Was the Michigan State Bar Exam Just Too Hard for Thomas M. Cooley Law Grads?

If your read President and Dean Don LeDuc's recent "commentary," you reach the conclusion that the reason why only 51% of Cooley grads passed the Michigan State Bar exam was because the exam was just too damn hard. What's he complaining about? So what if only 110 Cooley Law grads will have to take the exam over. The School has already pocketed their tuition.

Perhaps Dean LeDuc thinks that the use of the bar exam to regulate the labor supply of lawyers in Michigan is inappropriate. See ATL's Test Takers Tank On The July 2012 Michigan Bar Exam post by Elie Mystal. Dean LeDuc writes

The 2012 results are a great disservice to those who took the examination and to the law schools, an issue that should have been addressed by the Supreme Court and the Board of Law Examiners before these results were released. These bodies and the law schools have a common responsibility to assure that the bar examination is a valid vehicle for assuring that those who seek to enter the legal profession have a minimally acceptable level of competence. I cannot speak for the other Michigan law school deans, but for myself I cannot accept that the 2012 results validly assessed our graduates. In short, these results are not for real.

Perhaps what Dean LeDuc really thinks is that graduates of the self-proclaimed second best law school in the country should be exempt from taking the bar exam. For more, see LeDuc's Are the Bar Results for Real? and Staci Zaretsky's Quote of the Day: Sorry, Dean, Those Bar Results Are ‘For Real’ on ATL. [JH]