The path to becoming a lawyer has remained unchanged for years: Go to law school, take a state bar exam and start your legal career.
The most recent law school grads, however, are struggling to stay on course, earning the lowest scores on the July Multistate Bar Exam in nearly 30 years. To become a licensed practitioner in most states, J.D. graduates must take the standardized test as part of a state bar exam. The MBE is offered twice a year and covers constitutional law, criminal law and other subjects law students usually learn about during their first year of school.
At 139.9, July’s mean score is the lowest July score since 1988, when it was 139.8, Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, wrote in the September issue of The Bar Examiner, a quarterly publication by the organization.
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Stats vary from school to school in terms of what percentage of new J.D.s pass the bar exam their first time around. For prospective law students, a school’s bar passage rate should not be a deal breaker when deciding where to go, experts say.
“I’m not sure that it’s very relevant,” says Mayssoun Bydon, founder and managing partner at The Institute for Higher Learning, which gives admissions advice and test preparation help to aspiring college and graduate students, and provides other services.
“The same applicant, no matter what law school they attend, if they’re going to have a hard time passing the bar, they’re going to have a hard time passing the bar,” says Bydon, a graduate of the law school at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Students who generally struggle with standardized tests, such as the LSAT, are likely to struggle with this exam, she says.
Your own raw intellect, ability to memorize information, standardized test-taking skills and how you end up preparing with a bar preparation course will largely determine your success, Bydon says.
Many law schools train students to think like lawyers, says Dan Sullivan, principal at Sullivan Law Schools Admissions Consulting and a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. “But the bar exam tests your knowledge of the actual laws and many times the laws of the particular state in which you’re taking the bar exam.”
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Plus, he says, some schools — often lower-ranked ones — train students on how to simply pass the exam and focus less on skills that will lead to being a top lawyer.
Graduates’ own willingness to buckle down and study — or not — can also heavily influence their chances of passing the bar, experts say. Because so many factors influence what happens when J.D.s take the bar exam, experts say it’s not best for applicants to put too much weight on a school’s bar passage rate.
But passing the bar can greatly expand a law graduate’s job prospects, experts say.
“If you want to practice law, that is to say, you want to go out and represent clients, you absolutely must pass the bar exam,” Sullivan says. Grads who want to teach law classes or work as a reporter covering the legal field, for example, may not need to be licensed, he says.
Some schools are increasing their efforts to help students pass the bar, which in turn helps them to become employed. In September, the University of Utah Quinney College of Law launched its 100-100 initiative, which aims to help 100 percent of graduates pass the bar exam on the first try and help 100 percent of graduates get jobs.
“This is what our students deserve,” says Bob Adler, the school’s dean. The bar passage rate for first-time test-takers at Quinney was 91 percent in 2014, according to the school’s website.
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“What we’re focusing on is those students in our student body who are at the highest risk of bar failure based on their academic performance,” he says. There will be additional academic support for students and more assessments of students’ work throughout their schooling, among other efforts, to help with bar passage and employment rates.
A school’s employment stats, says Sullivan, can be a better statistic for law school applicants to investigate than its bar passage rates. Applicants should find out how a school’s graduates do in terms of “placement at a job which requires a law degree within nine months of graduating,” he says.
If prospective law students want to compare the bar passage rates of different schools, they should research which state bar exam graduates from those schools usually take and the state where the law schools are located, says Bydon.
Graduates from a school in Iowa, for example, may mostly take the Iowa state bar and have a high bar passage rate. But if an applicant is hoping to take Florida’s bar exam, that information may not be as helpful.
Applicants can also consider if the state they want to practice in requires the bar exam. Most do, but in Wisconsin, for example, lawyers who graduate from Marquette University Law School or the University of Wisconsin–Madison Law School are not required to take the state bar exam.
Applicants should also think about what kind of law they want to specialize in, how much they’re able to pay for school and other factors when deciding where to go, says Adler, from the University of Utah. The bar exam, he says, “should be one of many factors they look at.”
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Assess Whether Bar Passage Rates Should Influence a Law School Decision originally appeared on usnews.com
