Pre-October Bar Exam Results Reflect Calm Before The Storm

Definitely good news, but it's not clear how much this will matter for October examinees.

The good news is that Indiana’s online bar exam results are back and they’re up! Of the 511 examinees, 78 percent have passed, an improvement over the 65 percent who passed last year. Indiana famously junked the whole online test format amid a cascade of technical failures and ran an open book exam over email. Critics may charge that the 13 percent bump reflects the impact of an open book exam — which is probably true! — but also, “who gives a f**k?”

The practice of law is an open book exam, meaning the format that Indiana stumbled into by necessity actually better tests the requisite skills required to competently practice law. While emergency diploma privilege was a better option, given the stress the pandemic placed on applicants taking the early August exam, if a test had to be given, this is the ideal model. Those who failed could have easily failed for a number of reasons, but if they truly struggled to produce quality answers with the aid of research then that makes this a true test of the minimum competency to practice law, which is what bar exams claim — but fail — to offer in the normal course.

Meanwhile, the cyberattack-plagued Michigan exam is also reporting better numbers with their closed book, ExamSoft-administered exam. Michigan’s pass rate was up 8 percent over last July, with 68 percent passing this time.

It’s natural to frame the Michigan numbers as encouraging news for those waiting on results from the recently concluded October Barmageddon. It was another ExamSoft test after all and maybe it indicates that Idaho was just an outlier after the first October jurisdiction to report delivered abysmal results. But in the words of the legend:

Michigan’s 2019 results were actually an outlier. In 2018, 67 percent of applicants passed. Before that, the number hovered around 66 percent with one bust out 73 percent result in 2017. So, while it’s encouraging that the online exam seems to reflect the norm, it shouldn’t be cast as any kind of improvement. Indeed, the steadiness of Michigan results says more about an examination process that preordains a 30-35 percent failure rate than anything else. Plus, Michigan wrote its own test, an important fact when October examinees consistently cited inordinately difficult and confusing questions in the materials provided by the NCBE. While the NCBE claims that there was nothing unique about this round of questions that they provided to online examinations at the same time that they were actively lobbying to replace online exams with in-person exams, applicants who had taken and passed previous bar exams in other jurisdictions branded this roster of questions overly populated by the screwball questions the exam usually peppers throughout the exam to help create some separation.

Where this is good news, possibly, is that it suggests that despite widespread discriminatory issues with the facial recognition software, the examiners may have successfully sorted out the falsely flagged applicants on the back end. That any applicant has to take the exam while their screen is telling them that they’re probably cheating for no reason is still entirely unacceptable, but if examiners successfully redressed this in the scoring it’s of some comfort.

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In other words, congratulations to those who passed these exams, and hopefully the October exam (maybe with a heavy hand on scaling) produces similar results. But it’s hard to see these outcomes as indicative of October’s outcome.

Pass Rates Are Up Among the First States to Give Online Bar Exams [Law.com]

Earlier: Bar Exam Passage Rate Nosedives To 29 Percent
Online Bar Exams Rely On Facial Recognition Tech And Guess What? It’s Still Racist!
The Online Bar Exam Amounted To Two Days Of Cruel Vindictiveness
NCBE Chief On Possibility Of Serious Evaluation Of Online Bar Debacle: ‘I Think So… I Don’t Know.’
NCBE Touts Poll, ‘See, People Who Don’t Know What A Bar Exam Is Think We Need Bar Exams!!!’
Like COVID-19, Online Bar Exam Is A Disaster And Was Entirely Preventable


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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