December 16, 2007

New Law School in South Carolina Benefits From Grade Changes on Bar Exam

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

Comments

1. Is this something new, or something that applies to provisionally acccredited law schools — the ABA examination referred to in the second line of the news item? Bar exams are generally designed by the individual states, rather than accreditors — at least those I took in the ’80s were.

   — Comm Prof    Dec 17, 05:30 AM    #

2. My question too – perhaps this is a reference to the Multi State Exam which looks like a national exam but technically is part of the state exam process – by choice of the State Bar Exam Committee (generally acting with delegated authority from the Supreme Court).

   — Bill    Dec 17, 07:35 AM    #

3. This has nothing to do with the composition of a state’s bar exam, which remains each state’s prerogative (although virtually every state includes the multiple choice multistate bar exam as part of its test). Rather, it has to do with a school’s graduates’ performance on a given state’s bar exam.

   There has been talk in the past 6-12 months of requiring accredited schools up for sabbatical review and yet-to-be-accredited and provisionally-accredited schools to establish a bar passage rate that is no lower than X points below the statewide pass rate of their home state or of the state in which the largest group of their graduates sit for the bar. (I haven’t followed the discussion closely enough to recall the exact number or range.) This was spurred, at least in part, by the “Spellings Report” and the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to renew the ABA’s accrediting authority for a shorter stint this time around than has previously been the case.

   — Keith    Dec 17, 10:49 AM    #

4. Right, Keith, I understand how S.C. has seemingly jiggered the numbers and why. What I’m still not clear on is what “the American Bar Association examination” is. If it’s the MBE, that’s something else altogether.

   — Comm Prof    Dec 17, 02:04 PM    #

5. The section in question is actually the wills, trusts, and estates section of the state bar exam. The State Supreme Court cited a scoring error and invalidated that entire section.

   — Phillip    Dec 18, 09:55 AM    #

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