Law Schools

ABA Continues To Crack Down On Law Schools That Admit Students Who Can’t Pass The Bar Exam

Which law schools will be the next to face the ABA’s wrath?

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FLORIDA COASTAL SCHOOL OF LAW — COMMENTS FROM DEAN SCOTT DEVITO

Before I talk about the letter, let me give you some background. I believe the letter you are referring to is an October 12, 2017 letter which is supposed to be posted at: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/news_announcements/public-notice/adverse-actions.html. When I just checked, our letter isn’t there (nor are the other schools who have received a letter in this period). It just has May listed. There should be a subsequent month with additional schools (other than Coastal). I am not sure why it isn’t there anymore (or I can’t get to it through the link). If you would like to know who else received a letter (I did not make a list or I would send it along), it might be a good idea to reach directly out to the ABA.

In October, we met with our Student Leadership and had three student town halls (one for each year, 1L, 2L, 3L) to discuss the letter.

In terms of the letter, I have to say that I was disappointed to receive a letter saying we are out of compliance with some of the Standards. While our outcomes are certainly not where we want them to be, I believe we are in compliance with the Standards and we are in the middle of drafting a response to the ABA due November 8. I suspect the primary concern the ABA has is with our recent bar pass results. My analysis shows that, while our results are not where we want them to be, we are currently in compliance on bar pass (Standard 316) and our models predict we will remain in compliance on bar pass until the effects of increased incoming credentials begin to bear fruit where we should exceed the requirements of the Standard (Florida Coastal’s goal is to have at least a 75% first time pass rate).

You know what we’ve done in terms of increasing credentials and how that puts us relative to other schools so I won’t spend time here revisiting that.

But I would like to add that even though our bar pass isn’t where we want it to be, as I explain below, our analysis indicates that transferring to other Florida law schools results in lower bar pass rates for those transferring students as compared to similar students who stay at Coastal. However, please don’t solely rely on our analysis because we do not have the same access to the data for transfer students as the transfer schools, and you may want to reach out to those schools or the ABA to verify our numbers.

One way we have been trying to get a better handle on why our students are not performing as well as we (and they) would like on the bar is to compare what happens to students when they transfer to other Florida Schools. Based on that analysis (I have included the process for doing that analysis at the end of this email below my signature) we found that transferring was not good for bar passage for the students who transferred as opposed to similar students who stayed. Looking at the period beginning academic year 2012-2013 through 2015-2016 we had 92 students transfer to other Florida Schools. We had to stop at 2015-2016 academic year because our comparison is of whether a transferee ever passed a bar to whether comparable students at Florida Coastal passed the first time. We compared ultimate pass rates for transferees to first-time pass rates for students who remained at Florida Coastal for two reasons. First, it provides a conservative measure of the impact of remaining at Florida Coastal as compared to transferring, assuming we may have missed a person or two who transferred and passed a bar at some point in their post-graduate life. Second, for a number of the transferees it is not easy to identify precisely when they passed (and if it was their “first-time”). But if they did pass at some point, we knew that they had “ultimately” passed the bar. Of course, it is possible we missed a transferee that passed; the transferee school has this information directly, so if you want to double check you could reach out to them.

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Based on this process, we found the following results for transferees to Florida Schools:

 Transfer to School Number of Transfers

2012-2015 AYs

 LSAT Range 1L LGPA Range Transferee Ultimate Pass Rate Comparable Florida Coastal First-time Pass Rate
Barry University Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law 4 140-147 2.18-2.6 0.00% 50.87%
Florida A&M University College of Law 4 136-152 1.67-2.96 25.00% 37.80%
Florida State University College of Law 34 138-159 2.66-3.75 64.71% 89.06%
St. Thomas University School of Law 6 135-146 2.25-3.11 33.33% 53.18%
Stetson University College of Law 5 143-154 2.73-3.13 80.00% 76.57%
University of Florida Levin College of Law 31 139-158 2.8-4.0 74.19% 91.11%
University of Miami School of Law 7 140-160 2.75-3.7 71.43% 83.46%

 

As this table indicates, students who transfer from Florida Coastal to Barry University, Florida A&M, Florida State, St. Thomas, University of Florida, or University of Miami do worse on the bar than their peers (from the same entering class) at Florida Coastal. We excluded Florida International, Nova Southeastern, and Ave Maria because they only had a single transfer student during this period.

Another way of representing the information is to list the impact of transferring to the other school in Florida:

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Keep in mind, we are comparing Florida Coastal’s first time pass rate to the other Florida Law Schools’ “ultimate” pass rate (whether they ever passed the bar). If we were to utilize Florida Coastal’s ultimate bar pass rate, the other Florida law schools would come off worse.

Finally, these results are representative because the span of transferee’s covers the full spectrum with LSATs as low as 135 and as high as 160 (see Figure below for distribution of LSATs) and first-year LGPAs as low as 1.67 and as high as 4.0 (see Figure 3 for distribution of first year LGPAs).

I hope this hasn’t been too long, but wanted to give you the full picture. If you have any questions let me know and I’ll be happy to follow up.

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