Cronyism Blamed for Half of Univ. of Texas Law School Grads’ Inability to Pass the Bar, Many With LSAT Scores Below 150

Raw Story:  Cronyism Blamed for Half of Univ. of Texas Law School Grads’ Inability to Pass the Bar:

A mushrooming scandal at the University of Texas has exposed rampant favoritism in the admissions process of its nationally-respected School of Law.

According to Watchdog.org, Democratic and Republican elected officials stand accused of calling in favors and using their clout to obtain admission to the law school for less-than-qualified but well-connected applicants.

The prestigious program boasts a meager 59 percent of recent graduates who were able to pass the Texas bar exam. Those numbers rank UT “dead last among Texas’ nine law schools despite it being by far the most highly regarded school of the nine,” wrote Erik Telford at FoxNews.com.

“Every law school — even Harvard and Yale — turns out the occasional disappointing alum who cannot pass the bar,” said Telford. “In Texas, however, a disturbing number of these failed graduates are directly connected to the politicians who oversee the university’s source of funding.

Feb. 2014 Texas Bar (1st Time Takers)
Rank	School	Number	Pass Rate
1	Texas Tech	24	91.7%
2	Baylor	37	89.2%
3	Texas A&M	48	87.5%
4	Houston	32	84.4%
5	South Texas	111	83.8%
6	SMU	25	72.0%
7	St. Mary’s	42	66.7%
8	Texas Southern	24	66.7%
9	Texas	17	58.8%

Watchdog.org, Who Got the 128? UT Law Admits Students With Bad LSAT Scores:

Dozens of students admitted to UT Law in recent years have scores on the Law School Admissions Test, or LSAT, that are below the standards of the lowest ranked law schools in the country, a Watchdog.org investigation into admissions favoritism has found.

The LSAT is scored on a scale of 120-180. UT Law students get a median score of 167, according to the 2014 US News survey, and the great majority of the class scores a 160 or better. 

Even a score in the 170s with a near-perfect grade point average is no guarantee of admission, as this roster of self-reported scores for UT applicants from lawschoolnumbers.com makes clear. ...

With a score below 150, you’re something of a longshot even at the lowest ranked law schools in the country. The University of La Verne College of Law in California, for example, came in dead last in the peer reputation survey on the 2013 US News rankings of accredited law schools, yet three-quarters of its students scored a 150 or better.

In recent years, UT Law has admitted students not just with LSATs in the 140s, but with scores as low as 138, 137, 136, even 128. Several of them were rejected by other Texas law schools of lesser reputation. A 128 is down at the very bottom 1 percent of test-takers nationwide. It means the person got less than a quarter of the answers correct. 

Watchdog.org requested the LSAT scores of 122 UT Law students from four other public law schools in Texas, figuring that most people apply to more than one law school. We obtained scores for 47 people from the other schools, almost all of them with names redacted. Only six of the 47 scores were above 160.

The average high score for the applicants on our lists was 149.7, which is barely good enough for the worst law schools in the country. Even schools like Whittier Law College and Golden Gate University School of Law, which put less than a fifth of their graduates into full-time jobs, expect most of their class to have scores above 150.

A few commenters attacked Watchdog.org’s recent report on the political connections of dozens of students who had failed the bar exam at least twice in recent years, on the grounds that bar failure didn’t prove that the student had poor LSAT scores. The argument, in other words, is that just because somebody failed the bar (twice) doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve his place at UT.

These LSAT scores, however, prove just that. Almost every score we got was somewhere between borderline and horrendous. There were 18-24 scores below 150 and five to six scores below 140. ...

The 122 names we requested came from a database we built to tally the number of times UT Law grads had failed the bar. We requested the LSAT scores of the 90 Longhorns who failed the bar two or more times from 2006-2013. We figured that their struggles to pass the bar — 42 of them never passed — made them the most likely candidates to have benefited from favoritism. We requested the scores of 26 others who passed the bar on a second try, who also either shared a last name with a lawmaker or who had already attained a high-level government job.Then we picked six current UT Law students, five for no reason other than to obscure our interest in the sixth: Jonathan Seliger, son of state Sen. Kel Seliger, who is chairman of the Higher Education Committee. ...

We provide all three lists here (Texas Tech, Texas A&M, TSU) for any additional analysis and comments from readers. ...

Although it’s impossible to say conclusively from this sample whether affirmative action is a factor, as opposed to favoritism to a politician or a donor to UT’s Law School Foundation, we can say that the demographics of our list roughly reflect the state’s demographics.

• Above the Law, Top Law School Admitted Dozens Of Unqualified — But Politically Connected — Students
• Fox News, Corruption, Rampant Cronyism at University of Texas School of Law?
• Law & Econ Prof Blog, Political Corruption at Texas Law School, by Eric Rasmussen (Indiana)
• Tipping the Scales, Getting In: An Interview With UT’s Law School Admissions Dean

Update:  Of course, there are far fewer first-time takers of the February bar exam (360 in 2014) than of the July bar exam (1,759 in 2013).  Here are the comparable data for the July 2013 bar exam:

July 2013 Texas Bar (1st Time Takers)
Rank	School	Number	Pass Rate
1	Baylor	121	97.5%
2	Texas	268	95.5%
3	SMU	214	91.6%
4	South Texas	263	89.4%
5	Houston	217	88.0%
6	Texas Tech	192	86.0%
7	Texas A&M	127	85.8%
8	St. Mary’s	227	82.8%
9	Texas Southern	130	79.2%