it off.

That said, Florida Coastal and Dean DeVito deserve credit for recognizing how strict cutoffs contribute to the homogeneity of the legal profession. Someone needs to be on it.

I’m just not sure Florida Coastal is in the best position to act.

Earlier: Open Letter To The DOE: Put Above The Law In Charge Of Accreditation

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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