California law school bar passage rates recalculated for the New York bar

I have been blogging for years about bar exams in general and the California bar exam in particular. One of the themes of my blogging has been how much higher California's required passing score is than the passing score in other states. This year, the California bar exam results were so low--as a result of mismanagement by law school deans and faculties as I argued here and here--that the California passing score is now (finally) a topic of discussion.

In this post, I use the abysmal bar results from the July 2016 bar exam to illustrate the difference between California and another large state, New York. New York has a required passing score that is about average across the 50 states, whereas California has an unusually high required passing score. The table below shows just how different the results for California law schools would have been if California used the same passing score as New York. There is no perfect way to determine these numbers with the information available. However, the estimates are not likely to be off by more than 5-6% for any given school (see methodology note below).

Yes, you read the table right. If California used the same passing score as New York, even in this very difficult bar year most California schools would have had passage rates above 80%, and all of them would be well within striking distance of the ABA's proposed 75% passage rate in two years. UC Hastings, which had an extremely difficult 51% pass rate this year, would have had an 83% pass rate in New York. Thomas Jefferson, which had a 31% pass rate in California would have had a 66% pass rate in New York. Whittier, which had a 22% pass rate in California would have had a 57% pass rate in New York.

**NOTE: This post originally used a passing score of 135 for the New York bar exam when it is 133. These corrections have been made in the text and table and make the differences even wider between California and New York.

These results should give a new perspective to those on both sides of the "great bar debate of 2016." 

Law School	California Pass Rate	Average Scaled Score	Estimated New York Pass Rate
Stanford	91%	1620	99%
USC	88%	1562	98%
UC Berkeley	84%	1560	98%
UCLA	82%	1554	97%
UC Irvine	81%	1550	97%
UC Davis	72%	1507	93%
Loyola Law School	72%	1502	93%
San Diego	71%	1495	92%
Pepperdine	70%	1494	92%
Santa Clara	66%	1480	90%
McGeorge	61%	1480	90%
California Western	61%	1454	85%
Chapman	57%	1476	89%
UC Hastings	51%	1445	83%
Western State	42%	1441	83%
Southwestern	38%	1406	74%
San Francisco	36%	1399	72%
La Verne	31%	1387	68%
Golden Gate	31%	1385	67%
Thomas Jefferson	31%	1382	66%
Whittier	22%	1355	57%

Methodology: I started with the "Total First Timer" mean scaled score for each school obtained from this document. I assumed a normal distribution of scores for the school around the mean score. I then calculated the standard error of the distribution that best fit the actual results in California, which was approximately 114. This is lower than the standard deviation of scores overall in California (approximately 145) because each school has a fairly narrow slice of examinee abilities relative to the overall California pool. The passage rate in New York is therefore 1 minus the cumulative distribution below the passing score for New York, which is 133. The results may be off for some schools because the distributions are not perfectly normal for a variety of reasons. However, the predictions were within about 5-6% for all of the actual California results, and are not likely not off by much more than that for the New York estimates. 

Comments

[Alan Ramo]

The State Bar receives both state and federal funding. Has anyone looked at whether the State Bar's use of a standard out of step with the rest of the country, and the ABA's pending approval of a standard which will sanction such a strict standard, disproportionately impacts schools with higher minority admissions?