Two to three years worth of tuition, future job prospects, and the difference between holding a J.D. and being a practicing attorney all boil down to a two and a half day exam.
“A lot rides on it; there is an incredible amount of stress,” said Professor Becky Cochran, who runs the UDSL Road to Bar Passage Program.
The two-month, Road to Bar Passage Program course is free to UDSL graduates and focuses on the Ohio bar, the state bar for which 50% of UDSL graduates sit.
The course offers more personal attention, near immediate feedback (essays written on Tuesday are returned with constructive comments on Thursday), and tailored strategies than bar preparation courses taught by outside vendors, says Cochran and Anna Fister, a UDSL 2003 graduate and bar passage consultant who assists with the course.
Fister, along with Sha Hindz-Glick (UDSL ‘06), Patti Pickrel (UDSL ‘99), and Gerry Greene (UDSL ‘02) offer something else unique to the UDSL program, they were all sitting in the exact same place as the ‘07 graduates not too long ago. “The best ideas for the course come from people who have just taken the bar,” Cochran said.
Beyond covering common rules of law and test-taking strategies, “we talk about the little things – where the best hotels are to stay in the night before the exam, what types of pens to use,” Fister said. “We try to remove issues that other students might have when they sit [for the bar].”
The two-month course culminates in a one-day simulation of what the first day of the Ohio bar exam will be like, complete with all the rules and regulations handed down by Ohio Supreme Court respective to sitting for the bar exam. “No one [who takes the course] enters the bar exam shell shocked,” Fister said. “They are prepared; they say, ‘I’ve already done this’.”
And it seems to work. UDSL graduates who sit for the Ohio bar exam and go through the Road to Bar Passage Program have an over 90% rate of passage.
In 1997, the Ohio bar exam was made more stringent when the number of points needed to pass the exam was raised. In 2003, following several years of mostly declining scores that plagued all Ohio law schools, UDSL decided to create the Road to Bar Passage Program to give its graduates more structure and personalized attention to help them study and pass the Ohio bar.
About half of School of Law graduates sit for the Ohio bar exam, Cochran said. She explained that one component of law school rankings by U.S. News and World Report, as well as accreditation from the ABA, has to do with how many graduates pass the bar in the state where the majority of them sit for the exam. “Passage of the Ohio bar takes on a significance that you might not imagine.”
In addition, current students gain confidence in their own abilities to pass the exam when they see older classmates succeed. Similarly, employers feel confident that when they hire a UDSL student at graduation in May, he/she will pass the bar exam and be sworn in as a member of the state bar in November.
Beyond the two-month summer course for graduates, the program supports students by providing information, character and fitness counseling, and course selection advice throughout all two or three years of law school. During the last year of law school, that support increases with regular class meetings, individual appointments as needed, and, beginning last spring in 2006, a one-credit bar preparation course that is generalized enough to cover information tested on many state’s bar exams.
In Ohio, of first time takers, 81% or 64 UDSL graduates passed the July 2005 exam. This passing percentage equaled the state average. The Ohio Bar Exam is one of the longer exams, lasting two and a half days. It includes the national multiple choice questions, 12 half-hour essays, and two national performance tests. The Ohio test favors the written portions - counting them as 2/3 of the exam points - compared to the multiple choice portion of the exam. This year’s Ohio bar exam is July 24-26.