doomed to fail...
all of the 2Ls got a letter from the dean in our mailboxes today. this letter says that studies indicate that law school GPA is a reliable indicator of bar exam performance. according to this letter, on the 2005 PA bar exam, the pass rate at pitt law for the top 70% was 97.8%; the pass rate for the bottom 30% was 53.2%.
the letter goes on to say that for the class of 2005, a cumulative GPA of 3.045 and below constituted the bottom 30% of the class. for the class of 2006, the lower 30% had a GPA of 2.950 and below.
um...
so, my GPA is just a smidge above a 3.0. by some calculation of the above statistics, this puts me right at the bottom of my class, with a 1 out of 2 chance of passing the bar exam the first time i take it.
hmmm...
did i mention that i'm a scholarship student? does anyone else find it kind of hilarious that one can be a scholarship student and still in the bottom 30% of the class? does anyone else find it a bit silly that the new dean is spamming our mailboxes with threatening letters about keeping pitt law's bar passage percentage high?
one thing is for sure: i don't care. i mean that. i'm in law school to learn, not to pass the bar. i'll worry about the bar exam another day.
posted by emily @ Monday, October 17, 2005
8 comments
8 Comments:
And yet, here I am reading this...obviously, you care to some extent.
She cares because the act of distributing the letter is outrageous, not because of the content of the message....that I assure you she doesn't care about.
i kind of care about the content of the message. i kind of wish i didn't know that. :(
slk
Yeah, the Dean isn't really getting off on the right foot with students.
Don't worry Emily. I know a certain el. rev. person with a lower gpa than yours...
let me play devil's advocate here. actually, no, let me not hedge: this is exactly what i think.
they started this while i was there ('03), after the class of either '01 or '02 did especially poorly on the bar exam. and sure, it's annoying, but so is 80% of what you receive in your law school mailbox and 50% or so of everything else about law school.
i think the point -- and i think it's entirely illegitimate since, unlike emily, most students have banked their careers and approaching six figures of debt on attaining licensure -- is to scare the bejesus out of students at all levels of the GPA spectrum into thinking about the bar exam sometime prior to graduation (in, e.g., class registration -- federal income tax is no delgado seminar, but it does familiarize more vocationally-minded students with a topic that is a) important to their careers in practice and b) something they will be tested on come bar exam time). it also encourages students to start doing the pretty generous bar prep things the school offers sooner, which also increases bar passage rates.
as bar passage rates improve, so does pitt's stature. and pitt's stature is a rising tide that raises all of our boats, even those who long-since graduated. if pitt's a top-20 school in 20 years (humor me), we're all going to look a lot brighter 20 years down the road, our intellectual credentials are less likely to be attacked when we're nominated to SCOTUS, etc.
emily, in the cut-throat world of public interest practice (the paying kind, at least), school ranking will probably affect you more than it will your peers who seek big firm jobs, simply because of the people with whom you'll be vying for scant positions.
and evidently it works, as Pitt's bar passage rates have been higher since the scare tactics began in earnest.
as an ACLU maven, i would think you'd be able to change the channel if you don't like the content of the program, tune it out, recognize that you are hardly the run of the mill middle-of-the-class student, and recognize also that you'll be able to prepare for and pass the bar exam handily by studying methodically for three or four of the six or eight weeks you'll have to do so.
based on our conversations and your writings, i'm confident that you're doing law school with way more aplomb and style than most do. you're right that that's what matters -- to you. but never forget that you (and your peers, from what i can discern) are vastly outnumbered by students for whom law school is just a fancier version of triangle tech or devry, a means to an end.
i meant "i think it's entirely legitimate."
The letter is probably part of a Dean Crossley/BarBri kick-back conspiracy.
to be fair, AML's right: there's no doubt a good bit of marketing affecting the precise content, timing, and frequency of these sorts of messages. that said, BARBri works pretty damned well, so i'm not sure it's a conspiracy of the evil sort.
for that, you'd be better off keeping an eye on the forces -- read, local bar associations and inns of court -- resisting the inevitable trundle toward federalizing the bar. well, 49-state-isizing the bar, since those crazies in louisiana have some weird system nobody understands that i think might involve ritual poultry sacrifice and stinky cheese.
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