A decision by the South Carolina Supreme Court to invalidate one section of the American Bar Association examination administered in the state last July could improve the accreditation prospects of the Charleston School of Law, The State, a newspaper in Columbia, S.C., reported.

Before the ruling, 65.1 percent of the school’s first class of graduates passed the exam. But new grades calculated without the questioned section brought that figure to 69.9 percent. The school, which has provisional accreditation now, needed a 70-percent passage rate to meet an unofficial benchmark that the American Bar Association is expected to consider in deciding whether to grant it full accreditation.

The court’s decision improved the grades of 20 test takers who initially had failed, eight of whom were graduates of the Charleston institution. Those eight included the daughter of a state circuit judge. Another who benefited, a graduate of the University of South Carolina’s School of Law, in Columbia, is the daughter of a state legislator. The Supreme Court justices denied that their decision had been influenced by politics or any intention of helping the Charleston school, which opened in 2004. —Charles Huckabee