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A Study of the Relationship Between Law School Coursework and Bar Exam Outcomes
No full textThe recent decline in bar exam passage rates has triggered speculation that the decline is being driven by law students taking more experiential courses and fewer bar-subject courses. These concerns arose in the absence of any empirical study linking certain coursework to bar exam failure.This article addresses speculation about the relationship between law school coursework and bar exam outcomes. It reports the results of a large-scale study of the courses of over 3800 graduates from two law schools and the relationship between their experiential and bar-subject coursework and bar exam outcomes over a ten-year period. At both schools, the number of experiential courses or credits taken by a student did not correlate with bar passage, positively or negatively. Enrollment in bar courses correlated positively with passage, but the correlation was modest and significant only for students whose class rank placed them at heightened risk of bar failure. Even for those students, the marginal benefit of additional bar-related courses was not statistically significant once the student had taken approximately the average number of bar courses at that school. The study results indicate that efforts to improve bar passage rates by capping experiential credits are not supported by empirical evidence and that requiring bar-subject courses for students at comparable law schools would appear justified, if at all, only when targeted at students whose class rank places them at enhanced risk of bar exam failure
The Three Ages of Modern American Lawyering and the Current Crisis in the Legal Profession and Legal Education
No full text[B]ar leaders and legal educators must carefully evaluate how market forces are reshaping expert professionalism to determine whether social trustee professionalism eventually will be crowded out or whether professionalism itself will cease to be a useful tool for understanding lawyers’ identities. That assessment will need to take place not just in large law firms but in solo practices, small and mid-sized firms, public interest organizations, and government agencies. Efforts to study professionalism should go beyond an analysis of technical knowledge to identify a broad portfolio of skills that predict success in law practice. Moreover, there should be a recognition that the meaning of social trusteeship can differ across practice sectors, especially when comparing law firms to government agencies and public interest organizations. Ideally, these inquiries will offer a more nuanced picture of the ways in which lawyers understand their work and allow law schools to prepare students to navigate their own careers effectively. (459–460
Diversifying Graduate Education: The Need to First Understand What Contributes to Graduate Degree Aspiration Changes During College
No full textHistorically, graduate aspirations have been treated as fixed constructs, which neglects to consider that while students may begin college with or without a graduate degree aspiration, they may change their plan when progress through college years. Using data from the 2012/14 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, this study looks at how college students change their graduate degree aspirations between freshman year and junior year and what shapes students’ decisions in graduate degree aspirations. The results reveal racial differences in graduate degree aspiration changes during college years and indicate community colleges may serve an equal function as four-year institutions to help students keep up with their graduate degree plans. Findings have implications for campus leaders and administrators who seek to create and maintain environments that support college students’ development and their graduate degree goals
Examining Grad PLUS: Value and Cost
Get PDFThis report, the first in a two-part series, uses federal data to show that the primary criticisms of the Grad PLUS program—rising institutional education costs and potential cost to the federal government—are either nonexistent or massively overblown
A Blueprint for Using Assessments to Achieve Learning Outcomes and Improve Students’ Learning
No full textFor over a decade, there has been agreement among legal educators that assessments are a critical tool to improve students’ learning. We are beginning to understand that the types of assessments we use have the greatest influence on how and what students learn. As a result of recent ABA accreditation requirements, there is now a scramble in law schools to adopt assessments that improve students’ learning and bar passage rates so as to satisfy these new requirements. Nevertheless, there has been no clear methodology to assist doctrinal faculty in creating an effective assessment program. After twenty-seven years of developing assessment programs that have improved students’ learning and bar passage rates, this article is an attempt to provide faculty and administrators a blueprint for incorporating an effective assessment program.
The article is divided into four parts. Part one recounts how the assessments the author has used over the years have evolved to become an assessment program to help students improve their learning skills, perform better in law school, and pass the bar exam. Part two describes how to design assessments that relate to course learning objectives and help students in developing critical analytical and self-learning skills. Part three describes the difference between general and individual feedback, explains why individual feedback is the most important feature of an effective assessment program, and enumerates the characteristics of effective individual feedback. Part four includes specific steps that faculty, administrations, and academic achievement professionals should take in order to create an assessment program to improve students’ self-learning and analytical skills
A Rebuttal to Kinsler\u27s and to Anderson and Muller\u27s Studies on the Purported Relationship between Bar Passage Rates and Attorney Discipline
No full textBecause of the escalating cost of legal education and the recent decline in bar passage rates among ABA approved law schools, some analysts have reasonably attempted to determine the social costs of legal education. Many have attempted to place the blame on segments of the legal education marketplace. The complicated relationships among the policies of providing more access to justice, increasing minority representation in the bar, and protecting the public from shoddy law practice have recently inflamed academic debate. In the rush for assessing blame, some analysts have published empirically flawed reports that have received a great deal of media and academic attention, but have not received serious methodological analysis. The problem is that merely believing that one variable, such as LSAT scores, causes results, such as lower bar examination scores and/or increased ethical violations, is very different than empirically proving that professed cause and effect relationship. This article responds to two of these studies: one conducted by Professor Kinsler in Is Bar Exam Failure a Harbinger of Professional Discipline? and another conducted by Professors Anderson and Muller in The High Cost of Lowering the Bar. These studies concluded that there is either a causal link and/or a correlation between bar passage scores and the probability of state bar disciplinary rates. Both studies argue for more restrictive access to law schools or, alternatively, for more regulation of the legal stream leading to membership in the bar. Their data does not support their drastic remedies