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<\/p>\nCalifornia\u2019s notoriously difficult bar exam has long been a point of pride among the state\u2019s lawyers.\u00a0Now it is prompting blowback.<\/p>\n
With passing rates hitting historic lows, the state\u2019s law schools are pushing for a controversial change: lowering the score required to pass.<\/p>\n
The educators argue that California holds graduates to an unreasonably high standard that no longer can be justified, especially as the price of law school skyrockets.<\/p>\n
Others say lowering the bar would pander to a recent cohort of law students with weak credentials, and that law schools should either raise their own standards or shut their doors.<\/p>\n
The issue came to a head after the announcement that just 35% of takers passed the most recent California exam, given in February. Only 43% passed last July\u2019s test, the lowest mark for the summer exam in more than three decades.<\/p>\n
Bar-passage rates nationally have trended downward since 2014. While some states have begun to see rebounds, others haven\u2019t. Florida, for instance, continued a four-year downward slide on last July\u2019s test, to 68% passing, down from a recent high of 80% in July 2012.<\/p>\n
The declining rates have coincided with a steep drop in applicants to law school, spurring the programs to shrink class sizes and, in some cases, admit students with weaker grades and test scores. From 2010 to 2016, first-year enrollment at American Bar Association-accredited schools nationwide fell nearly 29%.<\/p>\n
One camp of law-industry watchers blames the drop in passing rates on the declining credentials of incoming classes. Others point to changing study habits of so-called millennials, who grew up with the ability to find information at their fingertips and aren\u2019t accustomed to the intensive memorization and writing skills needed to pass a bar exam. Law schools point to the test\u2019s required score as the problem.<\/p>\n
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The issue has been acute in California, which licenses the second-largest number of lawyers each year after New York and houses 10% of the nation\u2019s ABA-accredited law schools.<\/p>\n
Deans of 20 of California\u2019s nationally accredited law schools earlier this year unsuccessfully tried to persuade the California Supreme Court, which oversees the state bar association and regulates the exam, to temporarily lower the passing standards. The controversy soon reached the statehouse, where the Senate Judiciary Committee called a hearing to analyze the decline.<\/p>\n
Now, the State Bar of California is racing to answer a series of existential questions: Is the stringent test\u2014with a passing standard higher than all states but one\u2014serving the public interest? And does the exam even test what incoming lawyers need to know?<\/p>\n
A study released this week by two Pepperdine University School of Law professors, Robert Anderson IV and Derek Muller, concluded that California lawyers with lower bar exam scores were more likely to be disciplined or disbarred during their careers, based on limited publicly available data.<\/p>\n
The format of the exam hasn\u2019t changed substantially in decades, though the test will be reduced from a three-day undertaking to two days starting in July. A California state bar analysis concluded that the two-day test shouldn\u2019t affect passage rates.<\/p>\n
At University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, Dean David Faigman said he was shocked and disappointed last fall to learn that just 51% of his graduates taking the test for the first time passed the July exam.<\/p>\n
While accepting that his school had to do more to help students prepare, his ire soon turned to the exam.<\/p>\n
Each state sets its own passing score on a common multiple-choice section of the bar developed by a national organization. Since 1984, California\u2019s so-called cut score has been 144, higher than every state but Delaware. New York uses 133; 16 other states set it at 135.<\/p>\n