It’s something a bit more than that. It’s also the ability to take a set of facts and break it down into a series of discrete legal questions (procedural and substantive), kind of like factoring an equation. And then being able to come up with arguments for each one.
It’s also the ability to think and argue analytically and logically (although the “logic” in an argument can be invalid in a strictly logical-logical sense).
Was your (or your classmates, for that matter) stance informed by any input from a client, be they actual or hypothetical?
I took the Virginia bar exam about a decade or so ago. The first day was the “Multistate Bar Exam,” which is an all-day multiple choice test that covers basic (universal to the Anglo-American system) topics. Some federal issues (“constitutional law”, FRCP, FRE) and some more general topics (contracts, torts, criminal law, property – the stuff of 1L year). I believe every jurisdiction includes the MBE as a significant portion of your overall score – and it’s the same test nationwide each year.
Day two was essays and they were on Virginia law. Some of that law (like the UCC) was common in other jurisdictions, other areas (like divorce law) could be very peculiar to the state. Virginia is “difficult” mostly because there is a lot of terminology that was adopted in 1600s and is now unfamiliar, even to other lawyers. It was my sense (anecdotally) that the questions focused on areas unique to Virginia (although we had a UCC question, which I completely botched).
Except Louisiana and Puerto Rico.
That’s the really screwed up part, if you ask me. Being close to several lawyers from decent law schools, I find it so baffling, and if I were them, infuriating that you can go off and spend several years and tens of thousands of dollars to go to say… Boston College, University of Texas or Baylor, and then not actually be confident of passing the bar exam on the first go, without some expensive prep course specifically for the bar exam.
I could understand the necessity of the prep course, if say… you’d got your degree in Kansas, and you went to a state with significantly different laws like Louisiana, or if the prep course was merely state-specific stuff for the state you’re planning on taking the bar exam in. But it seems like it’s a lot more than that, based on the way all the lawyers of my acquaintance prepared for it.
That said, I think that your average citizen would absolutely bomb if they took the bar exam even with the prep course. I’m pretty sure you have to have a background in law in order to even get any utility out of the prep course.
Here’s another way to look at it. Think of who goes to law school.
So if only 50-70% (WAG) of these folk pass the bar - after having completed 3 years of law school and (presumably) a bar prep class, how much would a person’s chances decrease if they were lacking in any one (or more) of those areas.
Having said that, I am confident that an average college grad (top half of their class from a moderately decent or better college), w/ good language skills and test taking abilities, would have a pretty good chance of passage IF they studiously completed the bar prep class. If not, I would wager considerable sums against them passing.
The law school is giving you a different piece of the puzzle. And it’s not worth paying the top law school professors to give you what a bar exam prep course gives you.
My son-in-law has taken bar exams in 4 different states, and California was the toughest by far, New York second. He didn’t take it in IL but IN was not hard.
I suspect most people would not do well. He did so well on the LSATs the first time that he got a job teaching them before he went to law school, and if he found bar exams hard I can imagine what someone who struggled with LSATs would think. And I realize they are very different animals.
To be clear, the LSAT is not testing your legal knowledge and skills at all. It’s mainly testing two things (at least when I took it, ages ago):
A big part of the test was literally puzzles.
For what lawyers actually do, I think it’s probably more important for a lawyer to think of ways to screw the other person using the law or think of ways their client might be screwed by the other party. That doesn’t necessarily make them a good negotiator.
In my personal and business dealings with lawyers, the lawyer isn’t negotiating on my behalf. They are advising me on all the i’s and t’s that need to be crossed so I don’t run afoul of some zoning board or get the company sued by a client.
IOW, I think “being pedantic” is a good synonym for “thinking like a lawyer”.
I do not believe anyone could take any medical or important medical residency exam with a few hundred hours of prep school and come anywhere close to passing the exam, which likely has no essay questions (which any doctor would loathe marking), a practical observed test of skills, challenging questions even if you know the topic well (which can sometimes be disadvantageous with poorly written exams) and tough, motivated and intelligent competitors.
I could not comment on most other exams, which likely vary a great deal.
The level of motivation and time invested would possibly help. I read a book advising people not to go to law school unless they had a very clear idea of all that entailed. However, having read more law I have reconsidered my views. In fact, the best written textbooks are often written by professors, who also are reasonably good at anticipating future developments. While there may be merit to criticisms, lawyers do have the potential to be quite helpful. Some of the aspects of the system which are tiresome are outside of their control.
I fully agree that medical or other science/math related exams such as engineering and accounting are far more challenging for the average intelligent person than the bar. It is a lot easier to bullshit than to actually know something worth knowing! 
I feel much of the trappings of law are artifacts from earlier times, when law was presented as a mysterious realm reserved to the privileged few. A sort of priesthood. The fact that it requires years of expensive education further serves to restrict admittance to the legal society - which works best when it is serving the interests of the propertied/wealthy.
These days, the practice of law is basically just another job. And not all that well paying for many practitioners.
Again, I cannot say.
But a typical practicum involves going into a room with an examiner and a professional patient. The examiner asks you to do a full exam of one or two systems, state everything you are thinking while doing the exam, find the actual problem which is really there, then state five of the most common or can’t-miss causes. The examiner has a big checklist of everything you are supposed to say which is part of the exam. You lose points for every wrong statement or thing you miss. Then the bell rings. There are sixteen such stations. The examiner might give you one cue if you are lucky. How can you BS your way through that? You really can’t, despite differences in polish, presentation, personal warmth and completeness.
In my opinion, you most definitely CAN!
Only if I wrote the bar exam. (They might be more difficult than they were, especially if viewed as a cash cow by the organizers, which probably sometimes happens with big exams.)
In Canada, university engineering courses are pretty difficult. There is not a comprehensive exam covering them all. After two years you can write an exam to be a professional. My understanding is it covers basics like ethics, but not niceties like statics using polar coordinates, the molecular basis for material structures, complex vector calculus nor electrical circuits. Must be a big relief to those writing it, since these things are as hard as they are fiendishly exciting.
Are there not statistics on those who write these exams using usual and uncommon qualifiers? Or are these not public?
There is, as you know, a big difference between an initial exam and what one uses every day or month.
On first going into practice, I had ninety percent of the required medical knowledge, five percent of the efficiency and twenty percent of the political and management skills. But ninety percent of the naïveté.
Is it really true beginning lawyers know maximal law on writing the bar? I am a generalist, and this is not really true for me at all unless you consider fine points of preclinical subjects like biochemistry, and maybe not that much even then.
Sure, lawyers probably usually specialize, especially in bigger firms. But solo practitioners must know and use the nuts and bolts from the many times “law school categories” overlap, no? Or are they just very selective in what they take?
It’s my impression that solo practitioners specialize as well.
Law school—at least in the United States— doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer. It teaches you the underpinnings of legal theory, how to research the law, basic principles and concepts, basic brief writing concepts, ethics, etc.
It doesn’t tell you one damn thing about how to go about actually being a lawyer. All that you have to learn on the job. How do you get clients? What do you actually do once a client presents a problem? How do you appear in a courtroom? How do you appear in a case? How do you initiate a lawsuit? Nothing.
The things you learned in law school will be essential to you, but you still don’t know how to DO anything.
That makes me think of the Certified Financial Analyst (CFA) certification exam that many of my co-workers have taken. They spent weeks cramming on a bunch of mostly-unrelated topics that they promptly forgot after the test was over (I remember my co-workers thinking that the financial accounting section was particularly useless in our field).
I think WA moved to multistate (also after I took it). Before that move, it did emphasize WA law and people who had gone to school in WA tended to do slightly better because there was some overlap between some of what was learned in some classes and what showed up on the bar exam (e.g., my family law class was a little more geared to family law in the state - but not much) But as everyone else has said, you don’t learn how to pass the bar in law school - that’s not what it’s for.
I think that an average person would probably not pass without prep (some would, obviously. some people are just like that). They would be more likely to pass with a standard bar prep class, but even the prep classes assume a basic foundation that you don’t really get without exposure beyond “Law and Order” reruns. With a specialized “I haven’t been to law school” prep class, many people could probably pass.