Of the 698 Louisiana law students who took the bar exam in July, 432—or just shy of 62%—earned the right to practice law with a passing grade. That figure, as recently released by LSU, is down sharply from the roughly 70% of the 762 law students who passed the exam last year.
As Bloomberg recently reported, American law graduates are increasingly getting a taste of failure before they start their careers. Performance on the bar exam has continued to slip, with early results from about a dozen states showing most have seen a dip in pass rates. A number of experts tell Bloomberg the reasons for the slip in both the average score and the passage rate include recent changes in the test that have made it more difficult, as well as law schools admitting less qualified students.
In Louisiana, LSU once again had the highest passage rate among the leading law schools. Of the 150 LSU students who took the test, 117—or 78%—passed. Tulane had the next highest passage rate, at 72%, followed by Loyola at about 64%, and Southern University at just over 41%. The other law schools in the state collectively posted a roughly 58% passage rate.
The figures from last year show all of the Louisiana schools saw their passage rates decline. While the overall passage rate fell eight percentage points for the state, LSU saw its rate fall by 3.5 points, while Tulane fell by about six points, Loyola by roughly nine points, Southern by 15 points and all other law schools by eight points.
The lower passage rates being reported across the U.S. come a year after scores on the multiple-choice portion of the test registered their largest year-over-year drop in four decades, Bloomberg reports. This year’s results are among the most important in the exam’s history, because they will offer a clearer sense of whether last year’s failure rate was an anomaly or the start of a very bad run.
Among other states that have reported their bar exam results from July, Mississippi’s pass rate plunged 27 percentage points, from 71% in July 2014 to 51% this year. In Oklahoma and New Mexico, pass rates slumped 11 percentage points and 12 percentage points, respectively.
Read the full story by Bloomberg. LSU has the complete Louisiana bar exam results from the July test.
