Q: What do South Texas College of Law (4th tier law school) and Texas Wesleyan Law School (also 4th tier) have in common?
A: They, along with Texas Tech (2nd tier), U of H (2nd tier), SMU (2nd tier), and Baylor (2nd tier), have higher bar passage rates that UT.
Please join me in a collective WTF?
I used to give Sager the benefit of the doubt, but his head really should roll for this. Being in 7th place in bar passage is unacceptable.
And don’t give me that crap about Texas being about the ‘philosophy of the law;’ classes like Reading Roman Law and Food Law, might be well and good, but won’t mean a damn thing to someone who can’t pass the F’n bar. The truth is that the vast majority of the people who come to law school do so to become lawyers. I just can’t understand how the only top tier law school in the state can only consistently beat St. Mary’s and Texas Southern in bar passage.
Wait, St. Mary’s is only about 3 percentage points behind us, I better be careful what I say.
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Hm. I could be wrong, but my understanding was that those stats have looked like that for a long time. Aside from Baylor -- which as far as I've heard teaches pretty much exclusively to the Texas bar -- those numbers are all quite close (with the exception of TSU).
Given that there are quite a few students at Texas that don't come here to become lawyers (lots of dual-degrees, etc.), I have to imagine that there may be a lot of Texas grads taking the bar as a second choice, backup option, etc. These are also only numbers for the Texas bar, so they could be skewed based on grads who are considering practicing in other states and maybe not fully concentrated on Texas, as well as by a higher percentage of graduates who are headed for more competitive out-of-state jobs who might bump up that passage rate were they to take the bar (those numbers seem to indicate that many of our graduates didn't take the Texas bar).
That's obviously all conjectural, but I'm just trying to point out that I'm not sure how much those numbers indicate; nor whether they have much to do with Dean Sager -- not that there aren't some legitimate criticisms there :) but I'm not certain this is one of them...
1) I don't think the stats have looked that way for a long time. This years stats are pretty bad in comparison. Over the last five years, in comparison to the other Texas schools, we have been ranked 7, 4, 3, 1, and 2. If you want to look at the actual percentages, they have been 89, 90, 89, 92, and 93. Going from 93% to 89% seems to be a pretty big jump.
2) I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that the people who don't want to be lawyers wouldn't sit for the bar at all but would rather pursue their desired career, but I've got no data to prove that.
3) Point well taken on the out of state takers, I'd like to see that data as well as an overall passage rate for all graduates.
4) I still think our showing is disgraceful and I'm still pissed. I do think that Sager, while not being totally to blame, has to share in the responsibility in this. I'm not saying we should become a 3-year bar prep, but there should be more "bar classes" offered than there currently are.
Agreed about offering bar prep classes -- but the sample size is only 250 students. that means the difference between 89% and 93% is flipping ~5 people from not-passing to passing. That's a pretty small margin of error and not, I think, much cause for alarm. I certainly wouldn't call it a 'big jump.'
*10 students from not passing to passing
--Obviously I didn't go to law school because I'm good at math--still not a huge leap though
The other thing to keep in mind is that this is much more about the failure numbers -- if just 10 of the people who failed didn't take the test at all, that would put us in the #2 spot.
In order to get to that same place by adding people, we'd have to have something like 130 more people take the bar and have all of them pass. I pretty sure we don't even graduate that many people.
Can we find out if the 30 that failed had Rau for Contracts?
-jennybelle
So as not to derail, I copied my tangent about LR&W to its own thread on my blog. Carry on.
The only significant difference I see is between Baylor and the others, which makes sense if it was just three years of bar classes (yuck). I appreciate the fact that UT offers courses we couldn't get anywhere else. That being said, there's nothing wrong with doing away with some of the random stuff (Readings in Roman Law) for a bar class. I just wouldn't want any of my beloved criminal law taken away. It's actually relevant to what I want to do AFTER the bar, which is arguably even more important in the long run (assuming almost everyone eventually passes).
I've been fairly critical of Dean Sager in the past, but I don't think he should get the blame for this one. Tough to see how anything he could have possibly done could have changed the outcome for people who were already in their 3L year when he took over.
Also, so far as I know, there haven't been any changes to the core curriculum since he became dean.
Finally, one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of UT students leave Texas and take the bar elsewhere, and my general impression is that these students definitely do well. In fact, UT had the highest passage rate of any school on the CA bar exam last year.
Dean Sager just isn't to blame for this one.
Another point re: bar classes - So far as I know, UT already offers classes on every subject tested on the bar. If people don't take them, well...that's their own choice.
The bar exam is fucking stupid. Really, it is. Developing a law school curriculm around passing the bar exam would also be stupid (and would make you dumber for it).
To elaborate, it's much more important that you know how to think critically about the grey areas in the law, than for you to, say, have memorized the various categories of future interests. It's also more important that students know how to write well rather take multiple choice exams or write quickly. (UT may not always measure up in this latter regard, but schools focused on preparing their students for the bar exam are much, much worse.)
Also, as someone mentioned above, at least in my exam year (July 06), UT had the highest bar passage rate in California. So, maybe that's the problem. UT is preparing y'all for the wrong exam.
Yeah, Stanford's bar passage rate was like 85% last year.
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