Remember when the National Conference of Bar Examiners started offering law grads $1500 to test drive their new NextGen Bar Exam? That’s all well and good when you’re a “non-profit” with $151 million or so in net assets lying around, but what if you’re a state bar writing a new test (because you’re broke from having given NCBE all those millions of dollars for years)?
California announced that they’d cut the cord with NCBE earlier this year with Kaplan picking up the task of preparing a licensing exam for the state. The longtime bar prep company has to leave the prep business in California, but between its long-term cheaper test and providing testing locations to alleviate the burden on the state bar to rent out massive venues (with no heat!), switching to Kaplan should get the state bar’s licensing division out of the red.
But in the meantime, someone needs to take those test questions and California doesn’t have $1500 a head lying around.
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Actual extra credit! Telling me that it can earn an additional 40 points is sort of like discussing temperature in celsius. Is 40 a lot? A little? Well, the California bar is traditionally scored out of 2000 and while 2 percent may not seem like much at first blush, the difference between automatically passing and automatically failing was a mere 50 points (the gap from 1440 to 1390), so 40 points can’t alone take a fail to pass, but it can get a fail into the second pass read.
But it’s one thing to make extra credit available to everyone, but given that the examiners don’t intend to grade everyone’s extra credit, they’ve limited participation in this phase:
There are limited spots available; the State Bar may allow all eligible applicants to participate or may randomly select from those who applied. Participants will also be asked whether they prefer to participate in the exam experiment remotely online on their own computer or in person at test centers where computers will be provided. Due to limited space, an applicant’s preference is not guaranteed.
That makes the extra credit significantly more shady. Just force everyone to do the experimental questions, grade a sample of those, and move on. It even avoids any selection bias problems that might come up when relying on people choosing to opt into an experiment. It sucks for the graduates having to waste time fretting about a question that doesn’t count, but it’s better than arbitrarily giving one applicant access to points that could earn them a license and denying that opportunity to a similarly situated applicant.
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Earlier: Would You Take The Bar If They Paid You Like A 4th Year Associate?
NCBE Messed Up, Bro, California Kicked Them Out Of The Bar
Kaplan Steps In To Dig California Bar Office Out Of Bankruptcy Hole