A Skyrocketing Bar Passage Rate
posted by Sarah Waldeck
The New York Times has reported on the controversy surrounding the dismissal of Donald Guter, who had been dean of the Duquesne Law School for three years. The story also has been covered on Law.com and other legal blogs. One detail from the reports is particularly striking: under Guter’s leadership, bar passage rates increased from 68 to 97 percent.
This seems like an extraordinary increase for a three-year time period. If anyone wants to explain how Duquesne managed to do it, I’d be interested. (Or if this kind of increase is more ordinary than I think, I’d appreciate learning that as well.)
December 26, 2008 at 12:01 am
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Responses (6)
former hiring partner - December 26, 2008 at 11:06 am
I don’t know what happened at Duquesne but IIRC, Bill Henderson wrote an article about schools whose outputs (bar passage) exceeds their inputs (credentials of entering students). Teaching to the test, requiring bar exam courses, testing with the same format as the bar exam, and opting out of AALS are ways to increase bar passage. Also, you can expel students whose first year grades indicate that they aren’t likely to pass the bar.
Sarah Waldeck - December 26, 2008 at 11:29 am
Thanks for the cite to the Henderson article, which can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=954604. But I still don’t understand how they managed to have such a large jump in such a short period, unless they expelled large numbers of students.
Sarah
A Voice of Sanity - December 28, 2008 at 12:12 am
97% pass rate? That seems dubious.
Tim Zinnecker - December 29, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Statistics available at the PA bar exam web site confirm the 97% pass rate for first-time takers of the July 2008 exam. When results for repeat takers are added, the pass rate drops to just over 88% (trailing only Penn and Villanova). See http://www.pabarexam.org/Bar_Examination/Statistics/pdfs/0708stats.pdf
Eddie - January 16, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The answer is easy, but the process was not. Nearly every single student participated in free bar review courses during their last years in law school, held on Saturday mornings and if memory serves, at least one week night. How do I know this? I graduated from Duquesne in 2006 and passed two bar exams.
Yes, it is a 4th tier school. However, it is very well respected locally. The reason the students took this issue so seriously was that Duquesne has traditionally had a very high bar passage rate, but graduated a series of classes that performed very poorly. It was the number one issue when I was there, and the students were terrified of failing. Sarah and “A Voice of Sanity” – no conspiracy theories, just hard work
Eddie - January 16, 2009 at 3:49 pm
The answer is easy, but the process was not. Nearly every single student participated in free bar review courses during their last years in law school, held on Saturday mornings and if memory serves, at least one week night. How do I know this? I graduated from Duquesne in 2006 and passed two bar exams.
Yes, it is a 4th tier school. However, it is very well respected locally. The reason the students took this issue so seriously was that Duquesne has traditionally had a very high bar passage rate, but graduated a series of classes that performed very poorly. It was the number one issue when I was there, and the students were terrified of failing. Sarah and “A Voice of Sanity” – no conspiracy theories, just hard work
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