Top Law Schools

Congratulations to those who took the bar exam in 2019! For the 1st time in 5 years bar passage rates have gone up (+5% from the previous year)! Here is some cool data:

Six schools hit the Ultimate pass rate of 100% for their 2017 classes: Concordia University, Yale, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, Duke and the University of Chicago.

Nine schools failed to meet the new standard that requires 75% of graduates pass the bar within two years of graduation. Those schools are: Charleston school of Law, Florida A&M, Atlanta's John Marshall, Florida Coastal School, University of South Dakota, Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, Mississippi College, The University of the District of Columbia and Faulkner University.

What do you think about this?

Let's keep this upward trend going for 2020!

Concordia confirmed elite

We're back to a full T14

Apparently in 2019, 33 Concordia grads sat for the bar, and 22 passed. Woohoo!

This is great news.....but devil's avocado (tm: Tracey Morgan 30 rock)....the legal profession seems to rely, at least in part, on the mystique and image associated with having a difficult bar exam.

So, I think it's wonderful news, but I don't know that this is particularly news that the profession wants, as a whole, because extremely high bar passage rates makes it look like the test isn't as hard as it is.

However, people should ride this wave of amazing bar passage rates for as long as they can.

Kind of surprised we're not seeing more schools on that less-than-75% list. Several schools in California must have barely cleared the standard (does it still apply to schools like Thomas Jefferson and Whittier that are either closing or going non-ABA?), as well as a handful in the Southeast. Also, I'd take the 5% bump this year with a grain of salt: last year (2018) was an historic bad year for bar passage, so this could be more of a regression to the mean than actual new progress.

rcharter1978 wrote:This is great news.....but devil's avocado (tm: Tracey Morgan 30 rock)....the legal profession seems to rely, at least in part, on the mystique and image associated with having a difficult bar exam.

So, I think it's wonderful news, but I don't know that this is particularly news that the profession wants, as a whole, because extremely high bar passage rates makes it look like the test isn't as hard as it is.

Is that actually the case, though? Before I decided to go into law, as a member of the general public I had zero awareness of the difficulty of the bar exam, let alone any differences in pass rate between different states or graduates of different law schools.

I do think you are right that there is a certain mystique and image associated with being a lawyer, that is maintained in large part by the perception of the profession being difficult to enter. But I think that's more a function of the perceived/assumed difficulty of getting into/graduating from law school. I've never been aware of any perception of the bar exam functioning as a critical gatekeeper preventing unqualified J.D. recipients from joining the bar. If anything, I think it'd hurt public perception of lawyers if it became widely known that oodles of J.D. graduates every year lack the competency required to pass the bar exam.

Put another way: Doctors' perceived mystique/image has not been affected in any way by the fact that basically no M.D. graduate ever fails the USMLE.

QContinuum wrote:

rcharter1978 wrote: Put another way: Doctors' perceived mystique/image has not been affected in any way by the fact that basically no M.D. graduate ever fails the USMLE.

Sure, but M.D. programs are way harder to get into than 98% of law schools. You can get shut out of US M.D. programs with grades/test scores that will get you into half the T14. That screens out most of the goofballs who would otherwise give the profession a bad name.

White Dwarf wrote:Sure, but M.D. programs are way harder to get into than 98% of law schools. You can get shut out of US M.D. programs with grades/test scores that will get you into half the T14. That screens out most of the goofballs who would otherwise give the profession a bad name.

This is true, but I was talking about the public's perception. The perception - which is, in fact, erroneous - is that it's tough to get into law school - any law school. That's why (some) people are impressed when they hear such-and-such's son/daughter's a lawyer - they assume it's tough to get into law school, that it's not something many/most people could do. That's why, e.g., we have oodles of 0Ls on here, year after year, exclaiming about how they're so pumped they "made it" into law school and how we're so mean and unsupportive for telling them the law school(s) they got into aren't worth attending for their goals.

FWIW, the med schools have it right, IMO. Folks should be screened out prior to matriculation, not by a licensure exam after spending 3/4 years of their life and assuming tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars of non-dischargeable student debt.

White Dwarf wrote:

QContinuum wrote:

rcharter1978 wrote: Put another way: Doctors' perceived mystique/image has not been affected in any way by the fact that basically no M.D. graduate ever fails the USMLE.

Sure, but M.D. programs are way harder to get into than 98% of law schools. You can get shut out of US M.D. programs with grades/test scores that will get you into half the T14. That screens out most of the goofballs who would otherwise give the profession a bad name.

I think this it. People perceive law as a difficult and prestigious profession to get into. I don't think it functionally changes that perception whether the weeding out process is done at the beginning or at the end.

So, if you have a system where "everyone" can get into law school and "everyone" can get licensed, think it changes that perception.

I think it's far more fair to the student to weed them out at the beginning and not the end, but that's another discussion.

rcharter1978 wrote:So, if you have a system where "everyone" can get into law school and "everyone" can get licensed, think it changes that perception.

I mean, that's kind of the system we already have, though. Yes, there are news stories of folks trying and failing to pass the CA bar time after time, but those are the outliers, not the norm. Look at https://www.americanbar.org/groups/lega ... tatistics/. Bar passage rates are extremely high, even for T3/T4 law schools that are very easy to get into.

It's just that, somehow, public perception hasn't quite caught up to reality.