While law schools across the country have tried to find a solution to their graduates’ bar exam problems, be it through blaming the test for being unfair or too difficult or allegedly begging their graduates not to take the exam at all, passage rates have continued to drop precipitously.

Law schools in New York are particularly on edge, and with good reason — after all, the overall pass rate of 61 percent for the July 2015 administration of the state’s bar exam was the worst it’s been in more than three decades. One New York law school seems to have pinpointed the exact reason why its overall pass rate was so low. The school revealed in a recent email to all students that graduates with low GPAs dragged down the school’s overall pass rate. Which law school could it be?

The school in question is the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University, and its bar passage rate has progressively slipped from 88 percent in July 2013 to 78.10 percent in July 2015. You can be sure that any law school with almost a double-digit percentage point drop in graduates capable of passing the bar exam would search for the root cause of the problem, but like many law schools that have lowered their admissions standards in recent years, Cardozo’s quandary may be of its own doing.

Last night, Cardozo’s registrar sent a notification to current students about a new remedial bar exam preparation course the school will be offering in conjunction with Kaplan. That email contained some startling figures about graduates with low GPAs:

On the July 2015 New York Bar Exam, graduates from the Cardozo class of 2015 had an overall pass rate of 78.1%. The pass rate for graduates with GPAs above 3.2 was 97.8%. The pass rate for graduates with GPAs below 3.2 was 49.1%, and the rate for graduates with GPAs below 3.1 was 33.8%, even though almost all of these students took a bar review course.

It’s no wonder Cardozo graduates with low GPAs have suffered when it comes to passing the bar exam. Take a look at how the law school’s admissions criteria have sunk since 2010, particularly in the 25th percentile range. Students who entered the school with those numbers may well have become graduates with low law school GPAs, which have been shown to have a strong correlation to success (or lack thereof) on the bar exam.

To assist students with low GPAs, Cardozo Law’s remedial bar prep course — which has been named “Legal Analytic Methods,” likely so that it doesn’t look like a remedial bar prep course on transcripts — will be truly remedial, in that students with GPAs lower than a 3.2 are being “strongly encouraged” to enroll. The course will not be graded on a curve (a rarity in law schools). Further, after receiving their grades in the course, students will be allowed to choose a grade of “P” instead of a letter grade.

The only students who won’t be allowed to change their letter grades to a “P” will be those who receive a D or F in the class, which likely won’t be many, because it’s impossible to actually fail the class if you complete all of the assigned work. Even if students do fail the class based on their midterm and final exam scores, no one will ever know (except the students, who are likely to go into the actual bar exam — if they dare take the actual test — with their past failure weighing heavy on their minds).

Continuing to coddle students who are struggling in their academic classes by allowing them to fake their way through a remedial bar exam preparatory class is not the way to boost bar exam success rates. Failing the bar exam is no joke. While we appreciate that Cardozo Law is trying, there must be a better way to help these students.

(Flip to the next page to see the full email that was sent to all Cardozo Law students.)

Earlier: New York Bar Exam Results Reveal Worst Pass Rates In More Than A Decade