NCBE: New law school grads "less able"

[CountDeMoney]

Why Did So Many People Flunk the Bar Exam This Year?
By Natalie Kitroeff November 18, 2014
Bloomberg Businessweek

The most recent bar exam test results are in, and they are ugly. In several states, people who took the bar in July were more likely to fail than those who took it last year, and scores on one portion of the test dropped to their lowest point in 10 years.

Are America's law graduates really getting dumber? The people who put together the bar exam seem to think so.

The National Conference of Bar Examiners, a nonprofit that prepares one of the state-specific multiple-choice sections in which scores dropped dramatically, sent a curt message to law school deans in October. "The results are correct," wrote Erica Moeser, the group's president, in an Oct. 23 memo. "The group that sat in July 2014 was less able than the group that sat in July 2013."

It's technically true that this year's crop of grads was "less able" than before, if you use their pre-law-school test scores as a proxy for their smarts. The median LSAT score among students at American law schools has declined every year from 2010 to 2013, according to an analysis by Jerry Organ, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas. Last year, Organ found, law schools admitted 50 percent more students with low LSAT scores than they did three years ago.

Those numbers suggest that students might have been less prepared, but the figures may not be dramatic enough to explain this year's bar results. Organ analyzed how LSAT scores have tracked with scores on the exam in the past, and he found that this year's J.D.s should have performed slightly worse. Instead, they bombed.

Organ and additional law professors point to another culprit: a software glitch that affected test-takers for hours in July. At the end of the first day of testing, people who took the test in one of 43 states in which test company Examsoft administers the bar exam were unable to upload their answers for hours, stretching into late evening. The error eventually led states to extend the upload deadline; students went back to work on the test the following day. Examsoft said no answers were lost, but many feel that the time spent contending with software issues and the anxiety that resulted may have hurt students' performance on the rest of the test.

"I was up until 1:00 a.m. trying and praying for my exam to go through. When I finally did get to bed, I barely got 2 hours rest because I had to be up at 5:00 a.m. to start day two of the bar," one test-taker was quoted as saying in an August lawsuit that law grads filed against Examsoft.

Nancy Leong, a law professor at the University of Denver, remembers getting dozens of texts, e-mails and phone calls from students "in various degrees of panic" the night that Examsoft went on the fritz. One women cried for 20 minutes, Leong says. Another asked whether she should cancel the test that night, given how badly she expected to do in the morning. Blaming the drop in scores exclusively on a less-competent group of test-takers ignores how the glitch affected people, she says. "I think that it's insulting."

For its part, Examsoft points out that scores dipped everywhere, including such states as Virginia and Arizona that didn't use the company's software. The bug may have caused a bout of future-lawyer hysteria, but observers note it shouldn't eclipse the quality problem law schools face.

As fewer people apply to law school, many programs have accepted less-qualified applicants in order to keep class sizes the same and to sustain their bottom line, says Derek Muller, a law professor at Pepperdine University. "This drop, while bigger than expected, is just a sign for what's going to come for law schools as the incoming classes continue to decline in quality."

[The Minsky Moment]

It's a good thing they are entering a profession where you never have to work late, or function on less than an optimal amount of sleep . . .

[Ideologue]

Don't worry, they're not.

[The Brain]

Professor Organ? Really?

[KRonn]

Oh great, so now we're getting stoopid lawyers, not just the usual garden variety ambulance chasers.   

[Barrister]

Yet another reasons to prefer older lawyers.

[CountDeMoney]

Yet another reasons to prefer older lawyers.

Same thing's happening in the medical profession.  Get your older doctors while you still can, because the new ones coming out now are benefiting from undergraduate grade inflation and medical schools' aversion to kick anybody out academically, ever.

[Kleves]

I think the bar passage rate in Washington, which just switched to the Uniform Bar Exam, has been significantly higher recently than it used to be. In 2013, ~85% of people passed.

[Valmy]

Wait we are on a terminal decline because they passed at a rate comparable to 10 years ago?  I guess Lawyers from ten years ago are similarly bad?

[Ed Anger]

Lawyers should be culled regularly, like helots.

[Ideologue]

Wait we are on a terminal decline because they passed at a rate comparable to 10 years ago?  I guess Lawyers from ten years ago are similarly bad?

The point is smart people are avoiding law school because it's a human potential destruction factory, but in order to make revenue targets they're letting a lot of retards in instead, their crippled brains evidenced by their poor LSAT scores.  This is because law schools don't care about the profession, let alone students (LOL), but only their own short-term gross.  Just like every other decisionmaker in America.  This is why central planning in education is so obviously desireable.

Also... the class of 2014 is also only the tip of the iceberg.  Matriculants from 2012 and last year were even worse.

[grumbler]

I think that it is hilarious that the group that created the test that gave anomalous results immediately shifted the blame to the test-takers, and the languishotti immediately accepted their claim at face value.

I find it likelier that the one test was a focus of the problem, rather than the thousands of test-takers, especially since the explanation of the problem is easy if it is a bad test, and impossible if it is a sudden and otherwise-inexplicable drop in test-taker knowledge from last year to this one.

Some drop was to be expected based on what we know (and already knew) about the LSAT scores of the students now graduating.  The big drop is almost certainly mostly due to crappy testing.

[CountDeMoney]

Lawyers should be culled regularly, like helots.

Meh, it used to be "kill all the lawyers", but who is going to defend you when you kill all the stockbrokers first?

[LaCroix]

north dakota's passage rate dropped by 20% between this year and last year. i don't know about other schools, but i'd shift the blame to the test-takers in this case because of the massive drop. before, it seems like a lot of people took easy courses rather than the (sometimes) harder bar courses. it's been a rude awakening for a lot of students, so that strategy will probably change for at least the short term.

for the other schools, the article doesn't specify the drop rate or the lower admission standards. from what i've seen, the average decrease in passage rates and admission standards isn't much: a few percentage points and a small drop in LSAT/GPA. this is kind of to be expected, though. fewer people are attending law school, or not attending lower ranked law schools. those least likely to attend are people who do their research and discover law school doesn't guarantee a good job. on average, these students probably have higher LSAT/GPA scores.