HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Why Did So Many People Flunk the Bar Exam This Year?

It’s technically true that this year’s crop of grads was “less able” than before, if you use their pre-law-school test scores as a proxy for their smarts. The median LSAT score among students at American law schools has declined every year from 2010 to 2013, according to an analysis by Jerry Organ, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas. Last year, Organ found, law schools admitted 50 percent more students with low LSAT scores than they did three years ago.

Those numbers suggest that students might have been less prepared, but the figures may not be dramatic enough to explain this year’s bar results. Organ analyzed how LSAT scores have tracked with scores on the exam in the past, and he found that this year’s J.D.s should have performed slightly worse. Instead, they bombed.

Organ and additional law professors point to another culprit: a software glitch that affected test-takers for hours in July. At the end of the first day of testing, people who took the test in one of 43 states in which test company Examsoft administers the bar exam were unable to upload their answers for hours, stretching into late evening. The error eventually led states to extend the upload deadline; students went back to work on the test the following day. Examsoft said no answers were lost, but many feel that the time spent contending with software issues and the anxiety that resulted may have hurt students’ performance on the rest of the test.

Back in the ’90s I chaired a committee that looked at our grads’ bar passage rates, and we found that the LSAT score was a very strong predictor for bar exam performance — much stronger than college or law school grades, for example. That’s not really surprising, given that they’re both big standardized tests aimed at similar populations. But declines in LSAT scores are only sort of declines in student quality. LSAT scores are pretty good predictors of first-year grades, and of bar passage, but not especially good predictors of career success in lawyers.