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Cool Data on a Hot Issue: Empirical Evidence that a Law School Bar Support Program Enhances Bar Performance
No full textThe bar exam is a hot and controversial topic for academics, lawyers, bar examiners, graduates, and students. Criticism of the exam abounds. Does the bar exam correctly decide who should be admitted to practice law? Does the bar exam unfairly exclude minorities from the profession? Regardless of the accuracy of these criticisms, the bar exam is a reality that law schools and their graduates must face.
Many law schools are now offer programs specifically designed to improve their graduates\u27 performance on the bar exam. But none has engaged in a statistically verifiable analysis of whether the programs materially affect a student\u27s chance of passing the bar on a first attempt. This article fills the gap. It presents statistical analyses supporting the conclusion that a bar support program can significantly improve bar passage rates
Microaggressions: What They Are and Why They Matter
No full textThis paper, addresses how microaggressions affect students in law schools and what law schools and law teachers could do to provide a more favorable environment in which all students - and especially students of color - can flourish. Law schools are competitive places, microaggressions need to be understood in this context. The first section examines some of the harms that microaggressions cause. The second, discusses two forms of microaggression that are present in the law school environment
Standardized Clients: A Possible Improvement for the Bar Exam
No full textAs this Article describes below, medical educators have been working with standardized patients for more than three decades and have accumulated an extraordinary amount of data that validates their use of this method. Much work remains before legal educators can realistically talk about using a similar technique as a component of law school grades, let alone as part of a high stakes test such as the bar exam. Thus, while not an immediate option, it is possible that at some future date the use of standardized clients might enhance the efficacy of a [Public Service Alternative Bar Examination (\u27PSABE\u27)]. None of this appropriate skepticism, however, should preclude serious consideration of the Joint Proposal for a PSABE, irrespective of the possible future use of standardized clients. Nor should this caution deter legal educators from considering the standardized client as a future component of the public service bar exam or of any other innovative bar admission proposal. Some people may feel that it is too much of a stretch to initiate discussion about changing bar exams simply on the basis of the experience of medical educators. I remain encouraged, however, by John Sexton\u27s call for us to \u27[think] outside the box\u27 regarding the training of lawyers.
Part I describes the Joint Proposal for a PSABE, its genesis, its political development, and key unanswered questions. Part II discusses in some detail my recent work in further developing the standardized client in a law school curricular context. Part III discusses the similarities between some of the tasks of doctors and of lawyers. Then, building on the experience of medical educators, this Article sets forth proposed empirical analyses for the use of standardized clients. The legal profession might do well, once again, to follow the lead of the medical profession in better serving the public\u27s continuing need for competent and caring professionals. Stating it differently: Is it reasonable to think ahead to a time when the standardized client will be an integral part of the bar exam? (843–844)
Finding Success in the Cauldron of Competition: The Effectiveness of Academic Support Programs
No full textThis article provides an in-depth analysis of our comprehensive study of the Pace Academic Support Program. Section II of the article discusses the purpose and design of ASPs generally, and Pace Law School\u27s program specifically. Section III describes the research design, methodology, and procedures used for this study. Section IV evaluates and analyzes the findings, with an in-depth analysis of the impact each service yields to ASP students, as well as the statistical significance of such benefits. Section V evaluates the importance of background criteria and the impact that such variables have on ASP participants and non-participants. Section V also discusses whether any of these background variables allow some students to derive a greater benefit from the program than other students participating in the same service. Section VI elaborates on the benefits of participation in an ASP, while Section VII elaborates on the impact of background variables on the performance of students
The Bar Examination and the Dream Deferred: A Critical Analysis of the MBE, Social Closure, and Racial and Ethnic Stratification
No full textIn this article, the author applies social closure theory to help explain why more than a dozen states have recently enacted more stringent bar exam passing standards and why others are considering similar changes. While higher standards are usually advocated as a way to protect the public from lower student quality, the author applies social closure theory and argues that changes in passing standards are a response to a perceived oversupply of lawyers, especially among solo practitioners. In the 1990s, crowding among solo practitioners reached record levels, and real earnings eroded substantially. The author then links this labor market analysis to a critical examination of the knowledge claims that justify the bar exam to the legal profession and the public at large. The article\u27s conclusion is that the psychometric research sponsored by the National Conference of Bar Examiners consistently minimizes and obscures the disparate impact and unfairness of the bar exam for people of color
A Forked River Runs Through Law School: Toward Understanding Race, Gender, Age, and Related Gaps in Law School Performance and Bar Passage
No full textAnalyses of the National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study (N = 27,478), demonstrate that law schools enlarge entering academic differences across race, age, disability, and socioeconomic origins rather than reduce them, and that academic differences in turn impact bar passage. Such differences cannot be reduced to (1) academic preparation, effort, or distractions; (2) instructional or law school-type characteristics; (3) social class; or (4) acceptance of an elitist legal ethos. Rather, results suggest that (1) women, minorities, and other atypical law students confront stigmatization throughout legal education;(2) for women (entering law school in 1991), this stigmatization is new, rejected, and consequently unassociated with law school outcomes; (3) for minorities, this stigmatization is continuous with prior socialization, making resistance difficult and consequent impact sizable; and (4) for other atypical law students, this stigmatization varies with visibility of difference, as do resistance and impact. Implications for social stigma theory and legal education are discussed
Diverse Disconnectedness: Homophily, Social Capital Inequality, and Student Experiences in Law School
No full textLaw school students are encouraged frequently to “network.” However, depending on demographic categories, they may have access to differently resourced social networks in law school. In this article, we draw from our mixed-methods research to explore this diversity of experience, its limitations of access, and the possible network inequalities that may limit the value of legal education to diverse students across different institutional contexts. Using survey and network data (N = 744), collected during the fall of 2019 from three law schools, as well as supplementary interview data (N = 55), we examined students’ social networks, the structures of these relationships, and their associations with law school satisfaction. We find that, while students tended to cluster based on shared characteristics (that is, race, gender, sexual identity, political orientation, religion, and age) and contexts (that is, type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homophilous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black and White students, but the same embeddedness was associated with lower satisfaction with law school for Asian and Latinx students. These results provide grounds for rethinking how diversity matters in law school and its implications for marginalized students’ experience and success
The LSAT, Law School Exams, and Meritocracy: The Surprising and Undertheorized Role of Test-Taking Speed
No full textWithin the field of psychometrics, it is widely acknowledged that test-taking speed and reasoning ability are separate abilities with little or no correlation to each other. The LSAT is a univariate test designed to measure reasoning ability; test-taking speed is assumed to be an ancillary variable with a negligible effect on candidate scores. This Article explores the possibility that test-taking speed is variable common to both the LSAT and actual law school exams. This commonality is important because it may serve to increase the predictive validity of the LSAT. The author obtained data from a national and a regional law school and followed the methodology of a typical LSAT validity study, with one important exception: student performance was disaggregated into three distinct testing methods with varying degrees of time pressure: (1) in-class exams, (2) take-home exams, and (3) papers. Consistent with the hypothesis, the data showed that the LSAT was a relatively robust predictor of in-class exams and a relatively weak predictor on take-home exams and papers. In contrast, undergraduate GPA was a relatively stable predictor on all three testing methods.
The major implication of this study is that the current emphasis on time-pressured law school exams increases the relative importance of the LSAT as an admission criterion. Further, because the performance gap between white and minority students tends to be larger on the LSAT than UGPA (the other important numerical admissions criteria), heavy reliance on time-pressured law school exams is likely to have the indirect effect of making it more difficult for minority students to be admitted through the regular admissions process. The findings of this study also suggest that when speed is used as a variable on law school exams, the type of testing method, independent of knowledge and preparation, can change the ordering (i.e., relative grades) of individual test-takers. The current emphasis on time-pressured exams, therefore, may skew measures of merit in ways that have little theoretical relationship to the actual practice of law. Finally, this study found some preliminary evidence that the performance gap between white and minority students may be smaller on less time-pressured testing methods, including blindgraded take-home exams. Definitive evidence on this issue will require a larger sample size
Describing the Ball: Improve Teaching by Using Rubrics—Explicit Grading Criteria
No full textAssessment is crucial to effective teaching and learning. Carnegie\u27s Educating Lawyers and Roy Stuckey\u27s Best Practices for Legal Education emphasize the importance of assessment. This article explains how detailed, written grading criteria describing what students should learn and how they will be evaluated should be a central part of law teachers\u27 assessment plans. The article details how rubrics can improve law student learning, and contains both detailed, step-by-step directions on creating rubrics and examples of rubrics from many different law school courses
Students with CLAS : An Alternative to Traditional Bar Examinations
No full textCLABA is a proposed public service alternative to the traditional bar examination in Arizona. The goal of CLABA is to interactively assist the community by helping to build it rather than simply protecting it from incompetent attorneys. Initially conceptualized as an AmeriCorps-type opportunity for recent law school graduates, CLABA has evolved into an innovative, integrated solution to unmet legal needs within both the community and the profession.
Part I of this Article summarizes the CLABA proposal; Part II addresses the unmet community needs that CLABA will help remedy; Part III describes how CLABA will function as an efficient stepping stone into the legal profession; and Part IV discusses the organizational and quality control issues of CLABA