You can see that several schools performed worse, or relatively worse, compared to their 2019 figures (again, consistent with what I noted earlier, major swings at some schools in 2020). But note outliers. Marquette (98.2%) and Wisconsin (100%) both have extraordinarily high bar passage rates, due principally to in-state diploma privilege.
In the past, this redounded to their benefit, as ordinary test-takers who took the bar exam performed substantially lower than 100% (see 71% in 2019), giving them a huge advantage. The new USNWR methodology, however, includes all of those diploma privilege admittees as “passers” in cumulative jurisdiction’s pass rate, too. Wisconsin and Marquette used to perform 30 points above the average; they’re now basically at the average.
In one sense, there’s a greater honesty to the metric in comparing similarly-situated graduates to one another. But it comes at the cost of punishing two schools whose graduates are all (or nearly all) immediately able to practice law. That’s a tremendously valuable outcome for law students.
It might be beneficial for USNWR to instead include two factors, absolute passers and relative passers (like this one). Some (especially California deans!) critique an “absolute” passer rate that lacks accounting for the difficulty of the bar. But if we care about law students’ ability to practice law, it seems to me that it’s important to capture whether your graduates are successfully getting students there, regardless of how hard or easy the bar exam is. (Of course, relative performance also should matter, I think, at least to some degree, as it suggests that some schools are improving opportunities for their graduates.) I confess, others would disagree.
How did other schools, like those in Utah, Washington, or Oregon, not perform much better or worse despite emergency “diploma privilege” being introduced? Recall it’s a mixed bag, depending on the school and the state, history and out-of-state test-takers. February 2020 did not have such exemptions, which are partially included in the figures above. Utah and Oregon still had a decent set of in-state test-takers, as diploma privilege did not extend to everyone—but schools in those states didn’t see as dramatic changes in overall passing rates, as in both states they were keyed to pre-set levels of test-taker success (86%, with an exception in Oregon for in-state schools), and that meant most people taking the test would have passed, anyway. Washington, in contrast, opened up diploma privilege to essentially all test-takers, and the corresponding increase in passers put the University of Washington near the bottom of changes from 2019 to 2020 (suffering something that Wisconsin and Marquette experienced this year).
It’s a seemingly small change in methodology, and it’s hard to know what a number like “0.0497” means to an overall score. But it’s worth identifying that the changes are not value-neutral and can affect similarly-situated schools quite differently.