Law Schools

California Will Use Psychology Study To Help Law School Grads Pass The Bar Exam

The research team has told the State Bar that it predicts that bar passing rates will improve in the intervention treatment condition.

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It’s time for a little chortling, sniggering, “yeah, you think you’re so great” for all of those east of the Sierra Nevada to say. U.S. News has ranked the 50 states on a number of criteria, including the economy, health care, education, opportunity, economy, and others. Guess what? California, the Golden State, comes in 32nd overall, but dead last, and I repeat, dead last in quality of life. For the close to 40 million who live here, that’s quite a takedown.

The report includes as aspects of the quality of life such characteristics as social environment (community engagement, voter participation, and social support), along with the natural environment, which includes, among other items, low pollution health risk and urban air quality.

However, the report is not granular in its review of California’s quality of life. It doesn’t even mention the California bar exam cut score, which is the second highest in the country, after Delaware, and which has been a hot topic for the last several years, as law school deans and others have perseverated about what to do about our lousy bar passing rate.

So, the State Bar of California, which now limits itself to admissions and discipline (courtesy of a divorce as of January 1, 2018, no more integrated bar), is working to come up with ways to see if and how the bar passage rate can improve. (As a dinosaur who took the bar exam during those days when it was three days instead of the two it is now, don’t get me started on how the exam has changed.)

To try and improve the passing rate, the Board of Trustees approved this past January a  memorandum of understanding with the Productive Mindset Intervention Research Team. (Huh?)  The goal, according to a memo from the Bar’s General Counsel’s office, is to “…improve applicants’ performance on the State Bar of California July 2018 bar exam.”  Although it sounds like a little “woo-woo” or a lot “woo-woo” to those outside this now apparently tarnished Golden State, I don’t think there’s anything lost by trying whatever might help bar takers to become bar passers. (If you want to read the memo in its entirety, here is the link.  Scroll down to item 706 on the January 2018 Board of Trustees Agenda.)

However, as a dinosaur, I’m wondering if using psychology will make any difference. (I can visualize the curled lips of fellow dinosaur lawyers who think this idea is hooey.) I’m wondering if the mind games we all play with ourselves and each other in prepping for the bar affect the bar taker’s ability to pass. I Googled “using psychology to pass the bar exam” and lots of entries popped up.

The memo to the Bar’s Board of Trustees says that “[p]roductive mindset interventions reframe the struggles experienced when studying as learning (not failure) and as pointing to areas where further effort and attention would be productive to promote success. Productive mindset interventions help students appraise learning and performance challenges as common, surmountable, and even useful.” In other words, bar exam takers shouldn’t embrace the exam (ha!), but accept it as one of the many trials (pun intended) they’ll encounter in practice.

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The decision to use this technique came after the less-than-encouraging results for the July 2016 bar exam; the pass rate for that exam was a dismal 43 percent, the lowest in three decades.  While not exactly Chicken Little saying, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling,” the results were sufficiently lackluster to prompt the Board of Trustees to ask, “Now what?”

Just about every lawyer who has ever passed the bar exam, in whatever state taken, has his or her own horror story (or perhaps more than one) about the nightmare that is the bar exam.  It’s an experience that every practicing lawyer has had and a shared experience. I wrote about my bar exam horror experience, and readers chimed in with theirs.  So, it seems that anything that will help bar exam takers is worth exploring.

Here’s how it’s going to work, at least for the July 2018 bar exam. Test takers for the July bar will have the opportunity to “opt-in” to the study and consent to having their bar exam scores evaluated for purposes of determining the intervention’s effectiveness. The study will be entirely online, and those who choose to participate will receive the intervention by email in May and with “boosters” in late June and early July, when both studying for the bar and freaking out crescendo.

The memo does not identify what the intervention consists of, but it does describe that every participant will either be assigned to “…an active control condition where students will learn study strategies,” or “…the treatment condition where students will receive the productive intervention.”

The research team has told the State Bar that it predicts that bar passing rates will improve in the intervention treatment condition and that the experience of test takers studying for the bar exam will improve. (See links to bar exam horror stories above.)

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Here’s my question: can the bar passage rate improve when stuff happens (e.g., FUBAR) that is totally out of control of the test takers? Does the productive mindset intervention take into account those random acts of awfulness that happen, despite having given your all to meticulous preparation?

The memo says that results from an online survey and focus groups in the Los Angeles area rehashing the July 2017 bar exam  “…strongly support the conclusion that a well-tailored productive mindset intervention will improve performance on the July 2018 bar exam.”

That’s all well and good and hopefully the productive mindset intervention will achieve the improved bar passage rate that the State Bar wants. However, can the “productive mindset intervention” technique be used not to just improve bar passage rates, but help newbie lawyers confronted with the realities of practice? Passing the bar is just the first hurdle in a lifetime of professional challenges.

old lady lawyer elderly woman grandmother grandma laptop computerJill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for 40+ years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

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