What's Up with the Virginia Bar Exam?

We all know that schools manipulate employment information because it's self-reported to the ABA and the rankings guru, but I wouldn't think a school could have any way of manipulating its bar exam passage rates. But then I saw this article today and I wondered if the wizards behind the curtain at Liberty had pulled it off:

Liberty University School of Law students achieved a 100 percent pass rate on the Virginia Bar Examination in February 2011.
...
Liberty is the only Virginia school to achieve the 100 percent rate in the state this year. Washington & Lee was at 90 percent; George Mason, 84.8 percent; University of Virginia, 75 percent; and the College of William & Mary, 73.3 percent.

I might actually believe the 100 percent claim with minimal skepticism if all the schools were above 90 percent. But with UVa and William and Mary at 75 and 73.3, I'm not sure I can buy it. I'm not an elitist by any stretch, but come on. Liberty is bottom-tier. The median LSAT in 2009 was a 150. 1L attrition in the Class of 2008 was 27.1%.

Liberty has in the past overstated its bar performance, but as far as I know there's no accounting metric that allows you to say student x passed they bar when they clearly failed. The official page says they hit 100%. Did only 5 students sit for it? The percentages look as though it may have been a low turnout.

In any event, it looks like the University of Virginia is taking measures to boost its pass rate (and claim it's doing something for unemployed graduates), but in the grand scheme of things, isn't this report - and others where third-tier toilets occasionally have higher pass rates than better-ranked schools - either an indictment of the bar exam process OR of the rankings system and prestige-based law?

The bar exam is either a good metric of competency or it isn't. If it is, the fact that lower-ranked schools can "do more with less" by taking 153 LSAT kids and getting them licensed while a school with 165 LSAT kids cannot get as many to pass signifies that the former institution is actually a become a competent lawyer. If it's not, then we should just scrap the thing and find a different way to certify people.

See also: http://www.ilrg.com/rankings/law/index.php/1/desc/Bar, where it shows in the 2009 data where you can see many lower-ranked schools outperforming higher ranked peers.