What is Quality? Advancing Value-Added Approaches to Assessing Law School Bar Exam Performance WORKING PAPER 1 (Updated November 22, 2022) Jason M. Scott and Josh Jackson
U.S. News & World Report rankings and tier groupings are often used as proxy measures of law school quality. But many of the factors that contribute to both law school outcomes and U.S. News rankings (e.g., undergraduate GPAs (UGPA), LSAT scores, admission rates) do not reflect the impact law schools have on student outcomes, such as bar passage and employment. We propose a method for measuring institutional quality that is based on a school’s ability to improve its graduates’ likelihood of first-time bar passage while controlling for those students’ preadmission characteristics. Using a value-added modeling technique, we first isolate each law school’s expected bar performance for the 2013–2018 bar takers given those cohorts’ entering characteristics and the school’s attrition and transfer patterns, then identify the degree to which this prediction overperforms or underperforms the school’s actual bar performance. Additionally, we utilize a bar pass differential rather than a school’s first-time bar pass rate, allowing us to account for variation between jurisdictions’ grading and cut scores. Finally, we provide a ranked list of law schools based on their added value for each entering cohort. INTRODUCTION When evaluating law schools, how is “quality” defined? And just as importantly, how is it measured? The most widely touted assessment of law school quality is the U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools” rankings; the schools ranked at the top of this list are the most competitive to enter and regularly place their students into the most competitive legal employers upon graduation. These rankings, however, are insufficient for assessing institutional quality, despite the fact that U.S. News law school rankings take into consideration a wide range of factors, as shown in Figure 1 (Morse et al., 2022).
As a working paper, feedback is welcomed and encouraged; please email comments and questions to jscott@accesslex.org.
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