A governor of the Florida State University System issued a warning last year, saying he is ready to discontinue the program if the percentage of Florida A&M University College of Law students who passed the Florida Bar exam on their first try remained below half.
80% of the law students in the FAMU 2023 class were expected to pass on their first try. For those pupils, the real result was 41%, which was a 12% drop from the previous year.
Students majoring in pharmacy, nursing, and physical therapy at FAMU also did poorly. Physical therapy was 13% below the approved target of 92%, pharmacy was 22% below the allowed goal of 92%, and nursing was 8% below the approved objective of a 90% pass rate.
During the panel’s meeting on Thursday in Orlando, deputy chair of the SUS Board of Governors Alan Levine voiced his dissatisfaction with the execution of the programs.
“I’m prepared to vote to take these programs away if we can’t do it the right way,” Levine stated. “This is a disservice to those students and to the taxpayers who are paying for this, and the result they are getting is they can’t pass their boards to go practice what they went to school for.”
The performance metrics, which include post-graduation job status, graduate demographics, enrollment planning, and other data, were brought up during a Board of Governors assessment of public university accountability plans. Two state colleges were singled out out of the twelve for their inferior performance.
Among all state universities, the nursing school at Florida Atlantic University was the only one to perform “in the red” in 2023—that is, more than 5% below the authorized targets.
Nursing students at the FAU Boca Raton campus and the Davie campus program both performed 5% and 17% below the acceptable goal for first-attempt nursing exam passing rates, respectively.
Levine remarked that, “We’ve talked about nursing at FAU for a while now, and we’re here talking again about this at FAMU.” Over the past five years, the FAMU law program has not achieved results that are within twenty percent of its authorized target.
FAMU’s president, Larry Robinson, stated that the school filed “fairly intensive or comprehensive improvement plans” for each of the four programs in 2023.
According to Robinson, the university has worked with other universities to share best practices for improving bar test results. According to him, faculty at FAMU gained greater skills in addressing at-risk students and modifying the curriculum to get them ready for the test.
“We have begun to review the curriculum to ensure that it correlates more closely with what students might experience or be questioned about on the bar examination itself,” Robinson stated.
According to Robinson, FAMU follows the careers of its graduates and enrols all at-risk students in courses to prepare for the bar test.
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“I think making the stronger correlation between the curriculum and the exams themselves and making the test prep a mandatory part of the student experience is going to make a significant difference,” he stated.
FAMU’s first-attempt success percentage on the bar exam was 7% lower in 2023 at 86% than the benchmark, or national average.
“I’m a huge fan of the work that’s been done at FAMU, you know that,” Levine stated. “And I’ve been a huge advocate for giving everybody the opportunity to correct these things. But not hitting our threshold for pass rates is completely unacceptable — it’s table stakes; this is a must-do.”
Levine stated that he is in favor of ending the two institutions’ programs.
“One of the questions I have is whether or not your admission standards are improper — are you admitting people into these programs that shouldn’t be in these programs?” Levine stated.
“That’s part of the question here. Not everyone needs to be a lawyer, not everyone can go into nursing, they’re tough career paths. So, if you let somebody in for other reasons than merit or they don’t meet the standards of the students that have the propensity to pass their boards, then you’re not doing them a service.”
