Legal Ethics, Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE)

The People Running The MPRE Could Use An Ethics Lesson

The MPRE people believe nickle and diming students is totally ethical.

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So, you’ve failed the MPRE. That’s horrible for you — you’ve failed a test that Saul Goodman arguably passed. It’s not your finest hour.

The only thing you can do is get right back on the horse and try again. But now you’re in for a nasty surprise, because the MPRE people have figured out how to make money off of your failure, or at the very least, they’re going to require you to jump through a needless array of hoops to be able to take the test again at a reasonable price.

Does LSAC (the organization that administers the MPRE) nickle and diming people sound “unethical”? If so, that might be why you failed the test in the first place. You see, in MPRE land, the most obviously unethical thing is the wrong answer. But the second most shady thing is usually the right answer…

A tipster who unfortunately failed the MPRE sent in this story about her efforts to register for the exam a second time:

I took the MPRE in August. After finding out my score (literally, one point below the NY requirement), I immediately signed up for the November exam. Guess what? It was already in the “late registration” period and required to pay a late fee. The late fee isn’t $5, $10, or $20, it is literally the exact price of the exam twice, a total of almost $150. There was an asterisk at check-out for students who just found out their scores to email MPRE to be reimbursed. I did so, and a week later got an email it would take three weeks to be reimbursed. It is about three weeks later and I still have not been reimbursed.

What kind of scam is this? Even New Jersey only has an application deadline before people find out if they’ve passed something by mistake. This seems like a willful scam by the MPRE people. Even if they do, eventually, reimburse people the late fee, making them pay it in the first place is wrong.

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And there’s another problem here. How is the late “fee” the same price as the exam itself? From our tipster:

You think they would figure out a way to remove the late fee for those who just found out their score through one of these accounts. Not to mention, the unethical nature of requiring law students (swamped in debt and working for free) to be required to pay a “late fee” that is double the cost of the exam, that is only offered three times a year, after receiving their score from the previous exam, which by the way, is an ethics exam. It is terrible enough that we have absolutely zero access to our graded exam and how this test is graded. This is a 60 questions scantron exam. There is absolutely no reason it should take a month to get our scores back, and further no reason that we can’t see our exam to determine how to improve.

Do you guys watch nature shows? Law students are kind of like the sardines of this food chain. Dolphins (i.e., law schools) round them up into a tight little ball, and everybody gets a taste. Birds, other fish, the whole ecosystem really, feasts on the bounty. But because they’re just so many of them, some of the sardine/law students make it through the gauntlet and survive to propagate the species and continue the cycle over and over again.

The MPRE people are just like a little tern. They just want to pick off a couple of sardines and go one their way.

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