The Best Practices for Legal Education Blog would like to extend a special thank you to the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) for their dedication to this project.
Robert Kuehn, Professor of Law at Washington University
School of Law in St. Louis, and David Moss, Associate Clinical Professor at Wayne
State University Law School, recently conducted a large-scale study looking at
the relationship between clinical/experiential or bar subject-matter courses
and bar passage success in a paper entitled, “A Study of
the Relationship Between Law School Coursework and Bar Exam Outcomes.” As a
law student currently enrolled in a clinic, this study immediately piqued my
interest.
This study was in response to fear that bar passage rates
were down because of rising enrollment in “experiential courses” as opposed to
“bar-subject courses.” Law schools began pushing students to enroll in more of
these bar-subject courses to correct this so-called issue. However, Professor
Kuehn and Professor Moss observed that there was no evidence to suggest that
taking more bar-subject courses was appropriate advice for all students. Their
study looked at this missing evidence between bar-subject courses and experiential
learning and bar exam outcomes for ten years between two law schools: Washington
University School of Law (WashU) and Wayne State University Law School (Wayne
State). Both schools only require the designed first year courses and the
upper-level writing courses mandated by ABA accreditation standards.
Previous studies performed in states like Texas, Colorado,
and California looked at the effects of coursework and bar passage rates. These
studies did not support the claim that taking more bar-tested law school course
improve chances of passing on the first attempt. Notably, a study done in
Indiana concluded, “simply forcing lower-performing students to take more upper
division bar-subject courses will not solve the bar examination failure problem.”
The first goal of the present study was to determine whether
a graduate’s enrollment in elective experiential courses was related to
first-time bar passage success. Next, it was to assess whether enrollment in
elective courses that cover bar subjects was related to bar success.
Data was collected from law school graduates from 2006-2015. The following table outlines the number of graduates with LSAT scores and bar passage rates between the two schools:
The next table looked at graduate characteristics such as undergraduate GPA, LSAT score, 1L GPA, and law GPA and their correlation with bar passage:
It wasn’t until 2005 that the ABA began requiring graduates to receive professional skills instruction with as little as one credit satisfying the requirement. In 2014, the ABA changed this to require six credits beginning with 2019 graduates. The study authors decided to track enrollment in skills courses versus bar passage over this time period.
The table above reveals a solid line depicting that average
bar passage percentages were steady from 2006-2013 (this is when experiential
course enrollment increased by over 50%). During the significant rise in
experiential enrollment, bar passage percentages were largely steady. “Therefore,
efforts to link declining nationwide bar passage rates to the rise in
experiential course enrollment are not supported by national statistics.” A
more likely contributing cause for bar passage declines since 2014 is weaker
credentials of incoming 1Ls.
At WashU, it was found that while taking at least the
average number of bar courses is associated with increased likelihood of
passing the bar, there was no statistically significant increase in bar passage
associated with bottom-quartile LGPA graduates who took more than the school’s
average. This was similar with graduates in the bottom half of their class at
Wayne State. Results for both schools indicate that graduates in bottom
quartile who take fewer than the average number of bar courses at their school were
associated with a significant increase in bar failure. Further, at both
schools, students entering with scores lower than 150 were associated with pass
rates significantly below the school’s average.
This study concluded that the claim that the dramatic
decline in bar passage rates is due to law students taking more experiential
courses or fewer bar-related courses is not supported. It characterized efforts
to cap experiential credits in order to improve bar passages rates are
“misguided,” warning that schools should not expect that “mere exposure” to
more bar courses will significantly improve bar passage rates.
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