The last couple of weeks I've highlighted various findings from the report commissioned by the California State Bar on the decline in bar exam pass rates. The report contains a lot of interesting information not previously publicly available, and I encourage law school faculty and administrators to read it in its entirety.
Today I want to highlight one of the more important tables in the Report, one that sets forth the results of a regression of various demographic and other factors on bar exam score. Table III.13, included below, shows how MBE score, written score, and total score vary with age, gender, minority status, undergraduate GPA (UGPA), LSAT, law school GPA (LSGPA), and repeater status. Variables with asterisks instead of numbers were not statistically significant.
There are a number of results that are expected based on prior work. LSGPA strongly predicts bar passage score, so much that moving from less than a 2.8 to above a 3.51 predicts an increase of 224 points on the total bar score (22.4 points on the nationwide scale). That's predicted pass/fail percentage increase of 66%! LSAT continues to be significant, but its magnitude is relatively small once LSGPA has been controlled. Moving from less than a 154 to greater than a 164 predicts an increase in total bar score of about 44 points (4.4 points on the national scale). UGPA is statistically significant but somewhat inconsequential, adding only a few points. Also, the findings are consistent with the well-documented regularity that men tend to score higher on the MBE and women higher on the essay portions, which tend to cancel each other out producing a roughly equal total score.
One of the unusual results is how much age appears to affect bar score and the way in which age appears to affect bar score. A student who is 30 or older scores almost 34 points lower on the total bar score (3.4 on the national scale) than a student who is 25 or under. That translates into almost a 10% difference in pass rate on the exam. This is comparable to the effect of moving from the lowest LSAT category to the highest one. In a sense, one might expect increased age to result in lower scores if not all variables have been controlled. After all, life tends to get more complicated with family and other obligations as one moves into one's 30s. Also, older students are more likely to be employed or be attending law school part time. However, the "life's more complicated" explanation should affect the MBE and written portion similarly. Yet the age variable seems to only predict a substantially decreased score on the written portion; the MBE is roughly the same for younger and older takers. Also, the "life's more complicated" explanation should have affected LSGPA similarly, and LSGPA is controlled in this regression. Yet the result remains.
The age coefficient is large enough in magnitude that it might be worthwhile for law schools that have range of student ages to investigate this variable further. I don't have a theory for why the writing portion specifically would be more challenging for older students, but it seems like one where an intervention might make a difference.