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75 Fla. L. Rev. 65 (2023)
The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools That Overperform on the Bar Exam

handle is hein.journals/uflr75 and id is 65 raw text is: THE SECRET SAUCE: EXAMINING LAW SCHOOLS THAT OVERPERFORM ON THE BAR EXAM Christopher J. Ryan, Jr. and Derek T. Muller* Abstract Since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success despite recent signs of improvement. At least partly as a result, rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates' chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. This Article examines which schools do so and why. Research for this Article began by accounting for law schools' incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar exam passage rate for each ABA-accredited law school. This Article then examines each law school's aggregated performance on bar exams for which its graduates sat based on relative and absolute performance, weighing the difficulty of each state's bar exam. Through this analysis, this Article identifies law schools with consistently higher and lower first-time bar exam passage rates over a period of six years between 2014 and 2019. In addition to identifying law schools that overperform on the bar exam, this Article is a novel contribution not only to the legal education literature but also to the quantitative methodological literature, given its unique tailoring of the classic value-added modeling design to the realities of the bar exam. In the second phase of research for this Article, the authors surveyed administrators at these overperforming and underperforming law schools, as well as law schools in the middle of the distribution, to qualitatively assess how these law schools approach the bar success of their students. Collectively, this Article provides significant insight into how law schools are responding to recent negative trends in bar passage rates, validates successful approaches to mitigate these negative trends, and * CJ Ryan is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law and an Affiliated Scholar with the American Bar Foundation. Derek Muller is the Ben V. Willie Professor in Excellence and Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law. This Article would not have been possible without the generous support of the AccessLex Institute, which sponsored this research (AccessLex Institute Grant No. BR2019005). We wish to sincerely thank the AccessLex Institute, as well as our current and former law schools, Roger Williams University School of Law and Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law, respectively, for their support of our research. Finally, we are indebted to the following scholars who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this work: Rory Bahadur (Washburn University School of Law), Deborah Jones Merritt (The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law), Jerome Organ (University of St. Thomas School of Law), Jenifer Robbins (IIT Chicago- Kent College of Law) and Kevin Ruth. 65

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