Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage? asks the question, and says the answer is “no”. That is certainly what our study here, several years ago, showed.
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by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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Is the Miami study publicly available?
I doubt it. It must have been a decade or so ago, at a time when the bar pass rate had dipped and we were looking for possible causes. Neither course selection nor core course professor seemed to matter in a statistically significant way. Bad grades overall were a strong predictor of failure: if you did very badly in law school, you were much more likely to fail the bar. Other than that, as far as I recall, we didn’t come up with anything much.
We eventually came to the conclusion, based on anecdotal evidence only, that too many people were skipping the bar review lectures and going to the beach. We started giving scary lectures about the dangers of this practice and also taking attendance more often in our own classes in order to emphasize the virtues of turning up. Scores went back up.