The LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center is home to the highest bar passage rate in Louisiana, according to exam results released Friday by the Louisiana Supreme Court Committee on Bar Admissions.
In July, 70 percent of the 171 LSU Law students who took the exam passed — the highest passage rate in the state. The Southern University Law Center had the lowest passage rate at 34 percent.
Graduating students must pass the bar exam before they can practice law. Louisiana’s exam, administered biannually in February and July, consists of more than 20 hours of testing on topics such as the Louisiana Civil Code, federal jurisdiction and criminal procedure.
LSU Law Center Chancellor Jack Weiss said it is important to pay attention to the relative pass rate — the percentage of LSU Law students who passed divided by the total pass rate — because that number is used for U.S. News and World Report rankings and for the Louisiana GRAD Act in determining tuition authority. The University’s relative pass rate for the July 2013 exam was 1.32, which is up from 1.22 in 2012.
Weiss said what matters most is how LSU Law does relative to other schools in the state because the difficulty of the bar exam changes each year. The passage rate is more a function of the exam and less of the students or the school, he said.
The way the bar exam is scored changed last year and the implications of that are not yet fully known, Weiss said, which could also affect exam results.
LSU Law was also recently rated the No. 3 best value law school by the National Jurist magazine. The magazine considered factors such as tuition, bar passage rate, debt accumulation and employment figures of graduates. According to an Oct. 2 LSU Law news release, 92 percent of 2012 graduates were employed within nine months after graduation.
Weiss said LSU Law students have a good reputation — people want to hire them, especially fellow University alumni.
“You can get an excellent legal education here at a reasonable cost relative to the rest of the law school world,” Weiss said. “You can come out of this school with tens of thousands of dollars less debt than students at other schools take on, and we have a very strong record of our students passing the bar exam and getting jobs.”
“You can get an excellent legal education here at a reasonable cost relative to the rest of the law school world.”