Bar Exams, Law Schools

This Law School's Bar Exam Passage Rates Are Embarrassing

Won't the ABA put this law school out of its misery? This is getting absurd.

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‘Why do we keep failing the bar exam?!?!?!?’

It’s no secret that bar exam passage rates have been plummeting across the country for the past few years, thanks in part to lax law school admissions policies, but some law schools have done much, much worse than others. Take, for example, a law school whose graduates had been failing the bar exam in such high numbers that the school introduced a new graduation requirement last summer that all students with GPAs below a 3.33 must take and pass a mock bar exam. This law school was so worried about its graduates failing the exam that in the past, it offered them the chance to take an intensive bar preparation program, coupled with a $5,000 stipend. That same law school was so distraught about graduates failing the bar exam that calls to them were allegedly made the day before the test, offering $10,000 stipends to take it at a later time.

The school we’re talking about is Arizona Summit Law School, which was put on probation by the American Bar Association over its horrendous bar exam passage rates, months after the school logged its worst bar-passage rate in more than a decade.

Now that the results from the July 2017 administration of the Arizona bar are out, it’s time to see if anything this school has done to better prepare its graduates for the test has worked out. Thus far, nothing at all has seemed to help Summit graduates:

Arizona Bar Examination First Time Pass Rate Overall Pass Rate (includes repeaters)
February 2014 54.5 48.8
July 2014 54.8 49.5
February 2015 52.6 46.4
July 2015 30.6 26.4
February 2016 38.1 28.4
July 2016 24.6 19.7
February 2017 29.5 22.7

As we noted previously, according to a press release from the Supreme Court of Arizona’s Committee on Examinations, the overall pass rate for the July 2017 exam was allegedly 57 percent. As it turns out, the overall pass rate was even worse than that — the true overall pass rate for the July 2017 exam was 56.6 percent. This summer’s results are now tied with the July 2015 results for the state’s second-worst pass rates since 2005, which is the earliest date listed on the state’s website. What part did the Arizona Summit Law School play in this summer’s bar exam carnage?

For the sake of comparison, take a look at this breakdown of results by in-state law schools, courtesy of the State of Arizona Committee on Examinations:

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First things first: July is prime time for new law school graduates to take the bar exam, yet only 35 graduates from AZ Summit deigned to take the test for the first time. Now is a good time to note that this law school enrolled 262 first-year students in 2014. Although we’re sure that many students were lost due to attrition — either by failing out, transferring out, or opting out because they no longer wanted to waste their money — at first glance, it looks like only 13 percent of what would have been the class of 2017 took the bar exam, and about 3 percent of the class actually passed the exam. There is something very seriously wrong with this picture.

Now that the ABA is paying attention to what’s going on at law schools that have been systematically taking advantage of students, it’s high time that the Accreditation Committee and the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar do the right thing and withdraw all life support for Arizona Summit. The school’s latest performance, or lack thereof, on the bar exam is surely the final nail in its coffin.

Stop students’ suffering. Pull the plug. Revoke this law school’s accreditation now.

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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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