
California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass - JumpCrisscross
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/business/dealbook/california-bar-exam.html
======
CobrastanJorji
> Bar passage rates at Whittier, long an avenue for disadvantaged students to
> become lawyers, had plunged in recent years. Its passage rate hovered in the
> routine statewide range, about 68 percent a few years ago, but fell to 22
> percent on the July 2016 bar.

This is a great example of a statistic that is interesting but needs more
context to be useful. Did the authors check to see whether other California
law schools saw a similar decline? If so, why call out Whittier? If not,
wouldn't that suggest that the problem is with Whittier and not with the bar
program? What am I supposed to infer, being told only that at least one school
saw a decline?

Edit: I looked it up. There apparently aren't reported numbers for Whittier
because fewer than 11 of their students sat for the bar exam for the first
time in 2017. So the statistic is even less useful than I suspected.

------
unstatusthequo
Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in
2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in
other states was around 20% (if I recall). California has differences in its
laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." Further, part
of that low passage rate is because of two factors: 1) most attorneys already
barred work full time, thus study time constraints; 2) what you're asked on
the bar exam has very little connection to the actual practice of law. Lots of
theory and hand-wringing, but neither law school nor the bar exam truly
prepare you for HOW to be a lawyer.

Glad I passed both on the first try. Won't ever do it again.

~~~
NTDF9
Sounds like tech coding interview process.

~~~
0xbear
Except after you're done, you get paid like $500 per hour

~~~
arethuza
Isn't that more like "the firm you work for charges" rather than "get paid"?

------
blatherard
I was surprised that this article doesn't mention that California is one of
the few states that allow graduates of unaccredited law schools to sit for the
bar exam. My understanding is that the bar passage rate for graduates of these
programs was much lower than that of ABA-accredited institutions.

Edit: I found an article with some numbers:
[http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/californias-bar-exam-
passage-...](http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/californias-bar-exam-passage-rate-
reaches-32-year-low/)

The breakout chart (towards the end) shows that ABA-accredited school
graduates passed with a rate of about 60% on the first try, which seems
alright, compared to a dismal 30% or less for unaccredited schools.

Edit 2: For comparison, the NY bar passed 67% of first timers, which is a
little easier than California, but not dramatically so. Source:
[https://www.nybarexam.org/ExamStats/2016_NY_Bar_Exam_PassRat...](https://www.nybarexam.org/ExamStats/2016_NY_Bar_Exam_PassRates.pdf)

~~~
matt4077
The article itself says:

"Last year, just 62 percent of first-time test takers passed the California
bar exam, compared with 83 percent in New York."

The 83% are also in your data if you focus on the ABA schools only. That means
failure rates are 17% and 38%, respectively, or a factor of 2.2x.

The student populations of NY and CA are probably comparable, and in any case,
as the article points out, the tests are largely identical; the differences
mostly stem from differing score requirements.

I'm sure there will be many snide comments about lawyers in this thread, but
most law students I've come across have appeared intelligent, serious, and
conscientious. I doubt that a system that cuts half of them can be considered
reasonable–though I'm not sure what the consequences are? Here in 'old Europe"
there are limits on how often you can take such exams–usually 3x. If you fail
the third time, you may have spent 8 years studying law and end up legally
barred from ever getting any degree.

~~~
gnicholas
In NY, you can only take 3x. In CA, you can take it as many times as you want.
This is one of the reasons that the "repeat taker rate" and the "aggregate
rate" in CA are much worse than in NY. CA simply has a different proportion of
first-time takers, since repeat takers are not cut off at any point.

When I took the bar in 2007, there was a guy who blogged about taking the bar.
After learning he had failed, he continued blogging [1] about his repeat-
taking experience. In all, he took the bar 11 times over 6 years before
finally passing. It struck me that by the time he was a newly-minted attorney,
I was a senior associate. I can't imagine how much time and money he spent on
that process, and I do wonder whether the system should allow people to do
this. On the other hand, he obviously really wanted it, and there's something
to be said for that.

1:
[http://californiagbx0707.blogspot.com/](http://californiagbx0707.blogspot.com/)

~~~
brianwawok
Reminds me of the joke "what do you call the guy who got LAST PLACE in medical
school"

Doctor

If you set a standard, the last place guy is just as much a part of it as the
first place guy. Now it might not look so good on resumes, but he is legal.

~~~
SilasX
It's a pointless joke. For a high enough standard, last place is plenty good.
The fact that someone is in last place says nothing about how difficult the
cutoff is.

To reverse the joke: you know what they call last place in the award ceremony?
Bronze medalist.

~~~
brianwawok
Or to go along further,

Do you know what they call the guy who got last place at the 100m dash in the
olympics? Last place / slowest / loser

Despite being the 8th fastest person on the planet.

~~~
SilasX
Then why do you make the joke? It's misleading.

~~~
brianwawok
Its an interesting thought line.

------
faccacta
Bar passage rates are falling because law schools have become increasingly
theoretical. Many law professors have never had actual clients who pay them
for legal work, or have worked as lawyers in the real world for less than five
years. These profs are producing interesting academic scholarship but they are
increasingly isolated from the legal profession. Law school classes, perhaps
as result, tend not to teach what bar exams test: the elements of crimes and
torts, how many witnesses are required for a will to be valid, the elements of
a valid contact, and so on. These are exactly the things that Californians
need their lawyers to know. If too many people are failing the bar exam, the
problem isn't the exam, but the prep.

~~~
ryandrake
I wonder how many Computer Science professors out there used to be real "in-
the-weeds" practicing software engineers.

~~~
larrik
Computer Science isn't Software Engineering...

~~~
ende
Not sure why you're getting down-voted, you're absoluteley right.

~~~
ghaff
Probably because it's pedantic. At most schools, if you want to major in
computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major. In some
universities, it's in the engineering school. In others, it's associated with
other science programs, math in particular. There are various historic reasons
for this.

People who then go to build software systems are at least hopefully applying
at least some engineering principles. Software arguably often doesn't follow
as well-established engineering principles as some other types of engineering.
But arguing there's some great separation between computer science and
engineering really is pedantic.

~~~
larrik
Is it pedantic? I think Computer Science should be taught by Computer
Scientists, which is a different set of people than Software Engineers. I say
this AS a Software Engineer.

~~~
ghaff
Every branch of engineering and science has more theoretical and more
practical aspects. Look at physics. The people who do the theory and those who
design the detectors have pretty different jobs.

And universities, at least the more elite ones, always tend toward the
theoretical side in all fields. Which is mostly a good thing so long as it
doesn't over-rotate. Whatever language you learn is probably going to be
yesterday's news in 10 years. (Unless it's COBOL :-))

[And I say this as an engineer with degrees in non-SW fields.]

------
gnicholas
> _Only 51 percent of the graduates of the University of California Hastings
> College of the Law passed the state’s exam in July 2016._

As a former lawyer, I was shocked by this number. Hastings is a pretty good
school, and I would have guessed that the rate would be around 70%.

But it makes sense in the current economic climate. After the bust of 2008,
tons of people went to law school, thinking they'd ride out the recession. But
that didn't work because (1) the recession lasted too long (in the legal
field, at least); (2) many people had the same idea, so there was a glut of
new lawyers; and (3) big legal clients realized they had been paying too much
for young associate labor. The legal market has been permanently altered in a
way that makes young associates much less attractive to firms (they were
previously cash cows).

Add to this the fact that tuition has skyrocketed at the UC law schools, and
it's no surprise they can't attract the same quality student as before. When I
attended UCLA Law a decade ago, tuition was around $20k. It has doubled since
then, and interest rates are much higher. As a fellow UC, Hastings has seen
similarly sharp increases.

So while my knee-jerk reaction was that this was "too low" a pass rate for
Hastings, it may be that in the current economic climate this is just the new
normal for Hastings. They are, I believe, the lowest-rated UC law school,
having been surpassed by the new UC Irvine.

~~~
Gargoyle
I just can't see going to law school without have a very clear career plan
starting immediately on graduation. If you can do well at one of the top 5
schools or have family connections that definitely lead somewhere, that kind
of thing. The risk/reward is just out of whack otherwise.

~~~
gnicholas
Yeah, my general advice is do not go to law school unless (1) you get into a
top 3 school; (2) you get a half-scholarship to a top 10 school; or (3) you
get a full scholarship to a top 20 school. And even then — don't go unless you
want to be a lawyer for at least 5 years.

Starting salaries are basically the same as they were a decade ago, but
tuition, cost of living, and interest rates have kept growing. As a result,
the payback period has gone from ~3 years to ~6 years.

------
zebraflask
This is speculative (and similar to other comments), but I would think this is
mostly about the schools holding a vested interest in being able to advertise
attractive bar passage rates. I doubt it has much to do with disadvantaged
students or expanding access to the profession, if you dig into it, but I
wouldn't be surprised at all if it had something to do with school
administrators worrying about keeping the applications, student loan money,
alumni donations, etc. coming in, and the school rankings up.

If you're familiar with the legal market in California, if anything, the exam
should be made more difficult. I personally thought it was overdue when
Whittier shut down - put it that way.

------
simonsarris
Because the schools are passing/producing more bad grads than ever, probably,
regardless of total enrollment numbers. There are two rough ways to take this:

A. The bar is needlessly high, its just gatekeeping credentialism

B. The median school output (the median grad) is increasingly worse.

I think the actual issue is B. I think its worse than most people want to
admit. It stuck out to me when I was doing a little reading about why CS
enrollment seems so low[1]. Quoting my own findings here:

> What supports this theory? Can we prove aptitude is flat? Kinda. In 1970s
> 1-in-2 college grads aced Wordsum test. Today 1-in-6 do.[2] Using that as a
> proxy for IQ of the median college grad, in the 70’s it was ~112, now its
> ~100.

> In other words we have more people going to college than ever, but the
> “average grad” is less intelligent than ever. Degrees are increasingly
> diluted yet expensive. You can pay more money than ever to show that you are
> of average intelligence.

And California State is trying to push more grads through than ever, so I
wonder just how comparable the pool of talent is vs other states.

> With the CSU remedial overhaul they are redefining “college readiness” as
> “willingness to pay the cash”. They are giving college credit for courses
> that 8th graders could complete. This is the most provable reduction in
> academic rigor I’ve seen, and it’s happening in the largest college system
> in the US. If anyone can explain why we shouldn’t be unhappy with a future
> of thousands of college grads with 8th grade reading skills, I’m all ears
> for the optimism.

> What’s weirder, their stated reasons for doing this are to “raise graduation
> rates.” That’s it. More dollars in the door, more college grads with 8th
> grade reading levels out.

Source for I'm talking about: [https://edsource.org/2017/csu-to-overhaul-
remedial-education...](https://edsource.org/2017/csu-to-overhaul-remedial-
education-replace-no-credit-with-credit-bearing-classes/579081/579081)

I hope I'm totally wrong but I _suspect_ the dumbing down of the bar is
another bad sign. Don't take it lightly IMO.

See also blatherard's comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14772630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14772630)

~~~

So: Why now?

From the Boston Globe[3] in 2014:

> Much of the flight from law school reflects the brutal reality of the
> employment market for lawyers. The National Association for Law Placement
> reports that fewer than half of lawyers graduating in 2011 eventually landed
> jobs in a law firm. Only 65 percent found positions requiring passage of the
> bar exam. At a time when many law school graduates are shouldering student-
> loan debts of $125,000 or more, compensation has declined painfully — the
> median starting salary for new lawyers in 2012 was just $61,000. And quite a
> few can’t find any work at all: Nine months after receiving their law
> degrees, 11.2 percent of the class of 2013 was unemployed.

In light of this, why is declining enrollment bad precisely, as the deans of
law schools suggest in the NYT? Anything other than vested interest?

[1] (My theory is that CS enrollment is about flat because aptitude is about
flat, and that rising college enrollment numbers don't represent the
production of more smart people at all, they are totally masked by issues like
this. CS is flat because its hard and not easy to fake your way through. More
about the educational decline here: [https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/why-is-
computer-science-enr...](https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/why-is-computer-
science-enrollment-so-low-dea064c2f7f0))

[2] I’m using the data here: [http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-
bin/hsda?harcsda+gss16](http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss16)

[3] [https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-
bu...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bubble-pops-
not-moment-too-soon/qAYzQ823qpfi4GQl2OiPZM/story.html)

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Yes it's B, read law school scam blogs to get the full impact.

~~~
passivepinetree
What do you mean by scam? Do you have any links to support this assertion?

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
[http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/?m=1](http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/?m=1)

------
bearton
As a lawyer who took and passed the California bar exam on the first attempt,
I think that this move by the California Supreme Court was absolutely
necessary. I have seen too many of my qualified peers fail this exam for no
reason. These individuals end up passing on their second and third attempts
and all that this exam did is cost them more time and money that they could
have been using to become better lawyers. I'm happy to see that there is some
accountability on the state bar examiners to make sure the test is graded
fairly.

------
Clubber
This will hopefully create a more inexpensive option for lawyers that just
need to file paperwork and look over documents, etc. It may make fighting
patents cheaper.

------
gnicholas
For breakdowns by type of school (ABA accredited, CA accredited, etc.) and by
race/gender, see:
[http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/admissions/Stat...](http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/admissions/Statistics/JULY2016STATS120716_R.pdf)

------
eregorn
I do wish the article mentioned if passing rates were dropping till now or
they've been the same and this is the breaking point. A specific school's
plunge in recent years does make me think this is not entirely good, but
doesn't represent the state as a whole.

------
arethuza
As someone not from the US - do all lawyers in the US have to pass a bar exam
or just those who want to appear in court?

In the UK only specialised court lawyers (barristers and advocates) are called
to the bar.

~~~
webnrrd2k
In the US there is also a large class of legal workers called paralegals that
don't need to pass the bar. They usually (always?) work under a lawyer,
though. The paralegal is generally responsible for running the day-to-day part
of some specific aspect of a legal practice. They are analogous to nurses or
physician's assistant in a medical practice, but for the legal profession. So
they are not layers, exactly, but often do the same kind of things.

------
gozur88
It seems odd to me the state supreme court would be managing this sort of
thing. Seems more appropriate for the legislature to do so.

------
jxramos
they're literally lowering the bar, ha!

------
kfhoeihfy38h
ABA Standard 501(b) states that "A law school shall not admit an applicant who
does not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal
education and being admitted to the bar."

If passing %s are falling while the cutoff is unchanged, the solution is not
to change the cutoff. Also, the school for "disadvantaged students" being
singled out in the article is hilarious.

------
IncRnd
> The move follows a sometimes furious debate in California legal circles over
> whether the state’s passing score, or “cut score” — 144 — was unrealistic.

If the passing score were unrealistic, there would be no lawyers in CA. Since
there are lawyers in CA, the passing score is both realistic and achievable.

I'm not an attorney in CA, but I imagine the score measures both intelligence
and knowledge in the field. Why shouldn't a prospective attorney be required
to score 100% on knowledge? That seems reasonable to me, at least for the area
of law they will practice.

~~~
rhino369
My calc 3 professor once said that he could make a test where everyone got a
100% or where everyone got a 0%, but neither test would tell him anything
about the classes skill.

The bar exam isn't designed for people to get 100%. They pick 10-20 different
topics and test you on them. Virtually nobody knows all the answers. And
nobody needs to know all the answers. Most attorneys will use maybe 1-3 of
those topics on a daily basis. And you don't operate without reference
materials in the real world. At one point I memorized what the requirements
for a legal cheque, but I'd look it up in a book if I needed to know now.

If you actually made of test of basic legal principles that all lawyers should
know, it would probably be an easier test. The hardest part of the bar exam is
the scope of the material.

I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam
is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe
hundreds of thousand of dollars.

If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just
require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred. There is a very high LSAT / Bar
exam correlation and you weed people out before they waste 7% of their career.

~~~
JadeNB
> The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.

The rest of your post seems well argued to me (I have no experience with law
school), but surely this part is irrelevant. If someone, after spending
howsoever much time and money, isn't qualified to be a lawyer, then he or she
shouldn't be a lawyer; there shouldn't be any certification by the state just
for effort, or financial expenditure.

(The rest of your post seems to pursue the alternate argument that the CA cut-
off is too high, giving many false negatives, and _that_ is an argument that
appeals to my selfishness: if I can't find a lawyer at a reasonable price
because the state has, intentionally or not, stifled competition among
potentially competent lawyers, then my interests have not been served.)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Read the sentences around that one:

> I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar
> exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and
> maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.

> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just
> require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.

To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy
from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ
tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them
spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail
when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.

The fact that this process is incredibly wasteful seems relevant to the
argument, no? If you took the bar exam after spending twenty minutes and fifty
bucks, it wouldn't really matter that it didn't provide any more information
on the testees than their LSAT scores had already provided.

~~~
JadeNB
> To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high
> accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle
> "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to
> have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're
> doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't
> bother.

That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in
my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However,
that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately
before the one I quoted:

> But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut.

If there _is_ a bar exam, then when it is taken is, I think, exactly the
_right_ time to make the cut.

Even with those sentences quoted as context, I still think that the time and
money spent in the study of law is irrelevant to whether someone should be
accredited, by whatever process. (That doesn't mean that I think that it is
irrelevant full stop; I agree that it is deeply relevant to the student, and
probably to society as a whole.) Nonetheless, I meant in my original post to
argue literally only with the one sentence that I quoted, which is why I did
not give the context, and not to argue with the rest of the post, which seemed
eminently sound and which I agree should probably be interpreted as you have
done.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least
> in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue.
> However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted,
> immediately before the one I quoted

It is the position of the sentence I quoted, as you can see by following my
quotation all the way through to:

>> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just
require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.

It seems like there might be a confusion over the concepts "bar exam", meaning
"any exam that allows or prohibits the practice of law by a testee", and "bar
exam", meaning "the test given to law school graduates who wish to practice
law, under the American legal education system".

A bar exam in the first sense makes the cut by definition -- it is the cut,
and therefore the cut cannot be made at any other time. But the bar exam in
the first sense does not occur at any particular time. rhino369 has made a
perfectly coherent argument that the bar exam in the _second_ sense, the real
bar exam as it occurs in American practice, which _is_ given at a particular
time, is given at the _wrong_ time, that it should be given _before_ students
go to law school and in fact should really just be replaced by the LSAT
(already given at the appropriate time) because it isn't informative taken in
addition to the LSAT anyway.

