Law school first-year academic dismissals drop more than 50% after spring semester without grades

Back in March, I shared some reflections that were mostly against the idea of moving to pass-fail grading, identifying some value of grades in the spring, especially among first-year students, and some problems. One included concerns about academic dismissal of law students.

We now have some figures from law schools. Academic dismissals among first-year law students were down over 50% year-over-year. They dropped from 1182 among ABA-accredited law schools (excluding schools in Puerto Rico) in 2019 down to 558 in 2020. (1L enrollment was basically flat.)

But I want to parse out what this means. Most law schools moved to pass-fail grading. Law schools were obviously aware that moving to pass-fail grading would cut half of a first-year student’s GPA. So many law schools may well have postponed their academic dismissals until this winter to get a second semester’s worth of grades.

From my look at the date, about 11 schools had a 5% or higher academic dismissal rate in 2019 that dropped to 0 this year. My assumption is those schools would be in a prime place for it.

A lot of other schools typically don’t academically dismiss any students, so their figures are unchanged.

But a lot of schools saw dramatic reductions in academic dismissal rates—from, say, 5 to 8% in 2019 to 1 to 2% this year. Some saw 10-20% rates drop to 4-6%.

It’s not clear if these rates mean schools were more lenient in their standards. Or maybe it means that they enforced them coupled with a true “failing” grade arising in pass-fail classes. That is, perhaps there were some actual failing grades issued when, well, let’s face it, pass-fail typically means “pass” in most courses. Or maybe schools articulated standards based on Fall 1L GPA performance alone.

In any case, we won’t know until next December what the 2L academic dismissal rates look like, and whether they’ll back-fill academic dismissals into this class. But I thought I’d flag the continuing lingering effects from the spring semester pandemic-related shutdowns and grading changes, and look at what it might yield in the year ahead.