Less than half of Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center graduates passed the bar exam in July, prompting the dean to write a letter to alumni promising reforms in the classroom, curriculum and culture.

Only 48.6 percent of first-time test takers passed, a 16.2 percentage point drop for the school when compared to the previous year. The Touro bar exam pass rate is 34.4 percentage points lower than other ABA-accredited law schools.

“We will be re-examining in minutest detail everything we do, in and outside of the classroom, to assure that the continued implementation of reforms, from evidence-based teaching to curricular reform, is successful,” said Dean Harry Ballan in a statement to the New York Law Journal. ”We will continue to work relentlessly for the success of our students with even greater intensity. We own it; we'll fix it.”

In the letter to alumni, Ballan said the school's results were not acceptable. “The faculty and I have begun to implement extensive reforms involving changes in the classroom, curriculum and culture of the school. We expect these changes to be reflected favorably in future results,” he said in the letter.

Touro's passing rate of 48.6 percent was the only time in the past five years that fewer of the school's graduates passed the test than failed. The school's 68 percent passing rate in 2013 was its best in that time period and its passing rate of 52.5 percent in 2015 was its lowest performance before 2018.

Overall, bar exam pass rates in New York state were only 63 percent in July, a drop of 5 percentage points. The 83 percent passing rate for graduates of ABA-accredited law schools who took the exam for the first time was down 3 percentage points from July 2017.

New York's plummeting scores mirror performance on the bar examination nationwide, which sunk to a 34-year low, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which released results on the Multistate Bar Examination in September.

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