ABA Journal reports that members of the ABA's committee advising on bar admissions standards, faced with 2006 data on the effectiveness of the current bar passage rate standard, is questioning whether the current standard should be changed and has asked for more data. The current standard for accreditation requires law schools demonstrate at least one of the following:
- that 75% of its graduates in the previous five years who took the bar passed.
- that in at least three of the past five years, 75% of its graduates who took the bar passed.
- that its first-time bar passage rate in at least three of the previous five years was no more than 15 points below the average bar passage rate for ABA-approved law schools in the states where its graduates took the bar.
The staff of the National Conference of Bar Examiners studied the population that took the July 2006 multistate bar exam and found that out of the nearly 31,000 law school graduates it could identify who took that test, less than 1%, or 248 takers, were still sitting for the bar when it was administered 2½ years later. By five years later, only 13 graduates who took the test in July 2006 were still sitting for the bar.
