Anxious CUNY Law School administrators are urging struggling students not to take this summer’s bar exam in an apparent bid to boost the school’s sagging pass rates, irate students charged.
The administrators even offered a handful of students a grant in the fall that’s normally reserved for those taking the July exam if they would agree to postpone sitting for the test until February 2013.
Students say an associate dean has pulled at least six classmates in for a one-on-one sales pitch advocating for the delay — even though the February exam is reputedly more difficult.
The move comes after the Flushing school’s pass rates for first-time takers of the New York bar exam plummeted to 67 percent last year — well below the statewide average of 86 percent.
Schools can face serious sanctions from the Bar Association if they have consecutive years of pass rates below 75 percent.
“It’s quintessentially a bribe offering an incentive to artificially inflate July test numbers, and it’s absolutely wrong,” said one student. “The fact the deans approach these students behind closed doors, pressuring them to make a decision that isn’t necessarily in their best interest . . . people are angry.”
CUNY officials downplayed the flare-up, saying it stemmed from a misunderstanding over a new initiative that was launched in response to last year’s poor results.
After The Post asked about the practice, Dean Michelle Anderson sent out an e-mail clarifying that struggling students were simply being offered an optional seventh semester of coursework at no cost.
“Ten years of data on CUNY Law graduates taking the bar highlight the predictive importance of law-school grade point averages and study in bar-related, doctrinal courses,” she wrote. “Based on these data, we reached out to those [third-year] students who were most at risk to offer them the option of extending their study and deepening their preparation for the bar.”
CUNY officials noted that the ABA counts both February and July results in its review of schools’ performance, so they have nothing to gain by delaying test-takers.
But students countered that February 2013’s results would be excluded from this year’s crucial tally, which comes after two years of disappointing results.
Students also complained that postponing the exam only added to their living expenses and put off their ability to earn income to pay back their college loans.
“I’ve never heard any law school do anything other than encourage students to take the bar,” said a CUNY insider. “It shows the desperation they’re going through.”