The American Bar Association rejected a proposal on Monday to require at least 75 percent of law students at accredited schools to pass the bar exam no later than two years after their graduations.
ABA's House of Delegates argued that the requirement would “be unfair to institutions that serve minority students," according to Inside Higher Education. An overwhelming majority of the ABA’s House of Delegates voted against the proposal, with a final tally of 88-334.
Several ABA leaders concerned with diversity in the legal profession sent a letter, claiming that “proposed changes to Standard 316, the bar passage rule, will have an adverse impact upon diversity within legal education, the legal profession, and the entire educational pipeline.”
The letter also mentions several data points from the past 10 years of ABA-accredited HBCU law schools that were underperforming in bar passage results, noting that if the new standard for bar passage were to be applied to results from 2016 and 2017, the list of schools that would have lost accreditation “could include five of the six HBCUs."
Aside from the impact on HBCU schools, which significantly contribute to racial diversity in the legal profession, the changes in bar passage standards would also impact other contributors, including “schools in Puerto Rico, most of the schools in California, and other schools across the country,” according to the letter. In 2018, “the first time pass rate for graduates of California ABA-accredited law schools dropped 6 percentage points from July 2017 to July 2018 (70% to 64%),” according to the aforementioned letter.
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6 comments:
So we reward low IQ and mediocrity. Welcome to the Brave New World
Never will have equality if we keep having classes of citizens. Rewarding the have nots is not success. Look at ALL the years we've done this - without success.
The soft bigotry of low expectations
Executive summary: We have chosen to keep our expensive diploma mills as full as possible.
Graduates who can't pass the bar exam after multiple attempts make us look bad for choosing students poorly, teaching them poorly, graduating them and foisting the idea they'll get legal jobs. We can obscure those facts.
But if really poor law schools which farm unprepared minority students close a) we'll all look bad, and b) we might have to take some of their unprepared students which c) will drop our collective scores even more.
Given this reality, we prefer the status quo (that's Latin) over actually raising the profession back up and will advise unprepared students Caveat emptor (also Latin).
So very well said! Truth!
"higher standards are unfair to minorities." Absolutely, I agree. It says exactly what we all think, but can not say. Read the book, The Normal Curve, about race and intelligence (Guess what? Caucasians are not at the top). It is all explained scientifically, unbiased, using statistical methods. Of course many will not accept the scientific method unless it produces a DESIRED outcome. The book can be interpreted as supporting the argument that higher standards are unfair to SOME minorities, but certainly not all.
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