When it comes to bar passage, not all law schools are created equal. A recent paper published in the Florida Law Review, and summarized by Law.com, analyzed law schools’ bar passage rates and found that some schools’ students are “outperforming” while others are “underperforming.”
Researchers conducted the analysis by looking at each ABA-accredited law school’s predicted pass rate compared to the actual pass rate for first-time test-takers over a six-year period. The study’s authors predicted the pass rate for each school by evaluating the students’ incoming credentials (e.g., LSAT) in each law class along with the average bar pass rate for the jurisdictions where the students take the bar exam. The actual rate incorporates both the relative and actual performance of students on the test.
The top 25 overperforming law schools—schools where the actual pass rates regularly surpass the predicted rates—are listed below. Law.com’s reprint of the list also includes the U.S. News and World Report ranking in parentheses.
Florida International (#60 in U.S. News)
Stanford (#1)
USC (#16)
UC-Berkeley (#10)
North Carolina (#22)
Belmont (#105)
Michigan (#10)
Florida State (#56)
UCLA (#14)
Virginia (#8)
Campbell (#125)
Yale (#1)
LSU (#99)
Georgia (#20)
Duke (#5)
Harvard (#5)
Wake Forest (#22)
Georgia State (#69)
Chicago (#3)
Penn (#4)
Illinois (#43)
Baylor (#49)
Washington & Lee (#40)
Liberty (#135)
Vanderbilt (#16)
In addition to the analysis, the study surveyed the overperforming and underperforming law schools on their approach to bar preparation. Ultimately, the report found a wide disparity in the curricular and extracurricular activities reported—not just between under and overperforming schools, but also within the cohort of overperforming schools. This suggests that a variety of support systems can effectively support students in passing the bar and that there is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
However, there were some interesting shared practices within the cohort of overperforming schools:
Overperforming schools focused much more on first-year bar pass rather than the ultimate pass rate (pass rate within two years).
Overperforming schools did not rely on entering students’ academic credentials to predict bar success. They acknowledge that there are many other factors, including student distraction and time constraints due to work, life, or other priorities, and/or the financial costs of law school or bar prep courses. The top performing schools attempt to mitigate these barriers directly, with resources that include academic support and bar prep programming.
The top programs also targeted students at risk for bar failure based on first year GPA, rather than on their academic credentials prior to law school.
Overperforming schools created an environment, an ethos, where faculty, staff, and students all believed that they could educate/be educated at the school for first-time bar success.