Vindication for the public skool kidz

Cleveland State University law grads excel at bar exam
Case alums bring up rear in passage rate
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Janet Okoben, Plain Dealer Reporter

Law school graduates from Cleveland State University showed up their private-school counterparts at Case Western Reserve University in the most recent Ohio Bar exam, posting the highest passage rate in the region.

CSU's law school tied with Ohio State University for the second-highest bar passage rate in the state, according to results released by the Ohio Supreme Court. Ninety percent of CSU and OSU students taking the test for the first time passed. Ohio Northern University, with a 95 percent passage rate, was tops in the state.

Case's passage rate for first-time test takers was lowest in the state, at 83 percent. Statewide, 88 percent of all 1,094 first-timers passed.

Law school graduates can take the bar exam multiple times, but the percentage of students who pass the test on the first try is a major measure of the quality of a legal education, said Chris Davey, a spokesman for the court.

For CSU's Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, the high passage rate is the result of years of work.

The Ohio Board of Regents threatened tougher oversight for public law schools back in the 1990s, when passage rates statewide were much lower.

In 2004, Steven Steinglass, the former dean, pushed to hire a full-time bar exam coordinator. Admissions requirements got tougher. Two years ago, the school introduced a for-credit course on the bar exam.

CSU also started requiring students to meet one-on-one with faculty in their second year of law school to plan for the exam they take almost two years later. Everyone in the law school pitches in, including Dean Geoffrey Mearns, who talked by phone on Tuesday in between one-on-one sessions he had scheduled with four second-year students.

The idea is "to impress upon them a year-and-a-half to two years in advance the kinds of things they need to be doing now to prepare," Mearns said. "It's one of those challenges you face as a professional that you can't wait until the last six weeks."

Case's law school probably will see some changes after posting the lowest passage rate in the state, said Dean Gary Simson.

He tried to put the score in context by noting that Case educates lawyers who will go on to practice all over the country. Only 70 Case law graduates took the Ohio exam for the first time in July, out of a graduating class of 225. Therefore, the curriculum at Case isn't geared as closely to the Ohio bar exam as it is at other law schools around the state, Simson said.
Still, he said the passage rates must rise and he has already created a committee to come up with ideas by January.

"There's no question, we shouldn't have been hovering around the mid-80s," Simson said. "It should be 95 percent and there's no reason why it can't be."

In the meantime, CSU's law school has another selling point to trumpet, along with an in-state tuition of $16,478 a year - compared to Case at $34,700.