I was reading about legal education in various countries and came across the Multistate Bar Examination, which is part of the bar exam in 48 of the 50 United States.
As I understand, the MBE is conducted on the same day throughout all participating states, and all test takers face the same questions. It consists of two sessions of three hours each; one is conducted in the morning, one in the afternoon.
Now the westernmost states, Alaska and Hawaii, are five hours ahead of the East Coast. How do the examiners of the MBE accomodate that in the administration of the exam? If the test begins at the same local time throughout the states, Hawaii candidates will have finished their test long before Massachusetts candidates begin theirs, giving them plenty of time to discuss the questions asked. If all candidates start the test simultaneously, this will make it inevitable to schedule the test to a time which is awkward and inconvenient (either unusually early or unusually late) for many people.
I’m sure there’s a simple solution to it, but I can’t think of it right now. Any examiners or (past) examinees here who know the Straight Dope?
It’s actually 47 states plus DC, and Alaska and Hawaii both use it. The ones that do not are Maryland, Washington and Wisconsin according to the wikipedia entry.
Puerto Rico does not use it, although Guam and the USVI do.
ETA: Oops, that’s not the MBE, that’s the MPRE (ethics exam.) Major brainfart there.
There are indeed 48 states that use the MBE, and the two that do not are Louisiana and Washington.
I don’t know the answer to the OP, but he’s got the time difference backwards. Alaska is 4 hours behind the East Coast. Hawaii is 5 hours (6 during DST) behind the East Coast.
Ooops…so that was my major brainfart in this thread. Of course the West is behind the East, not ahead of it (and it seems I also got the number of hours wrong…I just took a quick glance at a world time zone map).
If you had kept going west to Guam, then you would have been correct about the direction, at least, of the time difference. Guam is over the International Date Line and is therefore ahead of the mainland US.
If it’s anything like the AP tests, they don’t have the same questions on the exam. Alaska, Hawaii and points west use an alternate form of the exam. The test times are such that West Coast testers are in the test room before East Coast testers are released from theirs, so they can’t relay the test questions before the exam starts in LA.
Presumably the candidates have to hand the exam papers back in before they’re allowed to leave. This is the case with the Institute of Actuaries’ exams, where candidates sit the same paper all around the world and the time advantages can be significant. I invigilated for exams in Wellington in New Zealand when I lived there. At UTC+13 (in summer) the candidates finished the paper and left the exam room nine hours or so before the same exam started in the UK.
The other safeguard is, of course, the candidates’ self-interest. Passing the exams is hard enough. The last thing you want to do is lower your own chance of passing by giving tips to others who are yet to sit.
The issue of handing it back in only would prevent copying or faxing. It doesn’t preclude relaying information by memory.
As for your other safeguard, that’s only of importance in a competitive exam. The MBE isn’t competitive; each state sets the passing score it accepts, so what another person does is irrelevant to whether or not you pass.
Relevant to the OP’s general interest is the way clashes occur in the English exam system. High school exams, at age 16, 17 and 18, with any combination of subjects, and various examination boards…there’s inevitable clashes. The vast majority of these simply involve the pupils concerned taking one of the two in the morning, being supervised over the whole lunch break, then taking the other in the afternoon. Very rarely a three-way clash occurs, which gets rather complicated.
Edit: one of these two-way clashes occured at university, too.
I had no idea that everyone took the MBE on the same day. Learn something new every day!
I took it in 1991. Unless it has changed significantly since that time (and Wikipedia seems to indicate that it hasn’t), the MBE would be a very difficult test to cheat on. Why?
It’s 200 multiple choice questions. In studying for it, what I found was the very same issues came up time and time and time again. Based on the practice questions, it seemed as if they had a battery of about 250 issues they tested. So it was an easy matter to memorize those 250 or so issues and the corresponding legal “answer”.
What made the test a little more difficult was the element of reading comprehension/critical thinking the test drafters included. The questions were very exactly worded and it was crucial to read them closely and understand precisely what was being asked. It would have been a simple matter to understand the underlying legal issue, misread the question and thereby choose the wrong answer.
I felt like (and I remember discussing it with other folks at the time) they had almost given us a list of what would be on the test. If you could read the questions carefully and decode what was being asked for, it was a pretty easy test.
Anyway, given all that, anything short of an exact copy of the questions would be pretty close to useless to a cheater. The topics covered were easily available, and an approximation of the questions wouldn’t be much help because the answers were so dependent on the exact wording of the question.
Does that make any sense?
Also, I have no doubt they use several versions of the test where the questions are in different orders so that someone couldn’t just memorize the sequence of answers (i.e. “ACCCBDEAADBEADCCBDE”) and pass them onto a confederate, at least with any real confidence in success.
It seems to be similar to the TOEFL I took last fall, which is also a multiple choice test with pretty precisely worded questions. It’s a computer-based test that’s delivered online and real-time to test centers, and AFAIK all European centers administering the test on that day got basically the same set of questions (with slight differences - some candidates would get a few more questions in a section and a few less in another). Then again, in the case of Europe you have to get along with just one or two time zones, which ought to make it possible to actually have everybody on the continent take the test simultaneously.