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Troubled by minority students' dismal failure rate on the California Bar examination, the UCLA Law School faculty has voted to toughen its graduation standards and improve the school's academic support systems.

The changes, which were approved at a meeting of the faculty Friday evening, were adamantly opposed by various student organizations on the grounds that such changes would reduce minority groups' chances of entering and graduating from the Law School.

According to an umbrella protest group that calls itself "the Diversity Coalition," the changes were made abruptly, "without student input. and shortly before Law School finals," thus making it difficult for most students to participate in what the students said are "drastic changes" in some of the school's fundamental policies and programs.

Urge Delay

Despite the students' urging that all changes be tabled until next year when they can be studied in greater depth, UCLA Law School Dean Susan Westerberg Prager said last week that it would be "irresponsible" for the Law School to continue "graduating a significant number of people who do not have a meaningful chance of entering the profession in the state in which they want to live and practice."

A recent study showed, she said, that while nearly 90% of regularly admitted UCLA students now pass the California Bar exam, the passage rate is only about 30% for those who are admitted under a special program designed to attract minority and other educationally disadvantaged students.

"That information was sufficiently dramatic that I did not feel we should let another year go by without addressing at least some of the issues it raised," Prager said in a recent letter addressed to the school's approximately 900 law students.

To tighten its academic programs and improve students' chances of being admitted to the California Bar, the UCLA law faculty voted by a 2-1 margin to raise slightly the minimum grade point average that students must maintain to stay in school. In addition, the faculty approved an array of new support services, including hiring an additional person, "preferably a minority," to help develop new programs to recruit and retain minority students.

Streamline Process

The faculty also voted to streamline its admissions process so that the bulk of the decisions will be made by the admissions dean rather than a variety of student-faculty committees. The professors and older students would in turn be freed up to teach smaller classes and participate in new tutorial programs, according to the faculty plan.

As the faculty voted in an unusually long meeting that began in the afternoon and stretched into the evening, nearly 100 students, wearing black and carrying placards, held a silent protest outside the Faculty Center. It was one of several protests that have been staged by minority law students in recent weeks.

Although the dean said she was sorry that changes had led to animosities, she said she thinks that the faculty not only understands her position but that many agree with it: "I don't think we as an institution can pretend we don't have a problem."

In fact, the Law School's problem is one shared by virtually every professional school and undergraduate college in the nation: That is, how to attract and admit minority students, many of whom are educationally disadvantaged, without lowering the institution's academic standards or doing a disservice to students by placing them in programs in which they do not have a reasonable chance of completing with some success.

Special Consideration

Prager said UCLA had been a leader among prestigious law schools in reaching out to minority students and was firmly committed to continuing its policy of giving special consideration to all "high-risk" applicants, especially minority students.

The high-risk program at UCLA, known as the "diversity program," covers about 40% of each year's entering classes. Unlike the regular admissions process, which evaluates students largely on the basis of grades and test scores, the high-risk program gives special consideration to minority students and a variety of other unusual applicants, such as those whose native language is not English and older applicants who would like to return to school.

UCLA's admissions program was designed in 1978 after the California Supreme Court's decision in the Bakke case, which prohibited schools from setting aside special admissions slots exclusively on the basis of race. In fact, however, UCLA's program, like similar programs at other universities, has been the school's "primary tool" in admitting racial minority students, most of whom could not qualify under regular admissions standards, said Michael D. Rappaport, UCLA's assistant dean of Law School admissions.

In recent years between 25% and 40% of the entering classes have been members of minority groups, and the majority of them have been admitted through the diversity program, Rappaport said.

Some Not Qualified

While some high-risk students are quite successful in their Law School studies and legal careers, a recent UCLA study of California Bar exam passage rates showed that there are many students in this group who are being graduated by UCLA but who are not qualified to practice law in California as determined by the State Bar.

"All law schools have encountered increased difficulty in helping their students prepare for the (California Bar) examination," Prager said. "But UCLA's California Bar passage rate has gone down faster than the rates of a sample of comparable institutions."

In 1986, 71.9% of UCLA's graduates passed the Bar the first time they took it, contrasted with 78.3% in 1982. Among other California law schools, that record placed UCLA in fourth place, ahead of the University of California, Davis, (with a pass rate of 69.5%) and USC (67.5%). Stanford ranked first (86.2%), followed by Boalt Hall at Berkeley (79.7%) and Hastings College of Law in San Francisco (75.6%).