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Surveyed law schools to see if they offered bar preparation courses or other programs and whether they were effective. Detailed findings include that about 39 percent do offer such courses. (EV)

Students' and graduates' complaints about the Howard University Law School center on graduates' low rates of passing the bar examination but also take note of the poor condition of the physical plant. Article outlines student criticisms and planned administrative responses to the school's decline in quality. (SLD)

Howard University School of Law had a problem, and school officials knew it. Over a 20-year period, 40 percent of its graduates who took the Maryland bar exam failed it on their first try. During the next 24 months--the time frame required to determine its "eventual pass rate"--almost 90 percent of the students did pass. What they did not know was what was causing the embarrassing bar results, which threatened the law school's accreditation status. A study commissioned by Dean Kurt Schmoke revealed that one-third of the students at the historically Black Washington, D.C. school declined to take bar exam prep courses due to the average cost of between $2,000 and $3,000. The postgraduation courses, offered by a variety of private companies, are widely viewed as vital to ensuring a positive result on the exam. To make sure that first-time pass rate is the same as eventual pass rate, Howard joined the Alliance for Legal Education, which is lobbying to reverse a rule barring use of federal tuition grants to cover postgraduation exam prep courses. Other campuses are also taking action to reverse high bar failure rates by graduates unprepared for the rigors of the exam, which many consider the toughest professional licensing test in America.

The article focuses on improvement project which models an evidence-based approach to law school decision-making. Topics discussed include two-wave approach followed by the project, pressures faced by law school to respond to unfavorable bar exam results, and best place to look for ways to help bar takers.

In 2010, the faculty of St. Louis University School of Law implemented a research exam to test student competencies after their first year of law school. Since its creation, the exam has helped students feel more secure starting their first legal internships, allowed faculty to identify areas of decreased competency, and helped faculty find “better” ways to teach legal research and writing material. In anticipation of the implementation of the NextGen Bar exam in July 2026, the faculty determined that it was necessary to make some changes to the research exam in order to both gather data on students’ responses to the new question styles as well as expose students to the new question formatting. Professor Chris Rollins utilized NCBE materials and Missouri case law to craft a set of NextGen Bar Exam questions that then appeared in the research exam. There are several takeaways from the student data for the NextGen Bar questions that appeared on the research exam. First, students must employ critical reading skills and concept retention when they encounter the progression of questions rolled out for any given fact pattern, as they are currently expected to do on the MPT section of the Bar exam. Second, students need a strong handle on time management in order to succeed with these questions. Third, faculty must help students learn how to spot multiple correct answers instead of searching for a singular correct answer. Lastly, students need more opportunities to connect concepts from different class subjects. There are more and more resources available to help address these needs, and with proper planning, faculty can help students succeed with the NextGen Bar requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal profession has a long history of excluding members of communities of color from the practice of law. Historically, this exclusion was intentional--a function of the harmful and false belief that one's race is a factor in one's ability, or right, to be a lawyer. Today, people from communities of color continue to be excluded from the profession due to systemic, structural, and invisible racism. One contemporary method of exclusion is the bar examination--which has been persuasively shown to produce racially and ethnically biased results even after controlling for other factors like students' entering credentials and tier of school. This Article contends that fifty years of knowing that the bar examination produces racially and ethnically biased results and failing to fix the problem is too long. Our approach to solving the problem must change. We must stop relying on the state supreme courts, the state bar examiners, and the National Conference of Bar Examiners to eliminate racial and ethnic bias in the exam. This Article proposes two paths to fixing the bar examination. First, we must develop successful legal approaches for suing the entities involved. As this Article shows, certain state entities responsible for adopting and administering the law may be subject to suit on Equal Protection, Due Process, Title VII, and contract grounds. The fear of such litigation or damages associated with their success could drive the change we are seeking. Second, law schools must take a more active role in solving the problem. Recent empirical research shows that changes to pedagogy can raise bar passage rates--provided they are the right changes. Law schools could reduce the impact of racial bias in the exam by adopting these pedagogical practices and thereby increasing the bar passage for graduates from communities of color to combat the exam's structural and systemic bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates the negative correlation between the percentages of students who receive accommodations in law schools and first-time bar passage rate. Topics discussed include standardized examinations for disabled examinees and appropriate accommodations for their disability under the American's With Disabilities Act, exclusionary history of the bar admission process, and link between examinee's accommodation status and probability of passing the bar exam.

The article focuses on the problem with the current law school admissions system, which heavily relies on numerical factors such as Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores, resulting in a lack of diversity and limited assessment of applicants' potential for success. Topics include the overreliance on LSAT scores, the impact on diversity, and the need for a more holistic admissions approach based on competencies necessary for the legal profession.

The article focuses on bar passage rates are better measures of the quality of legal education than graduation rates or employment results. It mentions students with higher undergraduate grade point averages (UGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores are more likely to pass the bar exam than students with lower UGPAs and LSAT scores. It also mentions law schools over performed in terms of preparing students to pass the bar exam.

The legal profession holds lawyers to high standards in their personal and professional lives and expects aspiring members to follow the ethical rules with scrupulous precision and candor. Yet the profession, and those monitoring admission to the profession, affords no protections or recourse to this class of aspiring professionals during that critical period between graduation and successful bar passage. Without reform, this previously unacknowledged duty gap will continue to demoralize and potentially harm future lawyers and reflect negatively on the profession as a whole. Supervising bodies, discussed within, treat applicants as if they have already committed an ethical breach. Indeed, applicants are charged with meeting standards strikingly similar to those required for lawyer reinstatement after disciplinary action. Throughout the licensing process, duty remains a one-way street with applicants bearing the burden of compliance. This ethical duty gap was laid bare as these self-appointed supervisory bodies--boards of law examiners across the country--displayed a deeply entrenched commitment to a gatekeeping function by maintaining rigid and opaque lawyer licensing procedures as they administered the bar examination multiple times in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many boards made decisions putting the health, safety, and emotional well-being of bar applicants at risk, and in some instances prevented applicants' exam scores from being portable. Times such as these have historically prompted changes to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. What the COVID-19 bar exam crisis revealed is an uncomfortable truth: The legal profession appears to exhibit a marked lack of compassion, fairness, and ethical obligation to bar applicants in the period between graduation and licensure. The newest members of a so-called noble profession appear to be owed fewer duties than a potential client by every entity involved in the lawyer licensing process and have little to no recourse to have their complaints heard or addressed. This truth is shaking the foundations of the law licensing system, and applicants and others are calling for reform. Yet, on an individual basis, many boards of law examiners across jurisdictions cling to the status quo or adopt the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). Promulgated by the Madison, Wisconsin-based nonprofit organization the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), the UBE is graded and scaled by psychometricians whose duty is to maintain the statistical reliability of its product and whose transparency is limited due to its nonprofit status. Boards of law examiners give broad deference to the NCBE, even though the company is not subject to actionable ethical oversight by the jurisdictions that employ it--not in regard to its business practices, profitability, or code of conduct. Bar applicants, meanwhile, lose the protection of being enrolled in ABA-accredited law schools. The commercial bar preparation companies they are forced to employ do not owe any ethical duties to applicants either, as most are privately-held companies who bind users with arbitration clauses, choice of law provisions, and threats of reporting applicants to their jurisdiction's board of character and fitness if products are misused. This Article calls attention to the duty gap between bar examiners, the legal profession, and aspiring lawyers, identifying and scrutinizing its genesis and presence. It also suggests bar reform is best achieved through greater oversight of the lawyer licensing process by current members of the profession and insists jurisdictions treat bar applicants with the duties prescribed by the rules of professional conduct. Who watches the watchmen? In a selfregulating profession, we all do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on an empirical study that examines the disparate impact of the bar examination on applicants from communities of color. It provides a detailed analysis of the correlation between bar passage and race and ethnicity. It further offers evidence of racially disparate outcomes in the bar exam for first-time and ultimate bar passage, both across different jurisdictions and within law schools.

Since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success despite recent signs of improvement. At least partly as a result, rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates' chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. This Article examines which schools do so and why. Research for this Article began by accounting for law schools' incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar exam passage rate for each ABA-accredited law school. This Article then examines each law school's aggregated performance on bar exams for which its graduates sat based on relative and absolute performance, weighing the difficulty of each state's bar exam. Through this analysis, this Article identifies law schools with consistently higher and lower first-time bar exam passage rates over a period of six years between 2014 and 2019. In addition to identifying law schools that overperform on the bar exam, this Article is a novel contribution not only to the legal education literature but also to the quantitative methodological literature, given its unique tailoring of the classic value-added modeling design to the realities of the bar exam. In the second phase of research for this Article, the authors surveyed administrators at these overperforming and underperforming law schools, as well as law schools in the middle of the distribution, to qualitatively assess how these law schools approach the bar success of their students. Collectively, this Article provides significant insight into how law schools are responding to recent negative trends in bar passage rates, validates successful approaches to mitigate these negative trends, and recommends options available to law schools seeking to improve their students' bar passage rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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One might believe that a law school's graduates doing better on the bar exam than their matriculating credentials predicted must be primarily attributable to the teaching ability and performance of the institution's faculty. Some scholarship makes such a claim. However, it is empirically untrue. Prestidigitation rather than legal pedagogy yields such superficial results. Law schools manipulating their matriculant pools via academic attrition and transfer is the sleight-of-hand that improves their graduates' barperformance rates. This article reveals the math behind the magic. This article demonstrates that effective pedagogy may not be the only driver of a law school's students overperforming on the bar examination. Statistical analysis supports such an assertion by revealing the model misspecification of linear regression upon which previous studies rely. We wrote original code for the program Mathematica to generate regression equations which clearly illustrate the error of previous studies that applied linear regression to heteroscedastic, non-linear data. Linear regression of such data creates bias in favor of schools that matriculated students who have mid-range UGPAs and LSAT scores. We demonstrate mathematically that academic attrition and nettransfer rates--by combining those factors into a single, independent variable--likely affect institutions' over and underperformance on the bar examination relative to the entering credentials of their matriculants. We observed a marked difference in the value of this variables between schools that over and underperformed on the bar examination relative to their students' matriculating credentials. Our findings are significant because the unwarranted attribution of bar success to legal pedagogy harms educators, especially untenured, support faculty. This article shows that factors beyond the control of such faculty drive bar performance. Another lingering, unresolved question might also be harming legal educators: whether ABA standard 316--which mandates a certain level of bar passage by law schools' graduates--is ethically and morally supportable given the ability of schools to manipulate bar passage rates by modulating academic attrition and transfer rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on future of the bar exam and evaluating new pathways to attorney licensing. It mentions American Bar Association (ABA) revealed bar exam passage rates, as reported by 197 law schools in 2020 and 2021, broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender. It also mentions effectiveness of the bar exam in measuring competence to practice law has long been the source of concern.

I study the effects of requiring lawyers to pass the bar exam on whether they are later publicly disciplined for misconduct. In the 1980s, by abolishing what is known as a diploma privilege, four states began to require graduates from all law schools to pass the bar exam. My research design exploits these events to estimate the effect of the bar passage requirement on the share of lawyers publicly sanctioned by state discipline bodies. I find that during the first decade of their careers lawyers licensed without a bar passage requirement are publicly sanctioned at similar rates to lawyers licensed after passing a bar exam. Small differences do begin to emerge after a decade, however, and larger though still modest differences form after two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scatterplot displaying bar passage rates versus academic attrition, across all law schools, suggests that bar passage rates and academic attrition rates are not positively correlated, and may even be slightly negatively correlated. This means that according to the data in the scatterplot, there appears to be a slight trend where the higher an institution's academic attrition rate, the lower the bar passage rate. Such global statistical observations obfuscate the true relationship between attrition and bar passage at individual schools. Academic attrition rates have a significant positive impact on an individual school's bar passage rate. There are confounding variables which prevent us from seeing the true relationship between academic attrition and bar passage rates in the global scatterplot. This brief article quantifies the impact of academic attrition on bar passage for individual schools. We tangibly demonstrate the impact of academic attrition and matriculant credentials on bar passage at individual schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we explain the specific contribution of Bar exams to the professional socialisation of Brazilian lawyer leaders through examining their changing content, particularly the coverage of and balance between commercial and public interests. Understanding what drives curriculum change, as reflected in vocational assessment, could inform the future skills and ethical components of preparatory training of lawyers that in turn might hold implications for the fight against corruption. While we aim to demystify some of the myths surrounding Brazilian lawyers' ethical conduct, that often are reinforced by misleading and unrealistic media representations of legal heroism, we claim the ethical content of vocational Bar exams can still offer valuable insights into the formation of professional character, including the ability of lawyers to fully comprehend and connect with underlying fundamental values and interests that support both professional and state power. At the same time, we must recognise ethical training has its limits and can only ever go so far in helping to eradicate corruption. Our broad claim is that lessons emerging from recent Brazilian experience could, with some caveats, potentially guide and inform future developments in legal education and training elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-empirical law school study advice that emphasizes reading and briefing cases and memorizing rules, without frequent self-testing and formative self-assessment leads to a "law school learning trap." Law students fall into a law school learning trap by focusing on memorization of cases and rules for class preparation, putting off "practice" application of the law as exam preparation. Law students and legal educators misjudge the power of testing as a learning tool, and instead rely on non-empirical, anecdotal resources to guide law student study methods. A legal educator teamed up with an educational psychologist with a particular interest in pedagogical psychology, the study of how students learn, to create a unique Law Student Study Habits Survey to better understand how law students learn. Their groundbreaking empirical research from the Law Student Study Habit Survey shows that practice application of the law through self-testing, self-quizzing, and elaborative strategies positively correlates with academic success in law school, while reading and briefing cases, weak critical reading skills, and rote memorization of rules without practice applying the law negatively correlates with academic success in law school. Both legal educators and law students need to incorporate testing and formative assessment as a study and learning strategy to learn each new topic, not just for exam preparation. Self-testing and formative assessment are not only critical for success in law school, but help students develop successful learning strategies for the bar exam and as lifelong learners in law practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the admission to law practice and the provision of legal services. Topics discussed include American Bar Association ("ABA") requirements concerning law education; bar exams for students from different states; and findings of survey to the annual Seminar on Ethics and Professionalism conducted in Omaha, Nebraska.

The article discusses the authors' views about the validity of using undergraduate grade point average (GPA), a Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score, and a final law school GPA to predict whether an individual will pass an American bar examination, and it mention student success in law school, as well as information about Texas Tech University School of Law students and curriculum. Participation in non-curricular and applied skills opportunities is examined.

Increasingly, law school bar passage rates are an important concern for faculty and administration, as well as students. The July 2014 and July 2015 bar exams saw a precipitous drop nationally in bar passage rates, including declines ranging from four to over twenty percentage points. At the same time, there have been declines in applications to law schools, declines in admissions statistics (LSAT and undergraduate GPA), and an empirically demonstrable decline in student preparedness for law school. The confluence of these events portends even greater declines in bar passage if law schools do not rethink how they prepare students for the bar exam. This Article examines developments in academic support and bar preparation programs with an eye toward suggesting models for effective in-house bar preparation programs. Specifically, this Article examines: (1) the evolution of academic support programs in law schools to include bar passage programs, with a brief description of the types of programs that traditionally have been available; (2) the particular difficulty posed by the California Bar Exam; (3) the existing types of supplemental programs, and concerns posed by programs that are limited to "bar tips" or even limited practice exams or substantive lectures, given the increased numbers of "at risk" students due to the increase in underpreparedness; (4) the supplemental program at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law, including the intensity of effort required of both faculty and students in a comprehensive program applicable to all students; and finally, (5) the bar passage results at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law since adoption of a comprehensive supplemental bar passage program, that have been significantly better than would be expected by some commentators, given its ranking and relative youth as a law school. This Article suggests that the traditional focus of academic support programs, including bar preparation programs, that focus largely on perceived "at risk" students, is insufficient in light of the increased numbers of underprepared students. In order to avoid further calamitous declines in bar passage rates, law schools will have to move from traditional academic support models to models that encourage the entire cohort of students to work together, cooperatively, and that apply extensive time and effort to ensure that all students receive the benefit of these programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Utah Supreme Court's Order on emergency diploma privilege and paper titled "The Bar Exam and the Covid Pandemic: The Need for Immediate Action." It mentions six possible alternatives to the Bar Exam, including postponement, online exams, exams administered in small groups, emergency diploma privilege, emergency diploma privilege-plus. It also mentions court held a joint conference with representatives from both law schools and from the Utah State Bar.

The article presents a speech by Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia which was delivered as the 2014 commencement address at William & Mary Law School in Virginia, and it mentions Scalia's views about the future of legal education in America. Legal reform proposals regarding law students and state bar examinations are mentioned, along with the mastery of a subject such as patent or antitrust law. American law school courses and tuition rates are also examined.

An essay is presented on teaching of law students to clear bar examinations and enhance traditional law school teaching. Topics discussed include enhancing students' skills through problem-based teaching methodology; its methodology such as using bar exam-type questions and providing feedback to students on practice exercises; and how can law professors nurture students.