Bar passage and admissions tests among topics to be revisited by ABA Legal Ed Council
A proposal to tighten up bar passage requirements for ABA-accredited schools, which the House of Delegates rejected in February, will be revisited in November by the council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.
The current Standard 316 outlines a few ways that a law school can meet its requirements. The simplest is that, for the five most recent years, at least 75 percent of those graduates who took a bar exam passed it. If for three of those years the 75 percent rate is reached, that also is acceptable. Some schools demonstrate compliance by having a first-time bar passage rate within 15 percentage points of the first-time bar passage rate of the state for which the school is required to report. In doing these calculations, schools have to account for at least 70 percent of their graduates, beginning with the state in which the highest number of graduates took the bar exam.
The proposed revision to Standard 316 calls for a requirement that 75 percent of an accredited law school’s graduates pass a bar exam within a two-year period.
Under ABA rules, the House of Delegates can send a proposed rule back to the council twice for review with or without recommendations, but the council has the final decision on matters related to law school accreditation.
Options for what the council does next include again submitting the same revision to the House of Delegates at the February midyear meeting, continuing to study the matter, abandoning the revision or referring it back to the Standards Review Committee for more work, Barry Currier, the section’s managing director, wrote in an Oct. 20 memo (PDF) to the council. The group will discuss the issue when it meets Nov. 2 through Nov. 4 in Boston.
Critics of the proposed revision frequently argued that tighter bar passage standards would worsen diversity in the profession. The council in June began a survey of law schools focusing on bar passage information. Out of the bar pass rates from 92 schools that participated the survey, only three were below the revised standard’s 75 percent pass rate, Currier’s memo states. According to Currier, accounts that the revision “would have an adverse impact on, perhaps, a large number of schools and, in particular, on the group of minority-serving schools or law schools located in California was not borne out by the data we collected.”
Survey participants on the list (PDF) include the law schools at University of California Berkeley, Howard University and Yale University.
The council at its November meeting will discuss proposed revisions to other accreditation standards as well, including:
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• Standard 106, which deals with branch campuses.
• Standard 403, which deals with the instructional role of faculty.
• Standard 503, which deals with admissions tests.
Additionally, the council will be revisiting its employment outcome reporting form. After criticism of a new form that would allow school-funded jobs that were full-time, long-term, require bar passage and paid more than $40,000 annually not to be identified as school-funded positions, the council in August referred the issue back to the standards review committee.
Also, a proposal to merge both the accreditation and standards review committees into the council will be discussed. According to a memo (PDF) from Jeffrey Lewis, chair-elect of the council, the group voted “to support the idea” of the merger at its August meeting.
