Bar-Passing Rate

To become a lawyer, you must pass the bar exam in your state, and law schools often attract students by advertising their bar-passing rate: the percentage of their graduates who pass the bar exam. What qualities make for a good law school? You might think that a low student/faculty ratio was good; this would mean that the school typically has small class sizes.

a. The scatterplot shows the bar-passing rate against the student/faculty ratio for a large number of law schools in the United States. What does the trend tell us about the role of the student/faculty ratio?

b. The regression line for predicting the bar-passing rate is shown above the graph. What bar-passing rate would you predict for a school with a student/faculty ratio of 12?

c. Interpret the slope.

d. What, if anything, do we learn from the intercept?

e. Interpret the coefficient of determination.

(This data set is available at the text's website, and other variables are also shown, such as the minimum score on the LSAT (the Law School Admission Test), and the minimum GPA for the students accepted at the law schools.

Several other variables give higher coefficients of determination. You could also discover what named law schools have the low outliers, such as the bar-passing rate of 26%.)