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At a time of increased scrutiny of law schools, Florida Coastal School of Law has announced the Assured Outcomes Partnership, which it says it intended to “support shared accountability between the school and its students for success in the areas of academic performance, experiential learning, and bar exam passage”.
Under the program:
- Students will not be academically dismissed during their first year, as long as they meet several conditions, including complying with the attendance policy, attending writing workshops and involvement in the Bar Coaching Program.
- Students who meet these requirements and are academically dismissed after their first year will receive a refund of $10,000.
- Students who do not pass the bar exam on the first attempt but are in compliance with the conditions will receive a living stipend while preparing to retake the exam, as well as preparation materials free of charge. Students who make two unsuccessful attempts will receive a $10,000 refund.
- Students who follow the program but are unable to obtain “substantive practical legal work experience” while enrolled will receive $2,000.
Peter Goplerud, the dean of the law school, said in an interview that the initiative was not in response to a crisis. “Bar results over the last several years have been in the range from about 76 percent first time pass to low 80s on the Florida exam,” Goplerud said, “and our idea in putting this together really was to leverage some of the things that we’ve been doing but to beef it up a little by creating what really is a partnership so that the students have clear-cut responsibilities themselves and shared accountabilities for the outcomes.” (The law school's 2012 bar admission statistics are available here.)
Not everyone is pleased with the development; the non-profit Law School Transparency declined to comment, but linked to a post on the law blog “Above the Law” by Elie Mystal, which says the initiative “only sounds nice if you don’t read the fine print.” “I don’t know what kind of mathematically challenged people think that getting a $10K refund after spending nearly $120K to go to law school and not passing the bar is a good deal,” writes Mystal. “It’s an argument that will only work on stupid people, but that’s kind of the point.”
Goplerud said that he has talked to others that are “very intrigued by it.”
