Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm checking in on an ongoing project by researchers at AccessLex Institute who are trying to determine whether LSAT scores and other factors can predict who will pass the bar exam. And next, Law School Transparency is looking for new board members, which is a great opportunity for people to help improve access to legal education.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

Predicting Bar Passage

Results from the July 2019 bar exam are steadily rolling in, and the news is looking up. New York's pass rate ticked up two percentage points, to 65%. Florida's pass rate rose seven percentage points, to 74%.

But in most jurisdictions, pass rates have yet to return to their high from six years ago, before a steady, half-decade-long decline. Which means there is still lots of interest in figuring out how best to help law students pass the bar. Enter AccessLex Institute, which has launched a research project that aims to identify the factors that correlate to bar passage. Researchers have gathered extensive data from 20 law schools covering admissions, grades, and student engagement surveys and are crunching the numbers in search of statistically significant correlations with who passes the bar exam.

AccessLex's Research Director Tiffane Cochran kindly jumped on the phone with me to tell me the status of the project and discuss one of the biggest questions in this arena: Are LSAT scores good predictors of who will pass the bar exam? I've often wondered this myself, in part because the research—what little there is—never seemed very clear to me on the topic. As Cochran told me, the LSAT isn't designed to figure out who will pass the bar exam. Rather, it's designed to predict who will perform well in their first year of law school, and it does a pretty good job in that regard. So there hasn't been as much focus are studying the connection between LSAT scores and bar passage, she told me.

But there's a wrinkle when it comes to analyzing LSAT scores and bar passage, and it's something called "range restriction." Stick with me here, all you non-statisticians. Law schools tend to admit students who fall within a pre-determined range of LSAT scores, meaning their classes don't represent the full spectrum of LSAT scores. So when you look at who passed the bar from a certain school, you only get part of the picture. You can never know how all the people who fell outside the school's LSAT range would have performed on the licensing exam, since they didn't attend. Another way to think about it is that the analysis is skewed when the very factor you are studying—in this case LSAT scores—is used to determine the pool of subjects. However, savvy researchers can adjust their calculations to account for range restriction (don't ask me how, that's way outside my statistical capabilities), but much of the existing research on LSATs and bar passage hasn't take that extra step, Cochran told me. (If you want to know more about the range restriction phenomenon, check out this paper by AccessLex researcher Richard Gardiner.)

So far, the researchers at AccessLex have found that there may be a tenuous relationship between the LSAT and bar exam passage. However, their analysis does not adjust for range restriction because their study has focused only on students who were admitted and graduated from each participating law school, and also sat for the bar exam. The team is offering the range restriction adjustment to law schools that agree to provide the data necessary to perform this analysis. Using range restriction would enable them to determine if the relationship between LSAT score and bar passage is truly inconsistent across schools or if it's simply due to the limited band of LSAT scores available from each school. But the analysis doesn't stop there. The researchers are looking at a broad array of other factors that could predict bar passage. Here's Cochran:

"We're looking at variables on the law school transcript level: What was your first semester GPA? What was you first year GPA? Your final GPA? Your GPA in doctrinal bar courses? The big bulk of the project is whether or not student engagement is related to bar passage. We're partnering with [the Law School Survey of Student Engagement] so we can get data the students submitted in their third-year survey to figure out if any of those things are correlated to bar passage."

So what, exactly, does Cochran mean when she talks about student engagement? It's things like how many hours students spent preparing outside of class, whether they had an outside legal job during law school, and whether they had close relationships with faculty and other students.

My thoughts: Cochran told me there has been lots of interest in the findings of this study, which doesn't surprise me. If you had the ability to basically reverse engineer a high bar pass rate, wouldn't you jump at the chance? She and her team plan to aggregate the data from the 20 schools they studied to try and find some larger correlations to bar pass rates, with hopes of releasing their findings in early 2020.

But let me burst the bubble right off the bat: There is no silver bullet for high bar pass rates. The correlations that researchers have found thus far are school-specific. That is, it's unlikely they will be able to conclude at the end of their study that a single factor—let's say final GPA—is a strong predictor of who will pass the bar exam. That could be true at some campuses, but the researchers have yet to find evidence that one metric strongly predicts bar passage at all the campuses they studied. If that holds true, it creates a pretty strong incentive for each law school to crunch their own numbers.

Looking for a Few Good Men and Women

Longtime readers of mine know that I from time to time ask Law School Transparency executive director Kyle McEntee to weigh in on the pressing legal education issues of the day. He's spent the past decade almost singularly focused on making legal education more affordable and accessible, and ensuring that prospective students have the information they need to make good decisions. When I first met him back in 2010, he was a Vanderbilt law student who I assumed would lose interest in legal education advocacy as soon as his legal career got up and running. (There were some weird things going on at the time. Anyone else remember the law school hunger striker?) But to my surprise, he made his legal career about law school advocacy, and Law School Transparency is thriving.

Now, he's looking for some sharp minds to join Law School Transparency's board of directors, and I'm happy to help spread the word. You can read the full description of the gig here. But here are some highlights. The right candidate is:

• Excited about making legal education better and helping the next generation of lawyers

• An attorney, judge, law professor, prelaw advisor, or other individual involved in the legal profession who cares about access to justice and rule of law (all ages encouraged)

• Capable of contributing 5-10 hours per month in a volunteer capacity

• Interested in developing and monitoring the health of a leading education nonprofit

• Experienced in fundraising or willing to learn, inviting your contacts to join our cause

Extra Credit Reading

Some students at the University of Florida Levin College of Law are unhappy that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will teach a short course in the spring on the religious clauses of the First Amendment.

Pepperdine's law school has been renamed the Pepperdine University Richard J. Caruso School of Law after real estate developer and law school alum Richard Caruso donated $50 million.

The LawX legal design lab at Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School will team up with attorneys from Wilson Sonsini this spring to design a program to help people apply for asylum.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]