One of the essays, by Nick Allard, the dean of Brooklyn Law School, begins:
No one who graduates from an A.B.A.-accredited law school with a strong G.P.A. should have to take the bar exam. The current exam is very expensive, and not a great measure of competence to actually practice law....He doesn't mention Wisconsin, but we're the test case. Look at us. There's no bar exam in Wisconsin for graduates of Wisconsin law schools (that is, my school and Marquette). Are our lawyers worse than your lawyers?
For too long the unregulated monopoly of the testing industry has masqueraded as the self-appointed guardian of professional standards.... It is time for the A.B.A., courts and law schools to take back control of the future of the profession (which they know better than a testing organization) and overhaul the way we evaluate the readiness of graduates to serve in the private and public roles of practicing lawyers.
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95 comments:
The students are failing and the teachers are blaming the students. No surprise there.
Are our lawyers worse than your lawyers?
I was going to answer yes, because your lawyers probably believe that the commerce clause delegate to the federal government the power to enact the Clean Air Act.
But then their lawyers probably believe that shit too.
Shouldn't you be asking that the other way around?
It would at least sound better if you asked which school produces the best lawyers.
Why should lawyers have to understand the laws? The judges certainly don't. Just dumb down the bar exam. Everyone has a right to a job, don't they?
"The students are failing and the teachers are blaming the students. No surprise there."
Are you talking about one of the 5 essays or just making something up?
"Shouldn't you be asking that the other way around?"
So the question is X greater than Y could be more productively asked as: Is Y greater than X?
The question is the same in my book.
Just give them a good grade for participating...THAT is the way America operates now!
I mean the question are different only if you you care whether the answer is phrased "yes" or "no" when Y and X are equal.
"Just give them a good grade for participating...THAT is the way America operates now!"
In law school, there is a required curve and a a required average. It isn't permitted to give only good grades (or only bad grades), no matter how good or bad the exams are.
That means that if the students in this year are writing worse (or better) exams than the students 10 or 20 years ago, their GPAs will look the same as those students in the other years.
As the oversupply of lawyers has exploded, the guild must protect itself from further competition.
The faith promoting rumor is that the historical purpose of the bar exam was to prevent too many people from entering the profession. The passing grade was set each year to allow just enough new entrants into the field. In years of high demand for new attorneys, passing rates were higher than in years when the legal profession was in a slump. With too many attorneys chasing too few jobs, it's not surprising to see the pass rates fall.
Again, this was just faith promoting rumor (promulgated by my economics professor years ago). I'm confident that if this was once true, it no longer is. Still, the coincidence that pass rates are falling at a time of falling demand for new attorneys is interesting.
I'm very suspicious any time I hear of any reasonably objective standard like the bar exam being judged too exclusionary. In essence, Allard is saying that students are unfairly oppressed by the exam. If we remove that and replace a subjective standard like GPA, then quality will decline.
Students are being admitted into a program they can't pass in order to generate income for the education blob. They then fail the competency test. The response of the blob, the competency test must be abolished!!!!!!
The Wisconsin diploma privilege makes sense. Don't gotta have a guild membership; just a sheepskin.
We should go farther, though. Why have licensing at all for the practice of law?
"Ann Althouse said...
In law school, there is a required curve and a a required average. It isn't permitted to give only good grades (or only bad grades), no matter how good or bad the exams are.
That means that if the students in this year are writing worse (or better) exams than the students 10 or 20 years ago, their GPAs will look the same as those students in the other years."
So it really doesn't matter how good a teacher you are.
Lawyers must be stupid.
Lower the bar. What the hell, they're doing for nearly everything to satisfy some Progressive/Liberal/Democrat somewhere anyway.
There's a parable for this story. It's called Before The Law (Vor Dem Gesetz) by Franz Kafka.
There's good reason to cut back on the number of people allowed to practice law (and if making the bar exams harder does that, so be it). Too many lawyers with not enough good legal work to do means a lot more parasite clients getting someone to represent them and create nuisance suits.
With fewer lawyers passing the bar each year, we'll see the number of applicants to law schools drop off as well.
I am all for competency testing and evaluations, but the question of whether or not the bar exam is useful in producing good lawyers is valid. Or does it merely reward good test takers?
And grading on a curve is a mistake. If X in 2008 is not performing as well as Y did in 2007, the grades should reflect that. If X, Y and Z are all kicking the courses ass, they all deserve the same grade. Curve grading hides weakness and punishes success.
But in the absence of an independent check, wouldn't the race to the bottom on admissions win out??
A school like yours gets more applicants precisely because of the privilege, so you cannot extrapolate your experience to the whole universe of law schools.
It's very fair to say that pass rates vary widely between law schools. Dramatically so. The bar exam is an independent check on what otherwise would be a strong incentive to admit students who would pay, regardless of whether they are really capable of substantially mastering the material.
Also, for students who are going to commit three years of their lives and a lot of money to the study of law, being able to look at bar exam pass rates is a good independent check.
If the deans got rid of the bar exam, the next step would be to get rid of the LSAT. All authority structures get captured by their own interests, and the interests of law faculty are to keep their jobs at a time when the circumstances are difficult.
SGT Ted, grading on a curve has the benefit of controlling the teacher and grader. If the chemistry teacher spouts poetry all semester and then spills a few piles of crystals on the exam table with the command "Create life", then the curve helps minimize such stupidity.
There are separate issues that should be addressed.
First, if a higher percentage of students are failing the bar exam today than 10-20 years in the past (and the level of difficulty of the exam is about the same), then the implication is that today's students (and perhaps their professors) aren't as capable as their predecessors. If that's the case, then calls to abolish the bar exam conform to Larry's First Law: "Anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough."
Second, does the bar exam adequately measure what lawyers need to know to be successful. Perhaps the best way to evaluate that question is to interview 100 or more employers of lawyers. I'm talking about both criminal and civil law and from both government and private practice. Ask them what lawyers need to know to be successful. Use the information gained from those interviews to evaluate the bar exam as it currently exists.
Perhaps there should be more than one type of bar exam, each focused on a type of law. People who intend to focus on criminal law (either as prosecutors or as defense attorneys) should have to pass an exam that concentrates on that field. Likewise, those who intend to have a career in civil law should have to pass an exam tailored to that field. One size fits all is seldom a good policy, be it for clothing, education, or the bar exam.
Even within civil law, there may need to be some form of certification tests to indicate knowledge of specialized knowledge domains. My daughter-in-law works franchise law for a major corporation. Other lawyers specialize in tax law, immigration law, torts, etc. If a non-lawyer is looking to hire a lawyer for a specific need, it'd be useful to know the lawyer has passed the relevant exam. This would be similar to the IT field where there are many different certifications available for things like programming, network management, and cyber security. Just because someone has passed a generic bar exam, it doesn't mean that person has any practical knowledge in a specialized domain like tax law.
The current exam is very expensive, and not a great measure of competence to actually practice law.
But neither is getting a law degree, you greedy self-satisfied jerk. (And how does the expense of the exam compare to the expense of three (!) years of law school?)
So grade inflation is the cure?
My two cents, FWIW:
I am a practicing attorney, a litigator in private practice for the past 20 years, with a specialty that has me in court and thinking fast on my feet a good deal of the time, and also writing scholarly briefs. I'm a 53-year-old woman. I have always done exceedingly well--often, perfect scores--on multiple-choice, time-pressure, normed tests, such as PSAT, SAT, LSAT, GRE, and the Bar Exam, all of which I took and always scored in the 99+ percentile on. I have a high IQ--which is just another "score" from a similar type of test.
My grades were never as much to write home about, because I am lazy. They were good enough, in the 1980s, when combined with my test scores, to get me into Princeton University for my undergraduate degree (class of 1984), into UNC Chapel Hill for law school (class of 1992), then into Duke as a visiting scholar in Constitutional Law, and then into UCSD in a doctoral program in philosophy, with a scholarship, which I ultimately decided not to attend.
I am white. My perception is that all of these tests (including the essay portions) "test" one thing, above all: a mix of extreme self-confidence, focus and relaxation (all at the same time) when under the peculiar pressures of these tests--which are NOTHING LIKE the pressures of even the most demanding think-on-your-feet law practice--and, in the case of the Bar Exam, a small amount of easily-memorized factoids.
In law school, I happened to draw many of my closest friends from among the African-American students (partly because my boyfriend's roommate was African-American, and partly because my chosen field of debate, international law, had a mentor/mentee history among the Black Law Students Association.) My friends and acquaintances were unusually diligent, intelligent, mature, thoughtful, personable, knowledgeable, and decent people, of high verbal and analytical abilities. More so than me. All had the makings of fine, fine attorneys. One had been the president of the student body at NC State. One was my debate partner.
And they failed the bar exam at much higher rates than the general pass rate at UNC. It had nothing to do with their intelligence, preparation, or ability to be excellent lawyers. IMHO, it had everything to do with fear of that particular test. My debate partner and I sat through the usual bar prep course, studied together for about 3 hours the night before the test, and both passed. (No points for doing any better than passing--that's the goal.) He had grown up on a US military base in Germany, and, for whatever reason, had the same self-confident, breezy approach to multiple-choice, time-pressure tests that I have. And our equally intelligent friends who studied hard for weeks, agonized and sweated: many of them failed. The bar exam has almost no relevance to whether or not you will be a good lawyer, and total relevance to whether you choke on this type of test, which happens more to black and Hispanic students (and, usually, to women, though I don't know if that is true for the Bar), than to white (and I presume, Asian) students. I totally agree with Claude Steele on this. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/8221387-sterotype-threat
Same for IQ tests, of course. Given all that, is beyond shameful that colleges, universities, and Bar associations use these tests as thresholds. (I'm a section chair of my State Bar.)
Doesn't the bar exam have disparate impact? 'nuff said.
I had a physics professor who would create curves by bumping up the top end, so you'd get back crazy test grades like 117%.
Sounds like this deserves a study. Could be performed using Wisconsin. Does the bar make for better lawyers or not?
...We are programmed to receive,
You can check out anytime you want,
but you can never relieve(your student loans)
...
Unknown said...
My two cents, FWIW:
I am a practicing attorney, a litigator in private practice for the past 20 years, with a specialty that has me in court and thinking fast on my feet a good deal of the time, and also writing scholarly briefs. I'm a 53-year-old woman. I have always done exceedingly well--often, perfect scores--on multiple-choice, time-pressure, normed tests, such as PSAT, SAT, LSAT, GRE, and the Bar Exam, all of which I took and always scored in the 99+ percentile on. I have a high IQ--which is just another "score" from a similar type of test.
My grades were never as much to write home about, because I am lazy. They were good enough, in the 1980s, when combined with my test scores, to get me into Princeton University for my undergraduate degree (class of 1984), into UNC Chapel Hill for law school (class of 1992), then into Duke as a visiting scholar in Constitutional Law, and then into UCSD in a doctoral program in philosophy, with a scholarship, which I ultimately decided not to attend.
I am white. My perception is that all of these tests (including the essay portions) "test" one thing, above all: a mix of extreme self-confidence, focus and relaxation (all at the same time) when under the peculiar pressures of these tests--which are NOTHING LIKE the pressures of even the most demanding think-on-your-feet law practice--and, in the case of the Bar Exam, a small amount of easily-memorized factoids.
In law school, I happened to draw many of my closest friends from among the African-American students (partly because my boyfriend's roommate was African-American, and partly because my chosen field of debate, international law, had a mentor/mentee history among the Black Law Students Association.) My friends and acquaintances were unusually diligent, intelligent, mature, thoughtful, personable, knowledgeable, and decent people, of high verbal and analytical abilities. More so than me. All had the makings of fine, fine attorneys. One had been the president of the student body at NC State. One was my debate partner.
And they failed the bar exam at much higher rates than the general pass rate at UNC. It had nothing to do with their intelligence, preparation, or ability to be excellent lawyers. IMHO, it had everything to do with fear of that particular test. My debate partner and I sat through the usual bar prep course, studied together for about 3 hours the night before the test, and both passed. (No points for doing any better than passing--that's the goal.) He had grown up on a US military base in Germany, and, for whatever reason, had the same self-confident, breezy approach to multiple-choice, time-pressure tests that I have. And our equally intelligent friends who studied hard for weeks, agonized and sweated: many of them failed. The bar exam has almost no relevance to whether or not you will be a good lawyer, and total relevance to whether you choke on this type of test, which happens more to black and Hispanic students (and, usually, to women, though I don't know if that is true for the Bar), than to white (and I presume, Asian) students. I totally agree with Claude Steele on this. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/8221387-sterotype-threat
Same for IQ tests, of course. Given all that, is beyond shameful that colleges, universities, and Bar associations use these tests as thresholds. (I'm a section chair of my State Bar.)
Really?
You may not be as smart as you think you are.
My view is that anyone should be able to "practice law" and people should be allowed to use whatever criteria they want to choose a lawyer. But let's not be idiots about this. Passing the bar (and other) exam(s) is largely dependent on core intelligence and preparation. It is a shame that many people are admitted to law school who really do not have the capacity to be good lawyers or pass the bar. A shame.
Are our lawyers worse than your lawyers?
Talk about a low bar...
Tank -- I am absolutely as smart as I think I am, but you do not know either how smart I am or how smart I think I am (I dropped hint's, it's not so much), just that I happen to ace these particular, cretinous tests. I put all that stuff in there about me, so that people who want to think about this rather than spout opinions would have some reason to understand that I know what I'm talking about, and I'm not bitching because I can't do well on these stupid tests.
Did you read? I had very smart, very well-prepared friends, people I had worked with in debate so I know their analytical and verbal abilities in a formal setting, people who had good grades at a top law school, who failed the f***ing bar exam. Therefore, I can say with certainty that that test had nothing to do with their intelligence, preparation, or ability to be excellent lawyers. Because they were smart, well-prepared, had all the other mental and personality requisites to be good lawyers, but they failed the bar exam--at least, on their first try. (I think Hilary! did, too, which I always find to be a hoot. And it was the DC bar, too, legendarily easy. She really should tout that, it would humanize her. No one thinks she's unintelligent--at least, in the narrow IQ sense--or a slacker.)
I agree law schools shouldn't let people in (and take their money) if, in particular, they can't write well, which may indicate they won't be good at legal work. I also think law schools should change their entire method of instruction and exams, but that is beyond the scope of this thread. Again, my credentials are not to tout myself, but to show that I succeeded in a system which I think, nonetheless, is deeply flawed--so I can criticize it without people saying, sour grapes.
"Capacity to pass the bar" is a whole different story--a person may not have that, but still have the "capacity to be [a] good lawyer[].".
The time I have spent in higher education has taught me that degrees, in themselves, don't mean much, especially these days with rampant cheating, grade inflation, and all the weaseling and grubbery that students use to improve their GPA without learning. So yeah, an independent standardized exam is more than fair, and if people are butthurt because they did fine in school and can't pass the bar, that probably shows they weren't held to a high standard in school.
@Bob Ellison:SGT Ted, grading on a curve has the benefit of controlling the teacher and grader. If the chemistry teacher spouts poetry all semester and then spills a few piles of crystals on the exam table with the command "Create life", then the curve helps minimize such stupidity.
And when you get seniors who have all been in the same classes together, and have always known that if none of them does much they all have to get Cs, the curve maximizes that sort of perverse incentive.
The best way is to have classes with different instructors all take the same exams, independently of the instructors as possible--and that is exactly what the bar exam does.
@Coupe:Here's my degree from a state University. You think they are putting out shit students with a 4.0 GPA?
Yes, they are. 4.0 GPA is highly dependent on the university holding students to high standards. Most of them don't, and hardly any of them hold them to the same standards as 20 years ago. The smaller state universities are especially bad.
@Unknown:He had grown up on a US military base in Germany, and, for whatever reason, had the same self-confident, breezy approach to multiple-choice, time-pressure tests that I have.
So it was only the bar exam that was racist, of all the other exams you and he had taken?
Seems odd.
Unknown, your comments are verbose. Be brief
@Gabriel--Princeton is especially bad, too, as are all the Ivies, in any class without a quantitative component. And, most law schools have minimal, if any, writing requirements, either for entry or for graduation. This, in a field where you live and fall by your ability to write persuasively. Insane!
@mccullough --no word limit here, last I checked.
I'm really strong, but I'm just no good at weightlifting tests. I get all flustered.
@Gabriel -- when I took the PSAT, SAT, LSAT, and GRE, I didn't have the privilege of knowing the personalities and work quality of a significant number of African-American people. With the bar exam, I did. That's the difference. I think those other exams are perfectly racists, but I don't have as much information to base that on.
@Gabriel, and my point about my friend was that it's possible he grew up exposed to less stereotype threat. The US army, compared to most of our institutions, does an excellent job advancing people on true, race-blind merit.
@Unknown: The argument against standardized testing has always been "it doesn't capture the whole person". Up until the 1940s, that meant "the people passing are frequently Jewish or poor and our test doesn't fail them for that so we don't want to use it." It's a different reason but the same argument.
The question is not, does passing the bar mean you'll be a good lawyer. The question is, out of the people who passed the bar vs the people who didn't, which group has a higher proportion of good lawyers?
If people who pass are much more likely to be good lawyers than those who didn't, then it's a valuable exam. And it's not like you can't take it again. If you fail the exam over and over maybe you shouldn't be a lawyer.
In my years of teaching I have never encountered real "test anxiety"; i.e. someone who understood the material backward and forward yet failed the exam. I have met people who studied a lot and failed, but never someone who really knew and failed. No one has ever shown me such a case.
Why not, instead of making the students pay for the exam, force the schools to include the exam in the price of tuition?
The schools primarily exist due to the need for their accreditation and preparation for the Bar. It makes sense that they foot the bill if they think it is too expensive.
@Unknown:he grew up exposed to less stereotype threat.
Stereotype threat has never been shown to be real. The bigger the study, the smaller the effect, which is suggestive that it only shows up in small studies by chance.
The US army, compared to most of our institutions, does an excellent job advancing people on true, race-blind merit.
Hogwash. For one, they use ASVAB to screen, and then they use strict racial quotas. They use both methods.
That's a very good idea--force the schools to include the costs of the bar. They would just pass it along, but at least it would be visible up front as a cost. I also think the schools should have to give back the tuition if you don't pass the bar--THERE'S some motivation! (Might lead to law school administrators getting together in the teachers' lounge to revise the completed exam sheets . . .)
@Gabriel--"compared to most of our institutions." I was grading on a curve.
@Unknown:I was grading on a curve.
Yes, you were. And if you don't get a certain minimum on ASVAB, you aren't allowed in at all, and your score decides what they allow you to do if you get in. (Once you do get in, then its quotas.)
So they use standardized testing for exactly the purpose for which I advocate using the bar exam for lawyers, or actuarial exams for actuaries, or SAT/ACT for college students. Not because it keeps out all the bad soldiers and lets in all the good ones, but because the people who fail are much less likely to succeed in the military than those who pass. It's never certain, of course, but it's not intended to be.
They apply the quotas after the cut, not before.
@Gabriel -- On retaking the test: yes, and most do, and then pass on subsequent tries. But this mostly just shows that familiarity with the test makes you better at it, not that your ability to be a good lawyer is increasing. In the meantime, your ability to get a job quickly has been eroded, your self-confidence has taken another hit, and for what? The bar exam, in any form, only makes sense if we don't trust three years of law school to weed out people who have no business aspiring to practice law. (And, sorry @mccullough, here's another parenthetical--I do not, in fact, trust law schools to do that weeding, since even "non-profit" ones have such a strong financial incentive to churn tuition payers in the door. Humans, including law school administrators, are only human, after all. But slapping a bogus "exam" on at the end doesn't fix that problem.)
@Gabriel -- I'd be interested to know how and when the idea of time limits crept into these tests--IQ, standardized, all of them. I know it helps "norm" the results. But it ratchets up the anxiety, which has to be a confounding factor, and I don't see why that's needed.
Yes its too low. Everyone in my family is a lawyer. All of their cronies are lawyers. So I grew up surrounded by them. I have heard all the stories and legends.
But today, I meet some "lawyers" that are so stupid, I have to wonder if they fucked their way through law school. And I mean dangerously stupid - the kind of people who believe they are smarter than they really are. Like an anti-Sherlock Holmes, always jumping to the wrong conclusion and acting with smug certainty on it.
Unknown said...
@Gabriel -- when I took the PSAT, SAT, LSAT, and GRE, I didn't have the privilege of knowing the personalities and work quality of a significant number of African-American people. With the bar exam, I did. That's the difference. I think those other exams are perfectly racists, but I don't have as much information to base that on.
The tests are neutral. That's what makes them a valid means of comparing students from across the country. Different high schools and colleges have differing levels of academic rigor and grade inflation, so you can't simply compare GPA. If evaluating someone to hire for an engineering job, I'd take a B level graduate from MIT or Cal Tech over most straight A graduates from other colleges.
Where we're failing racial minorities as a nation is in K-12 education. A poor K-12 education is likely to lead to poor results later in life. Read some of Dr. Sowell's writings about how the quality of K-12 education in inner cities is so abysmal. Some of it can be attributed as a poor home environment. Some of it can be cultural such as the terrible "acting white" degradation of students who try to excel. I saw that one first hand when I was teaching in a predominately black school back in the 1980s. A great deal of the problem is poor teachers and even worse school administrators and unions. Most parents regardless of race or academic background want the best for their children. That's why the waiting list to get into charter schools is so long that some cities have implemented lottery systems.
But it ratchets up the anxiety, which has to be a confounding factor,
How do you know that it is? I see that you think it is plausible, but how do you know?
Time limits are given for the same reason the questions are all the same: standardization.
And if you use the time appropriately it's not an issue.
I've taken some actuarial exams (and passed them). 3 hours, 30 questions, passing typically around 23-24 correct. That's one question every six minutes. These exams were heavily mathematical; it's not enough that you took stats and calc, you had to know them cold to hit one question every six minutes.
So you know what you do? Spend your first six minutes triaging the questions. You find out you can definitely get 15 or so with no trouble, 10 you'll have to think about but probably get, and 5 you have no idea and will have to guess.
So you burned time for one question, that you make up by knowing you'll probably juts guess on the last 5, for a net gain of 24 minutes.
Now you do your fifteen easy ones and maybe they take two minutes apiece, for a 60 minute gain.
So you have 84 minutes to do your best at 10. Use your last two minutes to guess at the 5 you don't know. Those five you probably got 0 - 2 right.
No one has to have a great deal of intelligence in order to execute that plan. Time does not need to add to anxiety. You have to plan. If you know the material cold there is no reason time should make you anxious, because you know how well you can do. Of course there's ones you can't get. But you probably got 6-8 of your 10 and 0 -2 of your 5 and then you better have at least 14 of your 15 or you didn't study enough.
If someone can't execute something like that, I'm not sure I want to work with them. Do you really think the ability to plan under time pressure is of no value? Do you think the ability to set and execute priorities under a deadline is of no value? Do you think that people who can do that are more likely, or less likely, to perform better at work than people who can't?
Test-taking is just as learnable as the material of the test is.
Oh Crikey Unknown. I'm a bit older than you, but I went through that constant stream of standardized multiple choice tests that were inflicted/imposed on middle class students starting in the mid 1950's. (I was born in 1943). Like any other activity, if you do it often enough you get good at it, and if you're intellectually quick, it becomes a sort of sport. And like Unknown, I was good at it, and came to enjoy it.
There was one difference between your bar exam and mine (which I took in California in 1968). No easy fill in the box multiple choice questions on mine--it was all essay answers and issue spotting. And so it was a test of whether you could think quickly and write an intelligible answer. And yes, at least one of my fellow Berkeley law review members failed the exam on his first try. But the pass rate for the students from the better schools--Boalt, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, etc was 85-90% or better on the first try. By contrast less selective schools had much lower pass rates.
So I think the key "sorting" of who will ultimately pass the bar occurs at the law school admission level. And since most good law schools don't flunk all that many students out once they're admitted, there's not much of a weeding out process after admission to IL. There are students who self select themselves out in the first semester or so when they discover that law school is hard, and maybe Mommy's idea that her darling little boy should be a lawyer wasn't such a good one. But I didn't see much "weeding" by the school.
But I don't agree with Unknown's apparent premise that if a student manages to get admitted to an accredited law school, then they should not have to take a bar exam (because of freezing up or fear of taking a test).
If you go that route (as Wisconsin has) then you simply substitute the judgment of the law school admissions committee for the judgment of the Bar Examiners.
And of course once a lawyer is out in practice--whether solo, government agency, law firm or corporate legal department, the real judgment, and the only one that counts, is that of the lawyer's client or employer.
Law schools don't teach students to become lawyers, unlike every other professional school out there. They don't even teach you how to pass the bar - bar prep courses do that and any reasonably bright person who is good at tests could probably take one and pass a state bar. In addition, while there are 203 ABA approved law schools and a bunch of others, only the top fifty or so have good track records for passing the bar exams because they skim the best students and leave the dregs to the rest to the pack.
The only reason the rest of the law schools even stay in business is that they are money machines. For example, Duke University Law School (a top fifty school) costs more for three years of tuition than Duke University Medical School does for four. And at the end of the time, you have a bright graduate who knows nothing about the law and a bright graduate who has a working knowledge of medicine.
Fewer people are going into law because it a) leaves you with a very large debt and b) most graduates won't get a six figure job and a large minority (or even a majority) won't pass the bar and will not practice law.
So there is no way to determine if there are good lawyers graduating from law schools until they graduates learn to become lawyers which usually involves several years working at a law firm or having some other type of mentor. And there is no way to determine if a student will be a good lawyer because there is no practicum demanded by law schools.
Wisconsin only has two law schools and they are pretty selective. The odds are that their graduates will become good lawyers (using whatever standard you have) because they are bright and motivated even without a bar exam. I have a friend who did very well at Wisconsin and practiced excellent law until he moved to another state. He was allowed to practice there based on his record in Wisconsin as he did not have a bar exam score to show them. His record was spotless ethically and he could show a body of publicly available work to show competence. The system works in Wisconsin because there are only two schools and they are good schools. It may not work as well in a state with Joe's Law School.
RE: above comment about coasting to get a C on the curve. The use of a mandatory curve is to curb the trend toward grade inflation. Also, you must understand that law schools also keep track of class rank. Unlike the art education student discussed above in whose class 50% might have been 4.0 GPA, in law school everyone lives and dies by class rank. The difference between being in the top 25% of the class or merely the top 50% may only be a few points, and between the top 15% or 10% and the top 25% only a few tenths of a point. These rankings determine which employers will interview you. No one coasts. The curve means that one professor cannot attract students by having a reputation as an easy grader.
At my law school professors were allowed to give no mare than 5% A's and 20% A's and B's, were required to give at least 5% D's and F's, the rest were C's. This is probably similar to what the professor applies. This leads to some standardization of GPA's across law schools.
After practicing for 25 years, I still keep a current resume -- it still includes my class rank in the legal education section.
Skeptical Voter -- an essay / issue spotter exam is almost certainly a better test of lawyer ability than a multiple-choice test. I'm not so much against any sort of bar exam, as I am against the multiple-choice, time-pressure format, which seems to me to trip people up for reasons unrelated to their legal skills.
I appreciate what Gabriel said about triaging the questions, and preparing for the test's structure. All true, and I also have never been able to understand why people can't at least PASS the test (unless I'm missing something and the pass-rate jiggering is also curve-y, so the lowest scorers always fail?)
And I have now mastered paragraphination in comments, which shows I can still learn a new trick, albeit slowly!
Bar exam prep is a minuscule fraction of the price of law school. If we are going to get rid of one of the requirements, get rid of the law school requirement. (Some states like Virginia allow you to take the bar exam after an apprenticeship).
@BeachBrutus:The difference between being in the top 25% of the class or merely the top 50% may only be a few points, and between the top 15% or 10% and the top 25% only a few tenths of a point.
I don't know if FERPA lets you do that in colleges and universities; that provision may not apply to law schools. I can tell you I've never seen it done at the university level.
It does give students a motive not to collude and coast, I agree, because any of them who breaks faith will have a huge advantage.
@D.D. Driver:get rid of the law school requirement. (Some states like Virginia allow you to take the bar exam after an apprenticeship).
Law schools are a relatively recent invention.
Ann Althouse said...
"The students are failing and the teachers are blaming the students. No surprise there."
Are you talking about one of the 5 essays or just making something up?
9/24/15, 7:38 AM
Just making something up.
"Why are so many law students failing the bar exam?"
"There has been a drop in the number of applicants to law schools, and that's led schools to taking students with lower LSAT scores. It's not surprising that people scoring lower on one test would also score lower on another test..."
In between the two tests, the students are taking classes from teachers who are supposed to be preparing them to pass the exam and become lawyers. The teachers could claim to be efective educators if they took students with low test scores and taught them how to think and read and write better. Instead, the students are entering their classes with low scores, and leaving their classes with low scores. To me it would appear that the teachers have failed, not the students.
Beach Brutus and Mikeyes -- spot on. Law school: learning little, grade-grubbing a LOT (for those sweet, sweet tenths of a point for class rank), at three years' opportunity cost and (nowadays) ruinous expense. Completely idiotic. I think any of us could design a one-year curriculum (heck, the Bar prep courses do it in 6 weeks), that would genuinely prepare anyone WHO ALREADY KNOWS HOW TO WRITE, to be a decent lawyer. A "J.D." degree is barely the equivalent of a BA--less rigor than most. You should be able to go to college, major in law with a required practicum component, walk out the door, and hang your shingle.
Or, like my great-grandfather, leave school at age 11 to support your widowed mother, work as an office boy at the IRS, pick up experience, "read law," attend night school at CCNY (I still don't know why he had to do that--maybe to compensate for missing grades 6-12? I don't think he had a college diploma of any kind), pass whatever bar exam NJ had back in 1900 if there was one, get promoted by the IRS office to being a lawyer there, move to private practice, represent Newark breweries fighting prohibition, and die with your boots on as an NJ Supreme Court justice appointed by Frank Hague.
Or, do your sums in chalk on the back of a coal shovel, read every book you can get a hold of, pole a barge down the Mississippi, fail in business, practice law, go into politics, and save the Union. No law school or bar exam required.
@Gabriel -- class rank is not published but you do have to provide it to prospective employers. Plus, after a while it's not hard to figure out where everyone stands. The importance of class rank also means that cheating is very important. It creates real victims when your cheating allows you to leap frog a/several class mates.
"I had a physics professor who would create curves by bumping up the top end, so you'd get back crazy test grades like 117%."
I am not allowed to do that. I only have A+ as a grade to go to at the very top.
I shared Unknown's confidence in taking standardized tests throughout my life. Never worried, always did well, far better than my grades would indicate.
The Bar exam is different in that you absolutely can prepare for it specifically, unlike the ACT, for example. The bar exam is really a comprehensive law school exam. You know what areas are covered and have ample opportunity to prepare.
Whether you have confidence in taking the bar exam is directly linked to your level of preparation. I walked OUT of the Illinois exam, taken the summer after I graduated from law school, knowing I had passed.
Five years later I walked INTO the Florida exam knowing I would pass, because I had taken the time and effort on nights and weekends to prepare. No stress at all. In the exam room I noticed some who were almost sweating puddles on the floor, some hyperventilating and having to leave the room.
The ability to prepare for and handle stress is very important as a lawyer. Just my two cents.
Just what we need - to give the ABA more power over the legal profession. Never mind that they mostly represent academia and big firm attorneys, and have taken hard left stands on innumerable issues. And watched how they were corrupted into backing the America Invents Act. Thanks to them, law schools have to spend too much on increasingly obsolete libraries, and cannot hire very many practicing attorneys as adjuncts, but instead require the hiring of mostly full time faculty, who mostly never practiced that much law. I have fond memories of adjuncts - top civil litigator for Civil Pro, top defense atty for Crim Law (whom I still occasionally see as a talking head on TV)', sitting judge for Crim Pro, etc. For one thing, their war stories made the law much more memorable, and I remember it on occasion almost 30 years later. Some of my best profs were tenured, but all of my worst ones were. Over the years, I have belonged when the firm I was with paid for ABA membership, but didn't waste my own money. Which is how most of the attys I know think. They have never reflected my views, or that of most lawyers.
One of the big problems for law schools these days is that many of them have become social justice hot beds. Easier to get hired as a black lesbian, than white male law review grad. Just expect more of this if ABA certification replaces bar exams - after all, where in the law is this sort of nonsense most prevalent? Academia and big firms, both of which can afford it, and which provide much of the membership of the ABA.
I don't mean to insult Althouse, by the way. As far as I can tell from her occasional description of her courses, what she is doing is preparing a few of her students, very well, as philosophers of the law. It's what her employer expects her to do, but it is not what people who find themselves in need of an attorney require. That (philosophy of law) was the track I ended up on and eventually left. Practicing law is more fun.
Cool. Captcha has asked me to identify "drinks" (including what look like Mai Tais with little parasols), construction equipment, waffles, and pancakes. No problem-o!
9/24/15, 10:43 AM
Like, umm, ...?
Speaking of the ABA -- I agree. 100% useless waste of money, to join. Thank goodness I don't have to join it in order to be a member of my state Bar association. At the State bar, we volunteers design and offer courses to practicing lawyers, including lots of "Intro to X" and "Advanced X" courses. I should have mentioned that, as a component of legal education. Although, why would that be necessary, if law schools are preparing people to practice, or even to "think like a lawyer"?
One more thing (sorry, @mccullough!!)-- in doing my legal research, I appreciate the work that law school professors and law review staffs do, in reviewing and summarizing case law. Law school tuition supports that work, which is of direct benefit to people facing "cases or controversies" in their business and personal lives--i.e., who need a lawyer. Makes us more efficient, therefore cheaper for our clients.
For most of us, passing the bar is/was a function of working hard enough to prep for it, which I think is a good thing. I too knew I had passed my first bar exam when I walked out of the multistate portion (they ignored the essay if you aced the multistate). Patent bar had a 1/3 or so pass rare, so was a bit worried there. My second state bar exam, a decade after the first was more worrisome, since I was working full time and was a decade out of LS. But I passed. Thinking of doing it again, maybe, here in MT. But it is a bit scary, and my patent license is good nationally.
One of the more famous slackers was JFK, Jr. who didn't take enough time off from his duties as one of the top bachelors in the country, until apparently faced with mandatory termination from his job. And a law school grad patent agent I worked with who has failed 3-4 times because he just wouldn't buckle down. Last I knew, he was too busy working on his PU game. But also a couple top LS grads who blew up their first time around. And a woman with autism/Aspergers who has a near perfect memory for case law, but has problems issue spotting, etc Still, almost all of the white middle class law school grads who repeatedly fail to pass the bar exam are either lazy or graduated at the bottom of their class from law school.
@Wilbur -- I walked INTO the NC Bar Exam having studied only minimally, but KNOWING I would pass because I always do well on this sort of test. Two years later, I walked INTO the NJ Bar Exam having studied not at all, but still, highly confident that I would pass, as indeed I did. Piece of cake both times, and, both times, not a result of any diligent prep.
But your point, that good legal work takes excruciatingly thorough prep, is very true. I always prepare to the level I need, which, in the real world, is 100%. (In law school, it was 10%, which is why I got middling grades sufficient to my purposes, and for the bar exam it was 1%, which is why I passed, as intended.)
Oh, man, the last few Captchas were for recreational vehicles, drinks again but this time coffee and sodas, and burritos. People, I'm a middle-aged East-Coast old-money WASP! This culturally insensitive Captcha-ing oppresses me! (I genuinely had a hard time with the RVs and burritos, no kidding, took me a few seconds.)
Jesus Christ, pick-up trucks. What's next?
Hah! It was "grass," and by mistake I just hit "Publish Your Comment," which was accepted. Wrong kind of "grass," I guess. What's next?
Unknown - I want to dissent from your "completely idiotic" statement. Unlike many professions, the law is essentially competitive. Doctors, engineers, accountants, may call on one another for consults. But every day I suit up to compete against other attorneys as I defend/promote my clients' interests against theirs. Every day, not every once in a while, but every day. Law school competitiveness tends to winnow out those not suited for the day to day reality of the profession.
I concur with you on reading law and other traditional ways of preparing for the law. I think the law school method dates from the progressive credentialism movement from the turn of the last century.
Bananas. But I had to squint at a lot of the food images, some of which included fancy buffet spreads. If it's not clam chowder, pot roast, a sandwich, or a Pepperidge Farm cookie, I have to think about it. What's next?
Beach Brutus -- You're right, I hadn't thought about competition.
Interesting comment about the patent law exam. I understand the exams are rigorous and require a lot of highly technical knowledge, like medical school or engineering exams. However, many people think that's true of general-purpose bar exams, as well, and I would say, from my experience, not so.
I would expect to fail a patent exam, if I studied as little as I did for the general bar exam (or even a good deal more). But I suspect it's a real difference in kind, as opposed to merely degree. In other words, patent law really does test a body of knowledge, and the general bar is more like the SAT--there's some learned component, of course, but most questions you can figure out from general principles and background general knowledge.
One of the first confirmations that electroshock can damage certain certain types of memory came from a female patient who happened to be a patent lawyer. None of her doctors had thought to ask if she had a profession (this was in the 1950s), and the treatments harmed the specific memories she needed in order to be able to do her work. As I recall, she was able to continue practicing law, but not as a patent lawyer.
@Unknown: if I studied as little as I did for the general bar exam
The fact that you didn't study doesn't mean you didn't thoroughly understand the material. If the test is fair it measures understanding, not how hard you worked. There are people who study and study and don't learn. There are people who don't have to work hard to learn some things, just like there are people who don't need stools to reach the top shelf. Life's not fair that way, but the test is still fair.
You can hand me any undergraduate-level physics exam and I will pass it near 100% with no preparation (always did that whenever I proctored for someone else; I'd leave the name blank and turn it in, it would always get graded). I don't have to study for them any more. I know the material well enough to write my own.
Unknown said...
@Gabriel--Princeton is especially bad, too, as are all the Ivies, in any class without a quantitative component. And, most law schools have minimal, if any, writing requirements, either for entry or for graduation. This, in a field where you live and fall by your ability to write persuasively. Insane!
9/24/15, 10:02 AM "
As the client, the guy who writes the check, it has been my observation that most judges are lazy, their clerks are not always brilliant and the best briefs are the ones that are as short and sweet as possible with the most current relevant cites. It helps to be a good writer and not to be overly fancy. As for passing the bar, its a test. One either understands the questions and knows the answers or doesn't. A client appreciates a lawyer who understands the facts of the matter and understands the relevant applicable law and presumably a bar exam is of relevance in this. Would you using your example want doctors who were great as your fellow students in medicine except for the ability to pass their medical license exam? Or engineers and architects?
Well, the big reason students fail the bar exam is because the bar exam has little to do with what's taught in law school.
Thus, it is a test of student's ability to master complicated material on their own ,or find their own teacher. Maybe even to know that they need to learn more and what they need to learn.
Cubanbob--my point was that my fellow students were excellent lawyers, even while in law school--good at analysis, good writers, good oral advocates. Most of them took our practicum (clinic), so they were even out there practicing law. They had everything it took. But some of them failed the bar exam. Ergo, and in my experience as a test-taker and practicing attorney (as well as a client--I run a small business and employ lawyers too, know what you mean about writing a check), the exam does not correlate with being a good lawyer. Doctor and engineer are different, requires technical knowledge-p measured by Mother Nature. Bar exam does not.
I have worked w/ attorneys in about 20 different states. Wisconsin has more incompetent attorneys than just about all of them. The diploma privilege was pretty common, GENERATIONS AGO. The states that did have it all did away w/ that privilege years ago. NH I believe has a limited version of diploma privilege. Wisconsin is the only hold out. Law profs LOVE IT. There is no accounting for their horseshit taching
Unknown said...
Cubanbob--my point was that my fellow students were excellent lawyers, even while in law school--good at analysis, good writers, good oral advocates. Most of them took our practicum (clinic), so they were even out there practicing law. They had everything it took. But some of them failed the bar exam. Ergo, and in my experience as a test-taker and practicing attorney (as well as a client--I run a small business and employ lawyers too, know what you mean about writing a check), the exam does not correlate with being a good lawyer. Doctor and engineer are different, requires technical knowledge-p measured by Mother Nature. Bar exam does not.
9/24/15, 5:07 PM "
" Blogger Sammy Finkelman said...
Well, the big reason students fail the bar exam is because the bar exam has little to do with what's taught in law school.
Thus, it is a test of student's ability to master complicated material on their own ,or find their own teacher. Maybe even to know that they need to learn more and what they need to learn.
9/24/15, 4:56 PM"
I'm with Sammy on this.
It's not complicated material. I wrote down everything I needed to remember on three 3" X 5" index cards, to memorize. There were about ten factoids that were arbitrary and you couldn't deduce them from general principles. That was it. I imagine that is not true of medicine, engineering, or patent law!!
But despite being, essentially, an easy SSAT/LSAT/GRE type of test, as opposed to a test of arcane knowledge, smart capable people fail it every year, due yo nerves that didn't manifest themselves in a debate theater or a real courtroom. I'm sure there are people who fail it due to innate stupidity, but any law school who admits a person like that and takes their money for three years is evil.
In other news, people are wondering why Walmart lets in anybody who can make it through the door.
If you can't pass the bar, you can't be a lawyer so passing the bar is part of the process. The best way to pass the bar is to take a bar exam course and be smart enough to utilize the information. But the Wisconsin experience at least begs the question of whether or not the bar has any validity.
Once you have passed the various tests (law school, bar exam, pay your tuition) you can learn to be a lawyer but not before. Otherwise you have wasted 30k-150K and are not likely to get a job that helps pay the debt.
Wisconsin just eliminates the bar exam in this process for Wisconsin law school graduates. Since there is no objective way to determine if a graduate is a good lawyer, it seems to work anyway.
The medical profession is struggling with the whole concept of competence right now and there doesn't seem to be a good way to make the determination. The Wisconsin medical board wants all physicians to jump through a lot of hoops to prove that each physician is competent but they are doing so without any way to validate the tests and findings. This is in a profession that has a scientific basis (although medicine is not a true science) so finding a way to demonstrate competence in a a profession that has no valid metrics has to be much harder. Wisconsin just lets the market decide, I suspect, but as far as I can tell Wisconsin is not an outlier in any way as far as the discipline and other aspects of the bar goes.
@Unknown:But some of them failed the bar exam. Ergo, and in my experience as a test-taker and practicing attorney (as well as a client--I run a small business and employ lawyers too, know what you mean about writing a check), the exam does not correlate with being a good lawyer.
How did you do in stats class? I ask merely for information.
You know some people you thought would be good lawyers except for not passing the bar. You yourself didn't do any real work to study for the bar and passed, but you don't say whether you are a bad lawyer or not. And from that you conclude something about "correlation". You should wash out your mouth with soap after using that word in that way.
The absolute minimum you would have to do to decide if there were a correlation or not, is compare the fraction of people who passed and are good lawyers versus the people who failed and are good lawyers. Meaning you would have to get up and do some work and possibly study some math.
Instead, you have chosen to cite impressions that happened to stick with you and declared on that basis the whole system to be bogus, using a word that you have made clear you do not understand.
If, as you say, there are only a few notecards' worth of stuff you needed to memorize, after law school, in order to pass the bar, and your friends couldn't do it, then there is something seriously wrong with their ability to read, or else they didn't learn as much as you did in law school, in which case they didn't DESERVE to do as well.
What you describe sounds like an excellent exam for deciding who ought to be a lawyer.
Hey Gabriel, you're right! Correlation was the wrong word to use. How imprecise of me, how shocking. Now, let go of your pearls and I'll tell you a little secret: I should have said it's not an infallible indicator. By the way, I got an A in statistics in college by flipping hundreds of pennies in my dorm room on a take-home exam (to continue the up-thread comments on sheepskin being no indicator of quality.)
Everyone keeps missing the core of my observations: my friends were smart. They studied hard. They flunked a test that mostly tests nerves on an exam that's the do or die culmination of years of work and sacrifice by the whole family. The fact they flunked does not show they were stupid, because they weren't stupid. Hilary Clinton isn't stupid, and she flunked it! Sure, stupid people can flunk it, but I do wonder how many people THAT stupid get through three years at an accredited law school.
The point is, here's a test with not much relevance, if you prefer, to practicing law, that people seem to fail on the first go-round in a way that correlates with race (you can look it up), for reasons that are not dependent on intelligence or preparation. So, why do we keep using it, when there would be fairer ways to thin the herd?
Perhaps there should be the barrister/solicitor split as in the UK. People without the temperament to stand up under pressure can stay in dusty libraries writing briefs and hand off to sociopaths like traditionalguy who think they can dance.
Of course, the diploma privilege in Wisconsin operates under the pretense that the Wisconsin Supreme Court "supervises" the curriculum of the two law schools and the qualifications of the graduates, and therefore has already passed on the quality of the graduates. That's easy enough to do with only two law schools in the entire state. When I was at U.W. Law, there was a sense that some of the members of SCOW were paying attention to how the school was doing, albeit informally.
When you look at a state like North Carolina, on the other hand, that has seven law schools, oversight of the curriculum and qualifications of the graduates is a more daunting proposition. I can't imagine that any member of the NC Supreme Court has paid much attention to the Charlotte School of Law. Perhaps they should, but suddenly there's another duty that the Court's perhaps not prepared to undertake.
And then what of states like California, where it's simply not possible for the Court to be familiar with the quality of the education provided at all the law schools?
Wisconsin's diploma privilege is right for Wisconsin; but I don't think it's necessarily right for other states.
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