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.