Titillating headline but the article goes a bit deeper than this.
Last August, the tens of thousands of answer sheets from the bar exam started to stream into the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The initial results were so glaringly bad that staffers raced to tell their boss, Erica Moeser. In most states, the exam spans two days: The first is devoted to six hours of writing, and the second day brings six hours of multiple-choice questions. The NCBE, a nonprofit in Madison, Wis., creates and scores the multiple-choice part of the test, administered in every state but Louisiana. Those two days of bubble-filling and essay-scribbling are extremely stressful. For people who just spent three years studying the intricacies of the law, with the expectation that their $120,000 in tuition would translate into a bright white-collar future, failure can wreak emotional carnage. It can cost more than $800 to take the exam, and bombing the first time can mean losing a law firm job.
When he saw the abysmal returns, Mark Albanese, director of testing and research at the NCBE, scrambled to check his staff’s work. Once he and Moeser were confident the test had been fairly scored, they began reporting the numbers to state officials, who released their results to the public over the course of several weeks.
In Idaho, bar pass rates dropped 15 percentage points, from 80 percent to 65 percent. In Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas, scores dropped 9 percentage points or more. By the time all the states published their numbers, it was clear that the July exam had been a disaster everywhere. Scores on the multiple-choice part of the test registered their largest single-year drop in the four-decade history of the test.
“It was tremendously embarrassing,” says Matt Aksamit, a graduate of Creighton University School of Law, who failed Nebraska’s July bar exam last year. “I think a lot of people can relate to what it’s like to work hard for something and fall short of what you want.” (Aksamit took it again in February and passed.)
Panic swept the bottom half of American law schools, all of which are ranked partly on the basis of their ability to get their graduates into the profession. Moeser sent a letter to law school deans. She outlined future changes to the exam and how to prepare for them. Then she made a hard turn to the July exam. “The group that sat in July 2014 was less able than the group that sat in July 2013,” she wrote. It’s not us, Moeser was essentially saying. It’s you.
“Her response was the height of arrogance,” says Nick Allard, the dean of Brooklyn Law School. “That statement was so demonstrably false, so corrosive.” Allard wrote to Moeser in November, demanding that she apologize to law grads, calling her letter “offensive” and saying that the test and her views on the people who took it were “matters of national concern.” Two weeks later, a group of 79 deans, mostly from bottom-tier schools, sent a letter asking for an investigation to determine “the integrity and fairness of the July 2014 exam.”
Post by StrawberryBlondie on Aug 21, 2015 8:49:38 GMT -5
This is interesting. I'm going to think about this.
I'd be curious about the results from specifically tier 1 schools. My gut instinct thinks those will probably stay the same. If that's true, I have to wonder if the drop is directly related to the drop in people applying to law school.
Or stupid decisions like mine made to add an online program.
It's a very interesting article. I try and dissuade everyone that tells me they want to be a lawyer. I think our industry as a whole is in for some unprecedented times.
Post by Velar Fricative on Aug 21, 2015 9:07:05 GMT -5
I am embarrassed to confess that my Law & Order JD is defective and I only scored 20% on that sample quiz within the article.
In any case, I will reserve judgment of what I think the problem is until we see the results for 2015 in September. My gut says that glitch last year played some role in the lower scores but wasn't the only reason for it.
Could this have something to do with the fact that law school applications are way down (what by 50% since 2008 or so?)? That must have a waterfall effect on admissions and the quality of students at schools. Are LSAT scores dropping too? You would think there is a corresponding drop in average LSAT scores and bar passage 3 years later.
ETA: Wow, lots of info in the linked article. Thinking about the bar exam is giving me Vietnam-like flashbacks.....[cold shudder]
I ran into an incredibly dumb one last week. Small sample size and all that, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how he passed the bar exam.
IME, the legal profession has long had its fair share of practitioners who probably lose IQ points every time they take a piss. I frequently encountered attorneys who weren't terribly smart, but had mastered either their little corner of the law or how to be a big bully.
Post by jeaniebueller on Aug 21, 2015 9:26:00 GMT -5
Is this a thinly veiled dig at millenials? Also, I looked at the first sample question and gave up. I think I have become dumber since becoming a lawyer.
I don't think we can blame the issue on lower numbers of admissions/graduates because the article notes that the percentage pass rate of the BAR exam is what has gone down, not the aggregate number. I think. Did I read it right?
I also don't think we can blame it on the test, because if BAR BRI was right, if a certain percentage of people all miss the same question, that question gets thrown out and doesn't count for or against anyone. So people are missing a wide variety of questions.
My speculation is that what we are actually seeing is the accumulated affect of poor K12 education policies (NewOrleans). Those kids are now graduates of professional programs and they can't think critically, have trouble with applied knowledge, and (I know I sound like a broken record here, but...) they didn't get thorough undergraduate or k12 educations in civics/government, history, or literature all of which provide a necessary context for law and the foundation for critical thinking skills. This is what you get when an entire generation of children (now adults) are educated using matching and multiple choice worksheets put together by corporate-model educators*. It's not limited to law school either. I've been hearing quiet grumblings from doctors that med students are getting dumber, too. No ability to apply knowledge, or sort through a problem independently. They want to know "the answer" so they can memorize it. And they want their attending/professor/supervisor to just tell it to them.
*No source, no receipts; pure speculation. But I bet I'm right.
Wow. I got 90%. Not bad for a non-JD. There are times when I think I should go to law school. They are fleeting and not often. Even with this score, I don't want to be a lawyer. I may want to go to law school, but I don't want to be a lawyer, lol. I'm happy doing what I'm doing. (Just not who I'm doing it for).
What's interesting to me is that 90% of the lawyers around here tell me I should go to law school. The only one who doesn't is someone who is probably around the ages of the other lawyers on here.
"Not gonna lie; I kind of keep expecting you to post one day that you threw down on someone who clearly had no idea that today was NOT THEIR DAY." ~dontcallmeshirley
The NCBE, a nonprofit in Madison, Wis., creates and scores the multiple-choice part of the test, administered in every state but Louisiana.
Not really the point of this article, but I had no idea the NCBE was based in Madison.
If you go to law school in Wisconsin, you don't have to take the bar exam because the legislature has decided that, ostensibly, you learned sufficient Wisconsin law during school to practice without the exam. So, if it's about testing knowledge of Wisconsin law, I've never understood why graduates of out-of-state schools also had to take the MBE.
NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE!
Not that I'm still bitter, eight years later or anything. Why do you ask?
The NCBE, a nonprofit in Madison, Wis., creates and scores the multiple-choice part of the test, administered in every state but Louisiana.
Not really the point of this article, but I had no idea the NCBE was based in Madison.
If you go to law school in Wisconsin, you don't have to take the bar exam because the legislature has decided that, ostensibly, you learned sufficient Wisconsin law during school to practice without the exam. So, if it's about testing knowledge of Wisconsin law, I've never understood why graduates of out-of-state schools also had to take the MBE.
NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE!
Not that I'm still bitter, eight years later or anything. Why do you ask?
The legislature apparently thinks the same about teaching! And ostensibly, enough voters think the same about high school as applied to the governorship.
Anecdotal input here: So I talked to some July 2014 test takers in my office and they knew quite a few smart people from good schools who failed. There's been quite a dust up and apparently NCBE is being defensive and refusing to release raw schools and example questions. So it really seems like there's more to the story than this NCBE lady's take "your students are dumb"
Aren't the average LSAT scores of people entering law school going down?
They used to tell us reassuringly in law school that the only thing the LSAT predicts is whether you'll pass the bar (My law school's median LSAT at the time was in the 160s)
Anecdotal input here: So I talked to some July 2014 test takers in my office and they knew quite a few smart people from good schools who failed. There's been quite a dust up and apparently NCBE is being defensive and refusing to release raw schools and example questions. So it really seems like there's more to the story than this NCBE lady's take "your students are dumb"
Anecdotal input here: So I talked to some July 2014 test takers in my office and they knew quite a few smart people from good schools who failed. There's been quite a dust up and apparently NCBE is being defensive and refusing to release raw schools and example questions. So it really seems like there's more to the story than this NCBE lady's take "your students are dumb"
This doesn't really mean anything to me though. The golden child from my undergraduate program went to law school (same school I went to), took the bar twice and failed both times. I read that whole article and what I understood from it is that they looked at the data from a number of different angles including examining questions that appear on the test year after year and 2014 graduates missed THOSE questions at a higher rate as well. So ostensibly, test design is not the issue. But, you know, I guess we'll find out if the low pass rates are a blip when the next class takes the exam. Honestly, though, this doesn't surprise me. There was bound to be a reckoning. It's one thing when undergraduate programs lower their admissions standards to get more warm bodies on campus - it's harder to quantify whether those kids are of the same caliber as prior classes. But when you have a test like the LSAT, or MCAT, or Bar, or USMLE or these tests that are given year after year in very similar formats for admission to the profession, it become pretty easy to see whether there's a decline in the performance of the students. The cause might be hard to determine, but I don't think you're going to be able to blame it on the test. And the fact that law schools grade on a bell curve has, in the past, been something that made it more challenging, but if the entire population of students is deteriorating, it just masks that problem.
Anecdotal input here: So I talked to some July 2014 test takers in my office and they knew quite a few smart people from good schools who failed. There's been quite a dust up and apparently NCBE is being defensive and refusing to release raw schools and example questions. So it really seems like there's more to the story than this NCBE lady's take "your students are dumb"
Did you read the entire article?
Yeah, I guess if you're comparing a standard set of questions and the 2014 takers did disproportionately bad on them...you tend to think it's the testers. To counterpoint my CWs, I think we all knew smart people from top schools who failed. I'll be very interested to see the 2015 results this fall.
Post by jillboston on Aug 21, 2015 10:12:33 GMT -5
my co-worker is incredibly smart and worked nearly full time, has a 2 year old, her H has a demanding job. Anyway - she thought she did really well on the Feb exam and failed. To add to the anecdotes..
ANECDOTE: I went to a law school that can attract and should have no trouble attracting top talent (preens self), and despite nearly no history in the existence of the school of having such troubles, given the sharp decline in applications overall there is a lot of handwringing over making sure the students are of top quality so that things like bar passage rates in the 90th percentiles stay that way. My friend is in admin there and a couple more are professors and they're all quietly freaking. Smart people are doing other things.
I think this is closely related to an overall decline in student quality due to an overall decline in applications.
P.s. I hated everything about the bar exam. I only got a 70% on the sample test in the article because fuck criminal law, like I have time for that. I am not a bar exam apologist. Lol.
Eta: I have not memorized the bar passage rates for all law schools. I looked this up a couple months ago when we had a resurgence of the thread about Megan Heimer, who spreads dangerous lies and misinformation.
Doesn't the LSAT pilot the questions prior to creating new exams? The 2014 questions would have been administered in 2013 (without contributing to the 2013 test takers' scores) and then a statistical comparison can be made to determine the item difficulty. It should be easy to dispute the allegation that the questions were harder.
They did not that I am aware of when I took the bar exam.
I also found the bar exam to be not very relevant to actual law school, but what do I know.