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Surprise: MBE Scores Rise in 2016
August 31st, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Erica Moeser, President of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, sent a memo to law school deans today. The memo reported the welcome, but surprising, news that the national mean score on the MBE was higher in July 2016 than in July 2015. Last year, the national mean was just 139.9. This year, it’s 140.3.
That’s a small increase, but it’s nonetheless noteworthy. LSAT scores for entering law students have been falling for several years. The drop between fall 2012 and fall 2013 was quite noticeable: Seventy percent of ABA-accredited law schools experienced a drop in the 25th percentile score of their entering class. At 19 schools, that score fell 3 points. At another five, it was 4 points.
LSAT scores correlate with MBE scores, so many observers expected July 2016 MBE scores to be lower than those recorded in 2015. Moeser, for example, has repeatedly stressed the link between LSAT scores and MBE ones. She recently declared: “What would surprise me is if LSAT scores dropped and bar pass rates didn’t go down.”
Moeser just received that surprise: Students who began law school in fall 2013 had lower LSAT scores than those who began a year earlier. The former students, however, beat the latter on the MBE after graduation.
So What Happened?
Unpacking this news will take more time and data. Moeser mentions in her memo that the mean MBE score increased in 22 jurisdictions, fell in 26, and remained stable in two. Teasing apart the jurisdictions will provide insights. School-specific results will be even more informative in exploring why the overall score rose.
For now, I offer four hypotheses in descending order of likelihood (from my perspective):
Alternative Publishing Models For Cost-Conscious Professors
July 13th, 2016 / By James Grimmelmann
Casebooks are shockingly expensive. The latest edition of Stone, Seidman, Sunstein, Tushnet, and Karlan’s Constitutional Law has a list price of $242. It’s even more shocking when you consider where the money goes. Not to pay for the cases and other primary materials that make up most of a casebook’s contents: they’re public domain and free to all. Mostly not to cover printing costs: the paperback edition of The Power Broker (to pick a book with the same word count and heft as a casebook) has a list price of $26, and you can buy it on Amazon for $18. Mostly not to authors: royalty rates are typically 10% to 20%. No, most of that money ends up in the pockets of the casebook publishers and other middlemen in the casebook chain. This is a tax on legal education, sucking money from law students and from the taxpayers underwriting their student loans. (more…)
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Online Education at Law Schools
June 23rd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Today’s New York Times includes a column by Elizabeth Olson discussing online initiatives by law schools. Elizabeth was kind enough to quote some of my thoughts on this issue. If you’d like to read more about my suggestions, which encourage law schools to adopt a more innovative spirit with online courses, you can do so here. This is an area in which we could do well by doing good–if we’re just courageous enough to break some of our conventional boxes.
Lessons for Online Legal Education
June 5th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
An increasing number of law schools are creating online courses, certificate offerings, and degree programs. As newcomers to online education, we should look to existing programs for inspiration. One of those is Harvard Business School’s successful CORe program, an online certificate course in business basics. I wrote about CORe’s suitability for law students several weeks ago. Here, I examine three lessons that the program offers to law schools interested in online education.
Artificially Intelligent Legal Research
May 24th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
At least three law firms have now adopted ROSS, an artificial legal intelligence system based on IBM’s pathbreaking Watson technology. The firms include two legal giants, Latham & Watkins and BakerHostetler, along with the Wisconsin firm vonBriesen. Commitments by these firms seem likely to spur interest among their competitors. Watch for ROSS and other forms of legal AI to spread over the next few years.
What is ROSS, what does it do, and what does it mean for lawyers and legal educators? Here are a few preliminary thoughts.
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Prices and Priorities
May 11th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Bob Kuehn has written a terrific essay refuting the notion that clinical courses are too expensive for law schools to offer. His online piece includes plenty of hard data; some he gathered and some he drew from other sources.
Kuehn’s essay reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a member of my university’s board of trustees. I alluded to the challenges that public universities like ours face with reduced tax support for higher education. He responded differently than most trustees or administrators, who are happy to bemoan losses of public support. “There’s plenty of money,” he said. “It’s just a question of your priorities in spending it.”
And, of course, he was right. For the current fiscal year, my university predicted revenues of $6.1 billion dollars and expenditures of $5.5 billion. Even if revenues fell to match expenditures, that’s a lot of money to distribute.
Most universities, let alone law schools, are considerably smaller than Ohio State. About half of our budget, furthermore, stems from the medical school and health care center. (This is an interesting fact about many university budgets, that health care research and delivery is matching or exceeding other educational expenses.) Still, my board member’s comment is apt: Law schools operate sizable budgets and they have considerable discretion in allocating that money.
We don’t favor LSAT scholarships over need-based ones because budgets force us to do so; we make that choice to pursue higher rankings. Similarly, we don’t cater to the demands of tenured research faculty, rather than expanding clinical education, because our budgets are limited. We make that choice because it suits us (the tenured faculty) and because we hope, once again, that our choice will propel higher rankings.
Bob provides a welcome antidote to these ingrained choices. Expanding clinical education wouldn’t actually raise tuition; it would simply require faculties to change their priorities. And even those changes would be relatively small. We have to ask ourselves: What is the real root of our resistance to clinical education?
Legal Education and the Justice Gap
April 29th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I read recently about an organization that provides efficient, effective legal services to low- and middle-income clients. The organization, Chicago’s Coordinated Advice and Referral Program for Legal Services (“CARPLS“), has been serving clients for almost a quarter century. They currently help about 28,000 clients a year at an average cost of just $33 per consultation. How do they do it? And what can legal educators learn from CARPLS’s success? Read on.
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Harvard Goes Hollywood
April 22nd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Hollywood Public Relations is promoting a new program at Harvard Business School (HBS) called the Credential of Readiness (CORe). One of Hollywood PR’s account executives sent me an email, asking if I would like to blog about the program. Why not? I’ll discuss here the program’s suitability for law students. In a second post, I’ll explore what law schools themselves might learn from CORe.
And, of course, I’ll reflect on the curious marriage of the words “Hollywood” and “Harvard.”
Path Cleared for Paid Externships
March 15th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar took several significant actions at its March 11–12 meeting. The first of these was approval of several changes in Standards 304 and 305, which govern experiential learning and non-classroom educational experiences. Some of the changes adjust guidelines for supervision of externships; the most controversial allows schools to award externship credit for paid positions.
I have written several times to express my support for this change. Individual schools may still choose to ban paid externships, but the path should soon be open for schools to integrate these externships within their educational programs. The ABA House of Delegates will vote on the change, probably at its August 2016 meeting, but that vote does not bind the Council. [Updated at 4:45 p.m. to correct meaning of ABA’s vote.]
The responsibility now lies with law schools to implement this change wisely. I supported the change because I hope it will help us find innovative ways to educate students more thoroughly for law practice, as well as to help employers develop lasting frameworks for education in the workplace. We won’t accomplish either of those goals unless law schools devote real resources, energy, and collaboration to working with employers on these externships.
If your law school has an innovative idea for creating paid externships–or if you’re an individual with such an idea–please send me an email (merritt.52@osu.edu). I hope to feature good ideas here and promote discussion around them. Few ideas are perfect at their inception but, through discussion and sharing, perhaps we can refine ideas that will achieve our educational goals. Consider it online workshopping of pedagogic ideas!
Improving Bar Passage
March 13th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Scott Johns, Professor of Practice and Director of the Bar Success Program at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, has posted a thoughtful empirical analysis of the college’s bar preparation program. Johns analyzed 642 students who graduated from the college in 2008–2010 and then immediately sat for the Colorado bar exam. He knew the exam score for each graduate, rather than simply pass-fail status, which allowed for a particularly nuanced analysis. Using multiple linear regression, Johns found the following associations with bar exam score:
- Law school GPA showed the strongest association. An increase of one point in GPA was associated, on average, with an increase of 46.5 points in bar exam score.
- LSAT score was the next strongest predictor. A one-point increase on the LSAT correlated with a 1.1 point increase in bar exam score.
- Participation in two of the college’s bar success programs each correlated with higher bar exam scores. A third program did not show a significant correlation.
- Neither sex nor minority status correlated significantly with bar exam scores.
- Age correlated negatively with bar exam scores; on average, older students achieved lower scores.
- Participation in the college’s part-time program likewise correlated significantly with lower bar exam scores.
All of these associations occurred while controlling for the other variables listed above. Participation in one of the successful bar preparation programs, for example, was significantly correlated with a higher bar exam score after controlling for LSAT, law school grades, sex, minority status, and other factors listed above.
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