…to taking Wills & Trusts.
A new study highlighted on the Freakonomics blog says that there’s no correlation between taking “bar courses” and bar passage rates:
Their results were unequivocal: no relationship existed between law school courseloads and the passage rate of students ranked in the first, second or fourth quarters of their law school class, while only a weak relationship existed for students who ranked in the third quarter. Overall, Rush writes, “students in the upper two quartiles passed the exam at an extremely high rate and those in the fourth quartile failed at a high rate, regardless of which classes they took in law school.” The researchers repeated the test in 2007 using data from the Hofstra University School of Law, with identical results (which do not appear in the study).
If only I knew that before I signed up to take Corporations and Income Tax this semester. Bah.
September 26th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
So… I’m not a lawyer… but does this mean that basicaly what you learn in law school is useless? Or, is the bar exam useless? If you don’t learn the info in law school to pass the bar… where do you learn it?
I’m pretty unknowledgeable about the whole law school thing and bar exam thing.
70 percent pass rate is actually pretty good pass rate for a professional exam. CPA exam is around 45 percent these days (used to be closer to 30). Engineering licnese exams are 60-80 percent. Actuarial exams are 30-40 percent.
How’s the Corp and Income Tax class going?
September 27th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Nah… law school is (on the academic side) to expose you to different areas of law, to give you some practical experience (in some schools, if you choose), and to teach you to “think like a lawyer”. In most tier 1 schools they don’t really teach to the bar because people go so many different places.
All it really means is that you need to spend a few grand when you graduate to pay someone to re-teach you specifically for whatever bar you’re taking.
Corps and Income Tax are two different classes. Corporations is less boring (slightly) than I thought it’d be. Tax is easier (slightly) than I thought it’d be. The IRC, though, makes me want to shoot someone. Probably a legislator.
October 2nd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Law school teaches you to “think like a lawyer,” and the Bar Exam is the ultimate test to see if you’ve succeeded in that goal.
That being said, however, I was very happy that I didn’t have to learn U.C.C. Article 9 or Trusts & Estates from scratch in one week during bar review.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:23 am
I was far from an ace in law school, finishing with a B+ average. I got the worst grade in Contracts I in my entire 1L class. I took none of the supposedly essential classes like Corporations, Tax, Administrative Law, Trusts & Estates, etc. I took BAR/BRI, attended all the lectures, but did maybe 25% of the homework they assigned and watched an absurd amount of soccer during the weeks leading to the bar exam (it was a World Cup year). I passed the NY bar on my first try. Part of the reason I passed was that I started to learn how to think like a lawyer while I was in law school (but didn’t really get it until later). But I think the key to my passing the bar was that my bar review course taught me how to take a bar exam, which meant religiously following the formula for how to answer essay questions, applying all the tips that they gave me for how to squeeze extra points out of your answers, and getting plenty of sleep and (somehow) avoiding panic.