"A Study of the Relationship between Law School Coursework and Bar Exam Outcomes" forthcoming in J. Legal Edu

Professor Robert R. Kuehn (WashU) and David Moss (Wayne State) have just posted an important new manuscript on SSRN (here) slated for 68 J. Legal Edu (2019) that many of our readers will no doubt be interested in. The article tracks 10 years of coursework by WashU and Wayne State grads for any relationship between their coursework (focusing on experiential and bar subject matter courses) and bar exam outcomes. It debunks the concern that experiential coursework may be related to bar exam failure and finds a minimal relationship between bar subject courses and bar outcomes, and even then only for the most at risk students. As Professor Kuehn says, "with the adoption of the ABA’s new 75% bar pass standard, this study provides some much needed empirical light where there has been a great deal of often unsubstantiated heat."

From the abstract on SSRN:

The recent decline in bar exam passage rates has triggered speculation that the decline is being driven by law students taking more experiential courses and fewer bar-subject courses. These concerns arose in the absence of any empirical study linking certain coursework to bar exam failure. This article addresses speculation about the relationship between law school coursework and bar exam outcomes. It reports the results of a large-scale study of the courses of over 3800 graduates from two law schools and the relationship between their experiential and bar-subject coursework and bar exam outcomes over a ten-year period. At both schools, the number of experiential courses or credits taken by a student did not correlate with bar passage, positively or negatively. Enrollment in bar courses correlated positively with passage, but the correlation was modest and significant only for students whose class rank placed them at heightened risk of bar failure. Even for those students, the marginal benefit of additional bar-related courses was not statistically significant once the student had taken approximately the average number of bar courses at that school. The study results indicate that efforts to improve bar passage rates by capping experiential credits are not supported by empirical evidence and that requiring bar-subject courses for students at comparable law schools would appear justified, if at all, only when targeted at students whose class rank places them at enhanced risk of bar exam failure.

(jbl)