Which reminds me: the day they were scheduled to post my results, some sadist at the State Bar accidentally posted last year’s results, meaning every single person checking that day initially thought that they failed for at least a second or two. Luckily I was pretty sure I passed, so my initial shock was quickly replaced by “Wait, what? That can’t be right…”. After a quick check showed that nobody I knew had passed either, I realized there was a mistake.
Ok, took 2 BARS years ago, and they each have a story.
Took the Ohio Bar back in the 90’s. All exams take place in a massive gymnasium in Columbus (and I lived in Cleveland), so I have to get a hotel room for the 2 1/2 days.
The first day was fine, and I thought I was surprisingly calm compared to my friends. After the exam, I ate, went to a movie to unwind, and went to my hotel room to get a good nights sleep. . .
And I lay there. . .
And I lay there. . .
And I lay there. . . and start to panic because I can’t get to sleep. I call my wife in Cleveland and she tries to get to calm down, but all I really do is stress her out, because my shiny new job and all that law school debt is on the line. I try to read, I try to study, I walk around. Finally, I give up and turn on the tv.
I swear on my sainted aunt Dorothy’s grave this really happened. I’m flipping through channels and I run across some late night CLE/law documentary program on what I guess was Court TV at 3:00 am. An entire hour dedicated to the history and modern application of the Statute of Frauds. I kid you not.
Well, it seems on the multistate every third question was on the Statute of Frauds, and on the third day, 2 of the four written questions had Statute of Fraud elements. I don’t know how I did as far as ranking (its never published), but I did pass, and my Statute of Fraud questions were very rich in detail, including quotes from both Blackstone and recent SUpreme Court cases.
Six months later (in February) I took the Wyoming Bar. I passed, despite questions on hunting, oil and gas, and water rights law. The only strange thing was there were only 12 of us taking it in the whole state, and at least 10 of my co-testees failed the first time, and they were all law school classmates, making me the really odd one out. The passage rate was well below 50% IIRC.
Took Illinois’ in the 80s. My wife and I had married the summer before, so haing the same last name we sat next to each other. A good percentage of the material was in classes I never took (as quickly as I could I started taking admin and int’l law, and avoided any corporate classes I could.) So I sat through Barbri - didn’t read any of the material, but sat through all of the classes.
Day one, the essays were pretty easy, as you could pretty much pass them on organization aone.
Day 2, the multiple guess multistate. Wife and I were sitting so close to each other that our elbows touched. They were tearing the surface off of the street right outside our window. Nice conditions. They said everyone had different test books. I looked over at my wife’s, and hers was the same as mine except that the order of the 2 questions on each page were switched. Of the few I checked, we had completely different answers. So I stopped looking, figuring that way lay madness. The morning - maybe 75 questions - I kept track of how many times after reading the question I knew the answer and then found it among the options. Total - TWO! Which pretty much pissed me off. So that afternoon I just completed the test as quickly as I could. Skimmed every question and chose my first impression/gut instinct. Took me a fraction of the time allotted. But, they wouldn’t let you leave before the entire time was up. To this day my wife occasionally reminds me how much it pissed her off that I sat there and read the newspaper while she and everyone else finished the test.
My bar experience confirmed my opinion that it is nothing more than a bulshit fraternal hazing ritual. If the accreditaton of law schools means anything, then graduation alone should be sufficient. Or if the test is what is important, then let’s shorten up that 3 year program and limit it to required courses. If you are not required to study various subjects in law school, I’m not sure what the point is of having you regurgitate info on them at one point in time before forgetting them. Of course it does generate considerable fees for test prep services. Which I believe similar to the primary result of CLE requirements.
I would also toss the ethics portion, drastically reduce state licensing taxes, and instead, encourage greater malpractice liability. Let everyone in, and then hammer those who prove themselves incompetent. Encourage the profession to feed on itself.
I felt this way while I was a lawyer, and still feel this way as a federal administrative law judge.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter. That said, I’d quibble a bit. I think that the idea of a bar exam is fundamentally sound - if nothing else, it keeps the law schools honest. (Who wants to go to a school with an abysmal passage rate?) I think you’re right, though, to point out that subject-matter testing is pointless. As you say, it promotes cramming (followed by forgetting) of subjects we never studied, never intend to practice in, and aren’t competent to practice in even if we pass. And the MPRE is a joke - most of it boils down to, “don’t be an asshole,” which is intuitive to most of us and impossible for the assholes, and so does no good.
There is one part of the bar exam process that I actually do think has value, though - the performance testing, the essay tests with closed-universe hypotheticals. These are the questions that actually test the stuff of lawyering - research, analysis and problem-solving, as well as the ability to write cogently. A bar exam consisting of a daylong series of performance tests (for example) could actually tell us something about a test-taker’s basic lawyering skills. And most importantly, it could eliminate the need for state bar exams. If every state did pure performance-testing, there wouldn’t be a need to sit for a new bar every time you move to a state without reciprocity.
I took the Ohio bar exam in 1992, in the same giant auditorium in Columbus as Reloy3.
I’d taken the BARBRI course that summer and hadn’t enjoyed it much, although I understood its necessity. I remember one of the instructors trying to buck up our spirits, saying that he’d found it helpful to pick out the dumbest-looking person in the room when he was studying the Indiana bar many years before, telling himself, “If that guy can pass, I can pass!” Turns out the guy he picked was… Dan Quayle! And both passed. (He swore it was a true story). Another instructor told us that, as anxious as we were to pass the bar, the day eventually would come when we would grumble at paying our bar dues. And of course he was right.
My biggest problem that summer was procrastination. There was always something more interesting to do than studying for the bar. I’m a pretty disciplined person, but I confess I watched much more TV than I really should have, and then felt terribly guilty for it. My wife and I purposefully didn’t replace our broken-down ol’ black-and-white TV before I took the bar because I knew a spiffy new color TV might be a fatal distraction.
My character and fitness examination was with a couple of lawyers in Cleveland that spring. We met at one of their offices in the historic Terminal Tower, one of the first times I’d been there. I remember them chuckling over the required question about whether I was going to overthrow the government (of course I said “No!”). It was just a friendly little get-together, and they were very nice.
I’d arranged ahead of time to stay in Columbus during the bar exam with David, a good friend of mine from years before, and his companion. They were a gay couple who, unfortunately, had a not-too-pleasant breakup while I was staying there. I offered several times to go find a hotel room somewhere, but David kept saying, “No, no, it’s OK, you should stay.” Not the ideal situation to come back to each evening, but I tried to focus.
There was no dress code at the bar exam, and (alas) no questions about whoremastery. Couldn’t bring in any computers - everything was pen and paper. Essays, multiple-choice, and the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE). It lasted two and a half days and was pretty stressful, but I got through it OK. It’s all a blur now. Suffice to say I never want to take another bar exam again if I can possibly avoid it.
We were all told we could call the Supreme Court a particular morning early in November, and my wife and I were both dialing on separate phone lines and hitting redial again and again to finally get through. Found out after about 10 minutes that I’d passed, and was of course jubilant, and vastly relieved. A few days later I got it officially in writing. Whew!
At the time, if your Multistate score was over a certain level, you could pay $200 bucks and waive into the Washington, D.C. bar. Don’t know if they still do that, but I didn’t take advantage of it.
Swearing-in was at a big theater in downtown Columbus, across the street from the Statehouse. Then we were invited to the Supreme Court to meet the Chief Justice and receive a behind-the-scenes tour - very interesting. Then had a nice dinner out with my parents and wife, an excellent way to end the day.
Yes, it still happens, though I cannto swear to the accuracy of the $200. I waived in. My firm pays for two bar memberships - DC plus your choice (unless you took the DC bar, in which case you only get to be DC barred). Eery lawyer who works in DC (as a lawyer) must be a member of the DC bar, even if they never practice DC law. I don’t think that is the case in other jurisdictions.
Well, D.C. has more lawyers per capita than any other American city, I’ve read, so I suspect the D.C. Bar is very flush.
ETA: Yup, $21 million in revenues in 2008, the last year for which records are available. It’s the second-largest bar in the U.S., after California, I presume.
I’ve heard for years about US Bar exams, and the horrendiosity of same. We didn’t have them in my day (early 80s). We didn’t have the jurisdictional problems the Americans have, nor did we have a proliferation of law schools of variable standards. And law school admission was so hard in the first place adn then failure in exams culled so many people.
The legal profession and judiciary had a big hand in designing the law school curriculum, so if you passed that, you were pretty much right.
If you wanted to be a solicitor, you had to do a year of articles. If you wanted to go to the Bar, you could go straight away in principle, but in practice market forces would have killed anyone setting out at the private Bar straight out of law school.
The last of the uni exams was always ethics which (it pains me to say) was always treated as a joke, because it was the last exam and, compared with the other stuff, not intellectually taxing. People would go on all night benders before the exam and turn up still pissed. One year, one bloke famously stole a double decker tourist bus and drove himself to the ethics exam in it. Passed, too. In those days, jolly student japes were overlooked by the authorities in kindly spirit if you didn’t do any real damage.
Nowadays it’s different. If you want to go to the Bar, after passing all your exams, you then have to do the Bar Practice Course, which is a 6 week full-time nightmare in which they constantly throw briefs at you with real-world time lines and expect you to do paperwork and courtwork all on top of each other as you would in real-life practice. One morning you’ll have to draft some pleadings, then you’ll get a brief to do a GBH trial which is on in a week.
Senior members of the profession act as judges and what have you so we get to see what’s coming through the system. One year, I made a poor girl burst into tears in a mock trial. I wasn’t that mean, either, just persistent in having her answer a question. She was employed in my office at the time (still is). She’s done OK, so I don’t feel too bad.
I took the Illinois July 2013 Bar Exam. Bar prep went pretty normal for me. I wouldn’t say that I was overwhelmed until about a week before the exam. My MBE scores didn’t seem to be improving and I had gotten a bad score my practice MPT (through Barbri). I didn’t cry for the first time until about 5 days before the Bar Exam. But on the day of, I felt as prepared as I could be and I was ready for whatever they threw at me…
But then I took the exam. It was horrifying. The essay questions were very difficult, and 3/9 I literally had no idea. Property is not, and never will be my forte, yet there was a water rights and a mortgages essay. The third essay I had trouble with was an evidence essay, usually my strong point, but during the pressure of the exam, I blanked. It was horrible.
The night after day 1, i was oddly calm. I hoped that the MBE would go better. It didn’t. It was harder than any practice MBE I had done. Out of 200 questions, I only knew about 20-30 of them for sure. The rest I had either narrowed down to 2 or guessed completely. It was a nightmare. My boyfriend (now my fiancé), picked me up and all I felt was ANGER. I was angry that the exam was so difficult. Angry because I didn’t feel as if it adequately judged my capabilities as a lawyer. I was angry because I felt like I spent 2 months studying all of the wrong material (8 of the 26 subject did not appear on the exam at all, and even more appeared only barely).
I prepared everyone that asked me how it went for the failure that was sure to come. I kept a little hope, but I knew deep down that I had failed. I prepared myself for the long journey of studying again, and tried put the exam out of my mind in order to enjoy my new free time, but of course the regret kicked in. I shouldn’t have went out drinking with my friends every weekend in May and June. I shouldn’t have taken a 3 day camping trip over the 4th of July weekend. I should have studied more, studied harder, studied better. Then I got the email stating that the bar results would be posted in approximately 2 weeks. The nightmares began. The intense praying began. The tears began. I knew that the chances of me passing were slim to none, but I couldn’t get rid of all hope. Yet every night for almost 2 weeks, I cried myself to sleep. I knew that I was going to fail and I wasn’t ready to deal with it.
On October 1, I made my fiancé take off of work (he had proposed only a week early), so that he could be with me to ease my pain when I failed. Everyone started posting on facebook that they had passed. I kept hitting refresh, but my results weren’t posting.
Finally they were there. “You have a new message from the IL Bar Examiners.” I took a deep breath and clicked on the link. I couldn’t believe what it said.
CONGRATULATIONS! I had passed. I cried hysterically, so hard that when I called my mom to tell her the good news, she thought I had failed. It was the best feeling in the world.
So basically, my advice to anyone taking the bar exam is don’t give up hope. Even if you are 99% sure you failed (as I was), there is always a chance, and the odds are in your favor! Congrats to everyone who has passed the bar exam, and to those who are taking it in the future or re-taking it, don’t give up hope!