What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley? Forum

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cavalier1138

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Re: What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley?

Post by cavalier1138 » Tue Jun 25, 2019 6:25 am

Bingo_Bongo wrote:Yeah, the California bar is hard
But that's really the main explanation for the numbers you found. If you had picked any non-California top school, the pass rate is consistently 96% and up.

I agree that maybe some people do deserve to fail out of top schools, but bar passage rates have nothing to do with that. The difference between the 40% of students failing the bar out of a California T3 and the 10-15% of students failing the bar out of Berkeley/Stanford is likely the reason for failing. I'd lay good money on the latter students failing because they didn't spend as much time on bar prep as they were supposed to and/or got burned out after three years of school. T3 students (as mentioned) have been preparing for the bar for at least a full academic year prior to taking the exam, so the reason for failing is far more likely to be failure to grasp the material.

And as already discussed, bar passage is a bad proxy for law school performance and legal competence.

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Re: What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley?

Post by Bingo_Bongo » Tue Jun 25, 2019 3:15 pm

I get that the California bar exam isn't perfect; but it's the only objective standardized measure between students of different law schools that tests knowledge of substantive law. There's really no other way to measure the competency of law students between schools when it comes to knowing basic 1L tested materials.
nixy wrote: But at schools in which students fall almost entirely within a very narrow band of high LSAT and high GPA? Everyone is absolutely smart enough not to fail.
Yes. Arguably everyone admitted to ANY ABA accredited law school is smart enough not to fail. Even third tiers generally require a good undergrad GPA and LSAT score > 50% of test takers. But discouraging professors from failing students just because the students are "smart enough not to fail" is silly. It's a form of character evidence, really. If I was a 1L professor, I'd be concerned only with how well the student understood my subject and performed on my exams. I couldn't care less that he had a 175+ LSAT score and was capable of doing well if he wasn't actually doing well.

Let's also not pretend that doing really well on the LSAT somehow means you're going to grasp all the different 1L subjects (1L Civil Procedure is absolutely foreign to some of the brightest people. If they don't put in some serious effort to really learn it, they can absolutely easily fail notwithstanding their inherent brilliance).

Again, case in point. Let's look at bar results where 1L topics are uniformly tested across all law schools:

At Loyola (Los Angeles): 1L classes are subject to a max median grade of 80%, meaning half the class gets Cs or below. Their 2018 July Bar Passage was 72%

At Berkley: Everyone's great and nobody fails. Their bar passage rate was 86%.

Is that mere 14% difference in students who can pass a test of minimal competency really worthy of the vastly different attitudes in grading?

And again, I get that the bar exam isn't 100% the same as law school exams. But, it's waaaaay closer than the LSAT is. So to say that a high LSAT score and decent undergrad GPA (which is pretty much the only thing that gets you into a fancy law school) entitles students to rest on their laurels and not have to worry about failing if they don't understand a class is just plain silly.

Professors should be allowed and encouraged to flunk law students who don't understand a course at a competent enough level.

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Re: What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley?

Post by cavalier1138 » Tue Jun 25, 2019 3:25 pm

Bingo_Bongo wrote:Professors should be allowed and encouraged to flunk law students who don't understand a course at a competent enough level.
Again, totally agree with that statement, but the bar exam doesn't measure that in any way. The bar exam covers subjects in a comprehensive manner that most professors don't have time to do in a single-semester course. It also covers topics that many law students are never exposed to, especially at T13 schools (i.e. wills). The bar is only a "measure of competence" because the ABA decided that it should place the arbitrary barrier to entry after students coughed up a few hundred grand and that it should base that arbitrary barrier on the ability to memorize legal doctrine, despite the complete pointlessness of doing so in practice.

I can envision lots of situations where an extremely competent student at a T13 would struggle with the bar, because an open-book exam asking about the grey areas of personal jurisdiction isn't testing the same skills as a multiple choice exam trying to see if you can remember the time limit for withdrawing a frivolous claim before a Rule 11 motion can be filed with the court.

Also, Loyola only dismissed 6 students (1.6% of the class) for academic reasons on its last 509 report. So despite having a harsher curve, it's hardly cracking the whip.

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Re: What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley?

Post by nixy » Tue Jun 25, 2019 5:16 pm

Bingo_Bongo wrote:Professors should be allowed and encouraged to flunk law students who don't understand a course at a competent enough level.
Sure, but you still haven’t demonstrated that this is happening regularly at schools that don’t fail people. Just because someone’s score has to be at the bottom of the curve doesn’t mean that person doesn’t understand the course at a competent enough level.

I guess I agree with you in that I don’t agree with the people who act like it’s some kind of treason if a prof (at a T14) gives out the discretionary C; I agree that no one’s entitled to a good GPA just by getting in. I don’t think, though, that profs aren’t failing people because of that; I just don’t think people who get into T14s actually fail very often at all.

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Re: What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley?

Post by Bingo_Bongo » Tue Jun 25, 2019 11:37 pm

cavalier1138 wrote:The bar is only a "measure of competence" because the ABA decided that it should place the arbitrary barrier to entry after students coughed up a few hundred grand and that it should base that arbitrary barrier on the ability to memorize legal doctrine, despite the complete pointlessness of doing so in practice.
I actually disagree with that. While closed book exams in real life are called "malpractice", having a baseline knowledge of basic legal concepts and cases rote memorized actually makes for a better lawyer. Having that baseline of knowledge committed to memory allows for faster and more efficiently research if you need to study a new area of law quickly. You also never know when you'll be expected to know something really basic, and not be able to research it.

Kayne West a while back said something along the lines of school being pointless since you can just google everything now. Well, you don't always know WHAT to google if you haven't been exposed to a certain concept or idea before.

Very unpopular opinion, I know. But I think all schools need to go back to more rote memorization. I had to learn the preamble to the Constitution in 8th grade, so should everyone else.
I can envision lots of situations where an extremely competent student at a T13 would struggle with the bar, because an open-book exam asking about the grey areas of personal jurisdiction isn't testing the same skills as a multiple choice exam trying to see if you can remember the time limit for withdrawing a frivolous claim before a Rule 11 motion can be filed with the court.
21 days, unless it's done sua sponte, then the judge can just smack you. Boom!
Also, Loyola only dismissed 6 students (1.6% of the class) for academic reasons on its last 509 report. So despite having a harsher curve, it's hardly cracking the whip.
Very true. It's pretty rare for students at third tiers to flunk out, too. You're talking generally less than 2% of the students.
nixy wrote: Sure, but you still haven’t demonstrated that this is happening regularly at schools that don’t fail people.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying T13s are full of idiots who can't comprehend basic concepts of law and all need to flunk out. I was mainly responding to some of the comments suggesting that professors shouldn't be failing anyone at those schools (either because the students are paying customers, or because they all have LSAT scores so they shouldn't be failing).

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Re: What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley?

Post by nixy » Tue Jun 25, 2019 11:52 pm

Bingo_Bongo wrote:Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying T13s are full of idiots who can't comprehend basic concepts of law and all need to flunk out. I was mainly responding to some of the comments suggesting that professors shouldn't be failing anyone at those schools (either because the students are paying customers, or because they all have LSAT scores so they shouldn't be failing).
That's fair. If a student genuinely fails the school should be able to fail them (though some remedial help might be good before kicking them out, depending on what's going on).
I actually disagree with that. While closed book exams in real life are called "malpractice", having a baseline knowledge of basic legal concepts and cases rote memorized actually makes for a better lawyer. Having that baseline of knowledge committed to memory allows for faster and more efficiently research if you need to study a new area of law quickly. You also never know when you'll be expected to know something really basic, and not be able to research it.

Kayne West a while back said something along the lines of school being pointless since you can just google everything now. Well, you don't always know WHAT to google if you haven't been exposed to a certain concept or idea before.

Very unpopular opinion, I know. But I think all schools need to go back to more rote memorization. I had to learn the preamble to the Constitution in 8th grade, so should everyone else.
Okay, first, doesn't everyone know the preamble already from Schoolhouse Rock?

Second, calling this "rote memorization" doesn't make much sense to me. I know certain local rules about, say, deadlines etc. because I use them all the time, so I've learned them. I certainly didn't sit down and make a concerted effort to memorize them, though. Similarly I've learned (a lot of) the major legal principles that come up all the time in my practice, but I didn't sit down and memorize them, either, and I certainly haven't memorized cases. I *know* certain cases in the way that (to give a really basic example) if I were doing admin law, I'd know cases like Chevron and whatever the case is that gives the standard for things like SS benefits cases (I don't do admin law so I don't remember what that case was called), or if I were doing employment discrimination I'd know McConnell Douglas. But I certainly didn't sit down and memorize those cases in law school and I wouldn't sit down and memorize them now. I learn them through using them as necessary for my work.

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Re: What percent of students flunk out of law schools like USC and UC Berkeley?

Post by cavalier1138 » Wed Jun 26, 2019 5:56 am

Bingo_Bongo wrote:Very unpopular opinion, I know. But I think all schools need to go back to more rote memorization. I had to learn the preamble to the Constitution in 8th grade, so should everyone else.
I know the introduction to "The Canterbury Tales," and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

I agree with Nixy that most "rote memorization" in practice occurs through regular interaction with a specific body of law. For example, I imagine you don't remember the 21-day deadline because you learned it while studying for the bar. But I also imagine you don't remember anything beyond the most generic information regarding future estates (unless you're a probate lawyer).

Yes, a baseline level of knowledge is necessary to know where to start for most things. But speaking as someone who's really good at memorizing things, it's a useless party trick. You need enough top-level knowledge about a subject for your eyes to twitch when you read an important detail. And in reality, you need to work in a field for several years before that becomes instinctive. You can't just sit down with a treatise at your desk and try to commit the whole thing to memory.

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