The Kids Are Definitely Not All Right: An Empirical Study Establishing a Statistically Significant Negative Relationship Between Receiving Accommodations in Law School and Passing the Bar Exam
Document Type
Law Review Article
Publication Date
1-2023
Keywords
health and psychological barriers, bar passage
Abstract
Many factors can influence whether a person passes the bar examination on their first attempt. One factor that should not is whether that person has a “disability” that would mandate reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. Unfortunately, before the publication of this Article, there has been no publicly available data that could be used to assess the relationship between receiving accommodations and passing the bar examination. To begin to remedy this absence of data, the author filed public records requests with sixty public law schools seeking information as to the number of students accommodated by each law school for the years 2019, 2020, and 2021. This data was then analyzed to see whether the percentage of accommodated students at a law school was correlated with bar passage rates. This analysis shows that there is a statistically significant negative relationship between the percentage of a law school’s student body who received accommodations and the school’s bar pass rate (controlling for other relevant factors). In other words, the more accommodated students a school has, the lower its bar passage rate will be.
