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The answers are not reassuring. The scores from each year's exams are published each May in a magazine called The Bar Examiner, and, boy, are they silly.
The first problem is that these guys don't understand arithmetic. Here are a few of their many miscalculations:
They mess up the percentages on first-timers. Montana did not know how many people were taking its February bar exam for the first time. The statisticians in Helena must have been over-whelmed by the data that flooded in from the 25 people who took that exam. And it is an improvement, because they had tried to count the number of first-timers the previous year, but had gotten it wrong.
Maybe they aren't really sure what a "percentage" is. In Nevada, 169 percent of first-timers passed the exam. The overall 1980 pass rate was either 67 percent or 87 percent - we just don't know which. In Idaho, 147 out of 179 passed, for a total of... 90 percent?
They can't count. The total number of people taking the exam was 67,888, and the total number passing was 45,054; and then the total number taking was 45,054, and the total number passing was 34,876. Of those people, a whopping 1,193 came from ABA law schools. In North Carolina, there were 94 first-timers and 58 repeaters, yielding a total of - you guessed it - 234.
There are dozens of such errors in The Bar Examiner each year. For instance, the first-timer figures fail to work with the totals in as many as half of the jurisdictions.
The bar examiners do mean well, however. They produced an "Errata" sheet to correct the errors that had "occurred" in their first try. This sheet was terrific. Such ambition! It changed the data for a whopping eight jurisdictions. Unfortunately, after those changes, the other numbers for at least two of the "fixed" jurisdictions no longer added up.
Small wonder that they say, each year, that "The National Conference leaves the interpretation of the following statistics to the reader." All hope abandon, ye who enter here.227 and to think that these people were calculating the number of right answers on my bar exam.
Besides bad math, you can get suspicious about bad intentions. Did they want more lawyers or fewer? It's not clear. In a few years a number of jurisdictions cut their pass-rate percentages, on top of the fact mat they were getting fewer applicants for the bar meanwhile, others had a different idea: Pass rates stayed about the same or even increased, despite the fact that those states were getting significantly more applications nor is it a geographical phenomenon. Neighboring states go in opposite directions, as do states containing some of our biggest cities.
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One explanation is that state bar examiners are doing their level best to find out who's capable of practicing law in their states. The other is that it's a hoax, and their real goal, to the great pain of law schools, law students, and clients, is simply to control the number of attorneys who are permitted to enter the practice of law in their states each year. Limitation is the severest form of flattery: As they know, once you're admitted, you'll be taking business away from other attorneys.
If you believe that the examiners are sincere, you have to conclude that they don't even know for sure what it means to be a "competent" attorney. Although the bar exam questions are becoming more similar from one state to another, the pass rates continue to diverge. It was no surprise to hear former Stanford Law School Dean Charles Meyers quoted as saying that the bar's claim that its exam insures a high quality of entering lawyers is based on "an act of faith."
None of this helped me, of course. By mid-July, I had pretty much relaxed. I knew I could not pass this damned thing. I continued to study several hours a day, and took the exam, but only because I hoped that, by going through the motions, I'd get psyched up for the next one, in February.
The Bar Exam Revisited
It takes them a long time to grade those July exams. I devoted the autumn to the last four classes I needed at the B-school for my MBA. Around Thanksgiving, I received the bad news. I applied again and began to think about studying for the February exam
Getting Geared Up
Failing was not the worst possible experience. The bar examiners informed one of my friends that his examination had been, would you believe, lost. A pessimist, he thought there was a good chance he'd failed, so he put in two months studying all over again before they found his exam, graded it, and told him that he had passed after all.
Some failed multiple times. The classmate who had been proud of me in my battle with Student Lawyer over the use of the word "only" rode with me on the subway to the July exam. He insisted on getting off at 59th Street and running the remaining blocks to work off tension. He had done well in law school, but, last I heard, he never did pass the New York bar exam, even after trying three or four times, and despite taking months to study before a couple of those tries.
Another classmate's firm dumped him when he failed. He couldn't find another job, so he eventually got depressed and gave up. Several years later, a TV reporter did a story on the people who were living in the New York City subway tunnels, and they found this classmate taking shelter in the dirt under Grand Central Station.
In most things, as they say, the best approach is: If at first you don't succeed, try again, and then quit. No sense being a damned fool about it. In this case, having already invested so much, not to mention looking forward to life on Wall Street, I felt that I had to pass, no matter what. I would indeed give it one more try, but it would be a real try.
That determination forced me to make some tough decisions. First, I decided that I'd have to fake it on the business school final exams that December. Second, I decided that my early months at the law firm, beginning in January, would feature lots of days when I avoided work and tried to leave by 5 p.m. to study, even though that would almost certainly give a bad initial impression to people at the firm who expected me to be available. And third, I knew I had to accept the necessary consequences in my personal life.
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