Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?

Last week, BloombergBusiness' Natalie Kitroeff had a piece with a title sure to grab your attention: "Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?" However, the piece is really about a stupendous drop in the rate of law school graduates who are passing the bar exam. For example, bar passage rates dropped by 9 percentage points or more in Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas in 2014.

National Conference of Bar Examiners' Erica Moeser says the student body that sat for the July 2014 exam were less prepared than the body that sat for the July 2013 exam. She told Kitroeff "underqualified law grads don’t deserve to pass the bar just because they earned a J.D. Her role, she says, is to protect consumers."

However, some critics point to the glitch in the ExamSoft software that cause thousands of test takers to get error messages when trying to upload their exams in 2014. Yet pass rates were down across the board in states that used ExamSoft and those that didn't, Kitroeff reports.

Moeser also argues that law schools have lowered their standards to admit students who aren't going to qualify for the bar: "''You’ve got this underclass in law schools who are really keeping the lights on but not reaping the benefit.'"