The bar is getting lower for CUNY law graduates.
Bar-exam pass rates for first-time test takers at CUNY have plummeted 16 percentage points in the past three years — boomeranging the school back to the bottom rank among New York’s law schools.
The pass rate dropped from a record high of 83 percent in 2008 to 67 percent this year — the lowest pass rate at the CUNY School of Law since 2005.
This year’s performance left the Flushing school an alarming 19 percentage points below the state’s 2011 average pass rate of 86 percent.
CUNY also had its lowest number of first-time applicants taking the bar exam in recent years, 99, which was also well below the majority of New York’s 14 other accredited law schools.
After the school upped its admissions standards and its minimum grade-point-average requirements for students in 2003, its bar-exam results rose dramatically.
But sources familiar with the law program say that the subsequent drop has come from a slackening of those standards — including allowing freshman courses to count pass/fail, and not mandating enough courses that are vital for succeeding on the bar exam.
School officials acknowledged the need for a tuneup with their response to the second straight year of disappointing results.
Earlier this month, the executive committee of CUNY’s Board of Trustees voted to raise the minimum GPA students need to avoid probation or possible dismissal from the program from 2.3 to 2.5 starting in the spring.
They also approved making at least four “bar elective” courses mandatory, as well as requiring struggling third-year students to come back for an additional semester in order to pick up their grades.
“The changes . . . are designed to raise academic standards and better prepare our students for the bar exam and enhance our ability to carry out our mission to graduate lawyers who will practice law in the service of human needs,” said the school’s dean, Michelle Anderson, who was appointed in 2006.
Pass rates on this year’s exam were highest for graduates from Columbia and NYU — which both hit the 96 percent mark.
American Bar Association accreditation requires that at least 75 percent of a school’s test-takers pass the bar exam in three of the prior five years in order for it to maintain its good standing.
It’s a potential concern for CUNY’s 2012 exam scores, since it has two consecutive years of results below that minimum mark.
But the ABA also allows schools to maintain their good standing as long as they’re not 15 percentage points below any other school in the same jurisdiction for three out of every five years.
That standard is not yet a concern for CUNY, which this year was within 9 percentage points of the second-lowest scorer, Pace University.