Bar Exams, Law Schools

Another State Lowers Bar Exam Cut Score To Make Pass Rates Soar

Which state will be next to lower its bar exam cut score?

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Law school deans across the country are understandably concerned about plummeting bar exam passage rates, as it speaks to the quality of the education that’s being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to students whose admissions profiles may have been below the school’s standards just a few years ago when it was easier to put asses in seats. But what happens when your law school is the only one in the state, and its first-time bar exam passage rates have been sliding for years?

You do what the rest of your law dean brethren have been doing, and try to get the state to lower its cut score. It’s a simple solution to a difficult problem, but consumer protection be damned, someone’s got to advocate for it.

This is what happened in Nevada, where the University of Nevada-Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law had been having trouble with recent graduates’ pass rates. Since the July 2011 exam, UNLV Law has seen a marked decline in the number of first-time takers who have been able to pass the test (with 2015 as an outlier):

After lobbying to get the cut score lowered from 140 to 138, a change that was made this past summer, UNLV Law was able to raise its first-time passage rate to 81 percent. That’s 15 percentage points higher than last July’s performance. “This is good news,” said Dean Dan Hamilton in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “This shows significant improvement. And I’m grateful to the leadership of the Supreme Court of Nevada in carefully considering how the Nevada bar exam is structured and how it best serves its purpose of serving Nevadans.”

According to Rick Trachok, chairman of the Nevada Board of Bar Examiners, however, the increase in passing scores was due to the fact that the most recent round of test takers scored “much higher” on the multistate portion of the exam. In fact, those in the top quartile of test takers scored about 10 points higher on the MBE than previous test takers. Perhaps the Nevada cut score didn’t need to be lowered; perhaps Nevada just needed test takers who were “more able” to pass the exam.

Congratulations to everyone who passed the July 2017 bar exam in Nevada. May you continue to score higher than your predecessors in all areas of life and law, even if those scores have been artificially propped up. You’ve kind of earned it!

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UNLV law school sees big jump in bar exam passage [Las Vegas Review-Journal]

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, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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