The July bar exam results were released this week. According to an article in Wednesday's New York Law Journal "[t]he six-year slide in bar exam pass rates looks to be at an end". (Karen Sloan, Bar Pass Rates Are Up. Is the Worst Over?, NYLJ (Oct. 30, 2019).

The increase for students passing the bar in New York rose by two percentage points to a whopping 65%! Is this something we should be celebrating? Why are 35% of our students failing after three years of going through the gauntlet of law school? With the vast amount of reading, writing, class time, law journals, preparing for mock trials or moot court, study groups, internships and externships in law offices and government agencies etc., what are we missing? And after all this, 3Ls have the arduous task of taking specialized bar review courses at great expense and virtually going into hiding from the rest of the world for the two months between graduation and the dreaded exam at the end of July. Something is amiss.

When I graduated law school in 1974 and successfully passed the July bar exam, I was totally unprepared for what awaited me in the legal profession for the next four decades. Every position I held had little relevance to my law school experiences. Suffice it to say, everything I learned for the bar exam had completely evaporated from the deep crevices in my brain immediately thereafter, never to surface again except for the many stories I've held onto about the experience.

Law schools have come a long way since my "dinosaur" days of writing on yellow pads (which I still do) and actually reading the books on the shelves in the library. Today, every student and professor can communicate online. In fact, with the advent of TWEN, virtually all course outlines and materials are only a key stroke away. Professors make themselves readily accessible, as opposed to mine who bragged that they lived in an "Ivory Tower" and conversing with students was beneath them. Now, there are also an infinite number of bar associations and mentoring programs to aid the students in all three grades.

As an adjunct professor in one of the Skills Labs taught in conjunction with the Foundational Lawyering Skills course that is mandated for all 2L students at Hofstra, I have the wonderful opportunity to work with students on an almost one-to-one basis. As a whole, my conversations with the numerous students I have come in contact with in the past few years is a positive one about how much they learn in such settings and similar programs outside of the classroom. Next year, how many of these students will be part of the 65% or 35%? They enthusiastically appreciate the necessary hands-on experiences they are receiving that will be invaluable when pursuing jobs. Yet, what does cramming for a bar exam accomplish in the real world?

It's a well-known fact that Yale Law School doesn't even grade its students. The administration and faculty take the position that if you were good enough to get in you will put into your studies what you want to get out of it. Perhaps other schools should follow suit. Whether those students, or their contemporaries in the other Ivy or high ranked law schools pass or fail the bar exam on the first, second or even third attempt, they will still have an advantage in securing a position in a "Big Law" firm ahead of all the other graduates from "lesser" schools, regardless of one's class standing. I recently read about one law school touting its current first-year class as coming from the best undergraduate schools, having more women and more diversity than any previous class. Don't we hear that from law schools every year? I wonder how much higher that school's pass rate will be in three years? After 40 years, the pass rate for New York has always hovered in the 60th percentile.

I don't presume to have the answer for this disconnect between a law school education and the persistently low passage rates on the bar exams. However, I will go out on a limb and propose that we find a better alternative to the existing situation.

Perhaps the ABA, which provides the accreditation to almost all the law schools in the country, can develop a mechanism for each accredited school to self-certify its graduating students as eligible to apply to their respective Board of Law Examiners and, in New York, their respective Appellate Divisions, as meeting all the requisite standards for admission to practice, in lieu of a formal examination.

In her article, Ms. Sloan makes reference to the exam cut scores in California and Delaware as being the highest in the nation resulting in "dismal bar pass rate[s]" stating that there is "increasing pressure to lower the exam cut score." It is clear that these cut off scores are arbitrarily applied in every state. Eliminating the exams altogether, as I have suggested above, may actually "raise the bar" of excellence in our future attorneys by placing a greater emphasis on the education obtained in law school than a single test that can never measure an individual's true skills and abilities.

While I recognize that the complete elimination of a standardized exam may be considered by most academicians, bar associations and accrediting boards as merely a "Utopian," "pie in the sky," solution that will never happen. And, if it were to happen with attorneys, what about doctors, accountants and the like?

Thus, bar exams (although changing in various degrees over the years from state to state to the current UBE [which still requires meeting certain criteria in each state for admission]) are probably as much of a given as death and taxes for the legal profession.

However, after reading the above referenced article, I wanted to take the opportunity to open a dialogue that law schools must do more for its current and future students to close the gap in this major disconnect between legal education and the bar exam. As I stated at the outset, a 65% passing rate is nothing to celebrate or brag about.

George M. Heymann is NYC Housing Court Judge (Ret.) and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University.