Bar results, some observations
Got a more detailed breakdown from my bar results a while back, hadn’t gotten around to looking at them in more depth for the obvious reason that I don’t know when I’ll be taking this test again. There is also that lingering doubt from not passing it on the first try that maybe I just plain suck at law, and those 4 years of night school were an utter waste of time and money. However after doing some real analysis on the written samples I know now like everything else related to the law, first impressions are almost never the end of the story.
Some background on the test. It comes in three components, two standardized national components, and one state-specific to make it a 3 part test over a two day period. This set up varies by state, but with more and more states adopting the standardized MBE, MPT and Mutli state Essay versions, it makes me wonder if a national bar exam is a possibility.For me the test consisted of ten 25 minute essays on state specific law on the first day, and a standardized multi-state practice test (MPT) at the end of the first day, and 200 standardized multiple choice questions covering 6 core legal topics as part of the multi-state bar exam (MBE). For my test, the essays are slightly weighted higher, making it the most important portion of the test. No minimums scores in any section of the test are required to pass, but statistically speaking, if you bomb the essays, you most likely bomb the test.
Essays and the MPT are given a score of 0-6, with the MPT counting twice, making it a total of 12 possible essay scores. The MBE is scored by taking the raw score (number of correct out of 200) and standardizing it with scores from all bar takers nationally to get a scaled score. Each state then uses that scaled score to incorporate in their own calculations and cut-offs. From my bar prep class, the magic number to shoot for is a 4 average on all 10 essays and the MPT, as a 48 total score makes it almost impossible to fail even with a very low score on the MBE, less than 100 scaled. On the MBE, my course recommended that we shoot for a raw score of over 110, about 55% in order to get a scaled score of 130, depending on how the curve for that particular test ended up.
For the essay section I got one 6, five 4s, one 3, and three 2s. My MPT was a 4, therefore out of 12 possible, I got one 6, seven 4s, one 3, and three 2s for a written score of 43 with an average of 3.58, below the targeted average of 4, but within striking distance. My MBE scaled score of 114 was on the lower end, but due the nature of the weighting of this section, just by itself, it wasn’t the end of the world either. How my scores lined up by topic is also worth mentioning. My high score 6 was on property, the 2 scores were in Family Law, Civil Procedure, and Contracts. my borderline score of 3 was in Criminal Law, the other 7 were solid 4s, (Torts, Evidence, UCC 3/4/9, Business Organizations, Professional Responsibility, and the MPT). Constitutional Law was not tested. On the MBE, the breakdown was roughly 1/2 for Criminal Law, and 2/3 for Constitutional Law and Torts.1/3 for Contracts, Property and Evidence.
Going into the test based on practice exams and just overall knowledge from law school I knew that I my strongest topic is Constitutional Law, and my weakest is Contracts. So the 2 in contracts I expected. One of the other 2 score was in civil procedure, which outside of broad concepts, it is very state specific and could hinge on the extract provided on the day of the exam. The last 2 scores was Family Law, a topic that I didn’t take in law school, but had pretty extensive real-life experience with in the legal clinic and prior to law school. It kind of reaffirms my thinking that the test is disconnected from real life practice.
First glaring observation this breakdown is the luck of the draw was not on my side as far as topics tested. Had there been a Con Law question, I’m fairly confident that it would’ve averaged out a weaker Contracts question. And likewise, had Contracts not been on the exam at all, I would’ve ducked one lower score.
Another eye-opening observation is the disconnect in parity from my scores on the 6 MBE topics and and the same 6 essay topics. If the test was accurate to ability and knowledge, then you would expect some parity. Of the 5 topics (Con Law was not tested), 3 of them, Criminal Law, Contracts and Torts were consistent to my essay scores. 2 of them however, Property and Evidence were way off, in that my MBE was significantly lower than the essay score in the same topic. One might think that given the relative weight of the essays to the MBE, that a higher essay might be grounds for curving a lower MBE in the same topic up a bit given a discrepancy, but that doesn’t happen.