RALEIGH — Campbell Law School ranks 11th in a new study released that examines law schools that overperform on the bar exam. The study comes in the wake of Campbell Law’s released and certified 2-year bar passage rate of 98.1%.
“A law school’s measure of success on the bar exam has shifted from first time pass rate to a new test set by our accreditor called the ultimate pass rate,” said Dean J. Rich Leonard. “Simply, it is the percentage of your graduates in a given year who took a bar exam within two years of graduation and passed. The accreditation standard requires a school to stay above 75 percent. I was delighted Friday to certify to the American Bar Association a 98.1 percent ultimate pass rate for my 2019 class. Study with us and you will get a law license.”
On Monday, Leonard told Reuters he credited the recent graduates’ bar passage success in large part to “a trio of test prep programs offered during and after students’ third year, as well as the school’s high required course load, which he said exposes students to more legal subjects.” Read the Reuters story at this link.
The study, conducted by CJ Ryan (University of Louisville – Louis D. Brandeis School of Law; American Bar Foundation), and Derek T. Muller (University of Iowa – College of Law) sought to analyze the “Secret Sauce” of overperforming law schools, and the value added by the academic institutions to the bar passage rates of their students. Campbell Law was ranked 11th as an overperforming law school, while in comparison Yale was ranked 12th, Duke was 15th and Harvard was 16th, the study found.
The study approached the issue by examining the predicted bar passage rates based on the credentials of the students (UGPA, LSAT), the relative difficulty of the bar exam in that jurisdiction and the school’s bar passage rates (ABA and NCBE) in order to identify overperforming law schools, and ultimately, the “Secret Sauce” that accounts for the success of their students.
The study sought to identify the value added by a law school: “the value of legal education, with respect to bar passage, turns on whether law schools increase the likelihood that their students will pass the bar exam beyond the likelihood that could be predicted based solely on the quality of their students upon entering law school.” Law schools that overperformed had a higher value added, and this value added “is a recognition of two things: (1) that these law schools can add value to their students, regardless of their students’ entering academic credentials, and thereby increase the likelihood that their students will be successful on the bar exam; and (2) that these law schools can mitigate these threats to their students’ bar success by designing and implementing reforms with the greatest student-oriented challenges in mind.”
Once overperforming- and underperforming-schools were identified, the researchers conducted surveys in order to determine where emphasis was placed in legal education at different institutions and identify the “Secret Sauce.” The recipe for “Secret Sauce,” as determined by the surveys, are:
1) a focus on personal traits including work ethic, distraction and financial cost;
2) identify at-risk students based on 1L performance;
3) hire bar prep personnel and implement inclusive academic success programs;
4) the curriculum focuses on “overall first-year academic support and third-year bar exam preparation:”
5) “faculty support and stress management;”
6) “top-performing schools are not spending extravagantly more on resources, and in many instances are spending less, than other schools to achieve bar success.”
ABOUT CAMPBELL LAW
Since its founding in 1976, Campbell Law has developed lawyers who possess moral conviction, social compassion, and professional competence, and who view the law as a calling to serve others. Among its accolades, the school has been recognized by the American Bar Association (ABA) as having the nation’s top Professionalism Program and by the American Academy of Trial Lawyers for having the nation’s best Trial Advocacy Program. Campbell Law boasts more than 4,500 alumni, who make their home in nearly all 50 states and beyond. In 2021, Campbell Law celebrated 45 years of graduating legal leaders and 12 years of being located in a state-of-the-art facility in the heart of North Carolina’s Capital City.