Bar Exam Success Analyses Overview

1. Understand the extent to which preadmission factors correlate with your students’ academic and bar success;
2. Develop interventions for bar success and when to apply such interventions;
3. Target interventions appropriately, especially given limited time and resources;
4. Build empirical evidence for what you have observed after years of experience and daily interactions with law students; and
5. Leverage data to advance new or ongoing student success initiatives.

1. The admission and academic factors that influence first-time bar exam performance among graduates of your specific law school.
2. The factors that influence academic performance throughout law school, from the first semester to the final year, including whether grades or credit hours earned in particular areas of study (e.g., doctrinal, skills-based, clinic) improve the likelihood of bar passage.
3. The extent to which performance in specific upper-level UBE-tested subjects (e.g., Business Associations, Family Law) is predictive of first-time bar passage, relative to performance in required 1L doctrinal courses.
4. Tangible strategies for increasing bar exam passage at participating law schools, based on the analyses conducted for their institution.

1. Schedule a meeting with us so that we can discuss the process and provide further instructions regarding execution of the data sharing agreement as well as our secure data transfer process. 
    
2. Review and sign our data sharing agreement, which holds AccessLex Institute accountable for protecting and safeguarding the data you provide for the purposes of the analyses. We never sell your students’ information to any third party and go to great lengths to anonymize and protect personally identifiable information. NOTE: This project does not require disclosure of student names or readily identifiable information about them.
    
3. Provide demographic, admission, and academic data on your law students who matriculated into your law school as first-time law students in the years 2016 through 2021 (most of these students would have graduated and taken the bar exam between 2019 and 2024).
    
4. Agree to allow your anonymized school-level data to be aggregated with that of other anonymized,
   participating institutions to be used in the building of a clearinghouse of relevant information as well as in reports, presentations, etc. When aggregated, your school’s name and identifying information (including the specific jurisdictions in which your students sat for the bar exam) are stripped from the data. In any reports, articles, communications, etc., we refrain from any mention of individual school characteristics that may be used to identify it, particularly as it relates to its composition of students based on their race/ethnicity, gender, or other identifying characteristics. By safeguarding the identity of your school, we by extension further protect the identity of your students/graduates.

Outcome Variables:

• Bar exam result: Pass, Fail
• Scaled MBE score (if available)
• Bar exam score (if available)
• Law school GPA
  • End of first semester
  • End of first year
  • Final/At graduation (cumulative)

Predictor Variables:

• Law School Coursework
  • Credit hours and grades earned in:
    • Doctrinal coursework
      • Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Conflict of Laws, Business Associations, Family Law, UCC Art. 9, and Trusts and Estates
      • Required 1L doctrinal courses
      • Other doctrinal courses
    • Skill-based bar courses
    • Legal writing courses
  • Credit hours only in:
    • Clinics
    • Externships
    • Other
• Pre-admission Factors
  • LSAT
    • Highest LSAT score
    • Avg. LSAT score
    • Number of LSAT scores reported
  • UGPA
    • First year
    • Final (cumulative)

Note: Coursework data can be submitted in one of two ways: either in wide format, where the data for a given student appears in one row; or in long format (or “transcript-style”), where the data for a given student appears in several rows with each row corresponding to that student’s performance in each class they completed.

Control Variables:

• Demographic Information
  • Unique identifier for each student (all students should be anonymized)
  • Race/Ethnicity
  • Gender
  • Birth year
  • First-Generation College Student Status (Yes/No)
• Enrollment Information
  • Enrollment term and year (e.g., Fall 2018)
  • Graduation term and year
  • Whether student unenrolled (either transfer or attrition)
• Undergraduate institution
  • Institution name
  • Whether student attended more than one undergraduate institution
  • Number of years to complete
• Other
  • Bar exam jurisdiction and year
  • Class rank (if available), final and by year