Friday, January 21, 2005

Law School Rankings And Bar Passage Rates

A friend and I were wondering if it were only law students who were interested in which tier their law school fell in or how previous graduates were doing on bar exams.

For example, does any one on the faculty or in the administration at Southwestern care that our bar rates for the past two years have been abysmal? Does anyone other than the law students themselves have a stake in which to care about?

Just wondering because it would be nice to know that someone care enough to help the students effectuate change in future results.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

AMEN

W said...

Amen was not the response I was looking for, but I'll take what I can get.

matt said...

Last year, there were more than a couple profs who commented ahead of time that they were curious to see how our ranking changed.

Then again, fucking WashU lives and dies by those rankings.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous here, re: "does any one on the faculty or in the administration at Southwestern care that our bar rates for the past two years have been abysmal?"

-- hmmmm... perhaps the Administration and faculty on the admissions committee DO care, as evidenced by the smaller entering class for Fall 2004-- it appears that the 04 entering class is about 100 students smaller than in previous years. If the Admissions committee did it right, the bottom quartile did not get in, thus, will not graduate, and in 3 or 4 years from now the bar pass rate will be in the high 70-s.

Current and previous students cannot blame the faculty, the curve, the facilities, WiFi, or the administration for low bar pass rates. The profs give the same lecture to each student in the class, the library is the same for all, etc. And yet, more than half the grads pass the bar on the first try; obviously most of the students figure out what it takes to pass the bar. The bottom quartile has historically shown a very low pass rate: about 10 percent in July 2004.

A better question is: can the non-profit school survive financially with fewer students. 100 fewer 1st years equates to roughly 3 million dollars less income to the school, per year, even if the attrition rate drops. Perhaps the curve will be increased to 2.8 to reduce the attrition rate.

W said...

Or perhaps they will raise tuition yet again.