> The move follows a sometimes furious debate in California legal circles over whether the state’s passing score, or “cut score” — 144 — was unrealistic.
If the passing score were unrealistic, there would be no lawyers in CA. Since there are lawyers in CA, the passing score is both realistic and achievable.
I'm not an attorney in CA, but I imagine the score measures both intelligence and knowledge in the field. Why shouldn't a prospective attorney be required to score 100% on knowledge? That seems reasonable to me, at least for the area of law they will practice.
My calc 3 professor once said that he could make a test where everyone got a 100% or where everyone got a 0%, but neither test would tell him anything about the classes skill.
The bar exam isn't designed for people to get 100%. They pick 10-20 different topics and test you on them. Virtually nobody knows all the answers. And nobody needs to know all the answers. Most attorneys will use maybe 1-3 of those topics on a daily basis. And you don't operate without reference materials in the real world. At one point I memorized what the requirements for a legal cheque, but I'd look it up in a book if I needed to know now.
If you actually made of test of basic legal principles that all lawyers should know, it would probably be an easier test. The hardest part of the bar exam is the scope of the material.
I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred. There is a very high LSAT / Bar exam correlation and you weed people out before they waste 7% of their career.
> The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
The rest of your post seems well argued to me (I have no experience with law school), but surely this part is irrelevant. If someone, after spending howsoever much time and money, isn't qualified to be a lawyer, then he or she shouldn't be a lawyer; there shouldn't be any certification by the state just for effort, or financial expenditure.
(The rest of your post seems to pursue the alternate argument that the CA cut-off is too high, giving many false negatives, and that is an argument that appeals to my selfishness: if I can't find a lawyer at a reasonable price because the state has, intentionally or not, stifled competition among potentially competent lawyers, then my interests have not been served.)
> I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.
To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.
The fact that this process is incredibly wasteful seems relevant to the argument, no? If you took the bar exam after spending twenty minutes and fifty bucks, it wouldn't really matter that it didn't provide any more information on the testees than their LSAT scores had already provided.
> To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.
That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted:
> But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut.
If there is a bar exam, then when it is taken is, I think, exactly the right time to make the cut.
Even with those sentences quoted as context, I still think that the time and money spent in the study of law is irrelevant to whether someone should be accredited, by whatever process. (That doesn't mean that I think that it is irrelevant full stop; I agree that it is deeply relevant to the student, and probably to society as a whole.) Nonetheless, I meant in my original post to argue literally only with the one sentence that I quoted, which is why I did not give the context, and not to argue with the rest of the post, which seemed eminently sound and which I agree should probably be interpreted as you have done.
> That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted
It is the position of the sentence I quoted, as you can see by following my quotation all the way through to:
>> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.
It seems like there might be a confusion over the concepts "bar exam", meaning "any exam that allows or prohibits the practice of law by a testee", and "bar exam", meaning "the test given to law school graduates who wish to practice law, under the American legal education system".
A bar exam in the first sense makes the cut by definition -- it is the cut, and therefore the cut cannot be made at any other time. But the bar exam in the first sense does not occur at any particular time. rhino369 has made a perfectly coherent argument that the bar exam in the second sense, the real bar exam as it occurs in American practice, which is given at a particular time, is given at the wrong time, that it should be given before students go to law school and in fact should really just be replaced by the LSAT (already given at the appropriate time) because it isn't informative taken in addition to the LSAT anyway.
Your post is somewhat of a strawman. I never wrote that someone should know all of the law, but that I believe they should know the law in the area they will be practicing.
I'm not an attorney, however my experience has shown me there are multiple kinds of practitioners of law. I have had various attorneys on the stand in mediation where they looked foolish in front of the mediation panel due to not knowing off the top of their heads the subjects they purported to be expert. There are no reference materials for them to look anything up at that point.
Why? I wouldn't expect any lawyer to have the law completely memorized. I'd rather hire one that spends their time studying cases and strategies, and has to look up the details of statutes once in a while.
> Why? I wouldn't expect any lawyer to have the law completely memorized.
That isn't what I wrote. In any case it's not what I meant.
I'm not an attorney, however my experience has shown me there are various kinds of practitioners of law. I have had tax attorneys and business attorneys on the stand in mediation where they looked foolish in front of the mediation panel due to not knowing off the top of their heads the subjects they purported to be expert. There are no reference materials for them to look anything up at that point.
If the passing score were unrealistic, there would be no lawyers in CA. Since there are lawyers in CA, the passing score is both realistic and achievable.
I'm not an attorney in CA, but I imagine the score measures both intelligence and knowledge in the field. Why shouldn't a prospective attorney be required to score 100% on knowledge? That seems reasonable to me, at least for the area of law they will practice.