Law Schools

Bar Exam Passage Rate Nosedives To 29 Percent

This is only the first of what could be many terrible reports.

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After the October bar exam cycle ended, we started seeing a lot of chatter from applicants that the questions on the exam were uncharacteristically confusing and difficult. More importantly, applicants who had already taken and passed the bar exam in other jurisdictions were confirming that this round of questions seemed disproportionately heavy on the confusing questions.

NCBE honcho Judith Gundersen went public to explain that these concerns were entirely unfounded and the exam wasn’t any harder than past exams. Maybe that will turn out, on balance, to be true. But it’s not off to a good start.

Idaho provides a small sample size, so we can’t make general pronouncements about the test yet. On the other hand, when a state that usually boasts a 70-80 percent passage rate dips to 29 percent — basically an inversion of its standard results — it’s safe to say that something wasn’t right with this test.

It could be the testing conditions, of course, but with all the discussion about the NCBE oversampling the traditional screwball separator questions, that seems a likely contender.

Most people out there think the bar exam asks straightforward questions about the discipline. That would make sense if the exam was truly about testing minimum competency. The driver’s exam asks everyone how to deal with a yield sign and if people know the answer, they pass the test. But the bar exam doesn’t work like that and justifies its own existence by failing people and using that fact to “prove” that without their exam there would be dangerous lawyers out there. Bar exams get to their “acceptable” failure rates by sprinkling the test with a few screwy tossup questions that more or less guarantee someone is going to guess wrong. You know those questions from your bar prep:

Identify orange?

a) A fruit
b) A car
c) A color
d) (b) and (c) but not (a)
e) None of the above

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The inscrutable reasoning behind the “most correct” answer is never explained and these questions will linger like splinters in your brain for weeks after the exam until you have the epiphany that it was a deliberately bad question that was never intended to test your minimum competency.

Applicants are convinced that the October cycle deployed many more of these questions than past administrations. Without having a chance to dissect the test and review all the results, that’s just anecdotal at this point. But Idaho’s experience could be a canary in the coal mine here.

Earlier: NCBE Chief On Possibility Of Serious Evaluation Of Online Bar Debacle: ‘I Think So… I Don’t Know.’

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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