Thanks to Amber Taylor, I learn that Eric Chaikin has made a documentary about taking the California Bar Exam. Despite the extremely unpromising subject matter, Amber's description makes it sound potentially interesting. I yield to no one in my distaste for bar exams, which in my view function mainly as cartels that restrict entry into the legal profession in order to protect current lawyers from potential competitors. That is particularly true in states like California and New York, which have created unusually difficult bar exams in order to reduce the number of lawyers entering their particularly large and lucrative markets.
That said, I think many law school graduates get overly stressed out and obsessed about taking the bar, and spend too much time studying. Most bar exams are primarily just tests of memorization. They're not much of an intellectual challenge, and require far less thinking than most law school exams.
Most important, all you have to do is pass. Unlike on the SAT or the LSAT, there is no need to maximize your score. As one of my law school classmates put it, every point you score above the minimum needed to pass is evidence that you spent too much time studying. I took this excellent advice to heart, and saved a lot of time and aggravation as a result (primarily by not attending any Bar/Bri lectures, and confining my preparation efforts to reading the books and taking some practice tests). If you're reasonably good at managing your time and memorizing legal rules, you can probably do the same thing.
It's not often that a professor tells students to spend less time studying. But when it comes to the bar exam, for many students it's the best pedagogical advice I can give.
Related Posts (on one page):
- More on Reducing the Pain of Taking the Bar Exam:
- Reducing the Pain of Taking the Bar Exam:
Or you could do it my way--attending Bar/Bri lectures and not reading the books or taking practice tests.
Or perhaps this advice is worse than useless for the many law students who aren't guaranteed to pass the bar on their first attempt?
Really, what is the point of this? if you know you'll pass, you don't care. If you don't know if you'll pass, you can't afford to pay attention to this advice.
Back then, in AZ on the multistate, 50% was a passing score.
Reason: the multistate had just released a sample and the correct answers. Just as an experiment, the chief justice of the state supreme court took it, as it were.
He scored 50%.
The next time the multistate salesman came by, he got an angry earful. And thus for some years the passing score was 50%, If it was indeed a predictor of legal success, the fact that you did as well as the Chief Justice was probably good enough,
1. in CA, you don't need an aba education to practice law. you just need to pass the bar.
if there was no bar.....
2. we need to limit bar admission somehow. there are too many lawyers for the market already . however, i think we should do that before going to law school not after. its cruel to charge someone 100-150k and give them a degree thats not worth the paper its written on if not passing the bar. heck even if they pass the bar they have a reasonable shot at getting a career that wont pay off their loans until they are eligible for social security. if they don't pass the bar-how the heck are they going to make it? they certinly cant discharge their loans in bankrupcy due to the near impossible standard for student loan discharge due to hardship.
3. whats even worse are character and fitness committee standards and procedures. for example, only in some states will the bar tell you before going to law school whether your character has anything to preclude you permanently from passing. here, you might have nothing in your record negative after joining law school, pass the bar, and be a straight a student, and still not make it becuase the committee decides on the eve of graduation it doesnt like your 6 year old marijuana offense.
i understand that the law school years could change their mind (i.e. you have a conviction in law school or something) but if you have something before law school that makes you ineligible there should be a way to tell without spending all that time and money.
havnt you also always wondered what would happen if we gave a bunch of tort professors a 1l tort exam to take and blind graded their exams on the curve with the other student's?
Reminds me of the line that Al Gore applied only to Harvard because it never occured to him that he wouldn't get in. Only Ilya is advising other people to apply only to Harvard.
Yes, you can make that chance even higher by spending even more time studying and by spending even more money on prep courses and materials. But for a lot of the people in the category above, it's worth pointing out that, if they consider it soberly, they themselves may conclude that it's not worth the extra time, money, and effort for the small increase in your chance of passing.
For instance, in some recent year (possibly 2007), over 90% of Harvard grads passed the New York bar. Let's take a lower-down school: 100% of UW Madison grads passed the Wisconsin bar. Over 95% of BYU grads passed the Utah bar. These are of course averages, taking into account how much these people studied. Probably the top third of the class at each of these schools, given how much they studied, had a passage rate very near 100%.
It may be worth pointing out to some of those people that their probability of passing the bar would be 99% given their current study plan, while there exists an alternative, much cushier, study plan where the probability of passing is more like 90%. Or maybe one might just tell these people that they should study however much they were going to study but just to realize their probability of passing and therefore stop stressing out about it.
Because the consequences of failing are so great, it makes more sense to me to study as much as you need to feel confident you're going to do pretty well on the test. That way, you've got some room for error / random bad things.
Okay, but how much studying is enough for doing "pretty well"? We have no way of really knowing, because the bar is graded differently than law school exams. (Not that law school exam grading made sense to me either, I'd get Bs in classes I thought I knew backwards and forwards, and As in classes when I knew almost nothing.) So why not just take the two months and study as best as you can? That way, you go into the exam with the psychological comfort of, well, I did what I could, the rest is up to the bar exam gods.
graduation from a wisconsin aba school gives you a pass on the bar (the only state you have a so called 'diploma right' to be on the bar.) thats why its 100%
but i take your point.
Ilya's right. You will have to memorize a boatload of legal rules; far more issues are tested than you learned in law school. But the essays are much simpler than law school exams. When you go through the essays, ID the issues, then go through and spit out the rule for each issue. Then it's just a matter of matching fact to element, and concluding if the rule has been satisfied. Don't overanalyze. Very few elements are arguable, so don't spend a lot of time developing counter arguments and counter-counter arguments. Budget your time, and make sure you complete each essay in the time allotted. Better three acceptable essays than two perfect and one unfinished one.
I think we are in basic agreement that the marginal value of additional study can be quite small in terms of contributing to the likelihood of passing; our disagreement, I think, is whether students are being irrational in their current level of study preparation. No doubt some are -- I've seen people devote 12 hours a day to bar preparation, which I consider excessive.
But my quarral with Ilya's post was his rather dismissive attitude towards the bar exam. To be sure, your chance of passing (assuming that you are a highly ranked student at a highly ranked school -- big assumption) is generally quite good. But the consequences of failure can be quite severe.
To take an analogy that Ilya and Sasha can probably appreciate, your chances of obtaining tenure are probably quite good. That does not mean that you'll cruise on the tenure track and skim on that extra publication, even if you had no other ambition than to achieve tenure. The consequences of failing at task that you are expected to succeed at are just too dire.
I went to the lectures, read the books, took the practice tests and passed the California bar on the first try. It's easy to be blase about it post-hoc but failing the bar exam can seriously screw up your career - you'll be fired from your job, possibly after failing once, certainly after failing twice, and then what are your prospects for earning a return on your investment in a law degree?
Ilya, I know you probably weren't being entirely serious, but this statement struck me as wrong and I've figured out why. Bar passage is a probabilistic result of studying, not a certain result. Suppose there are four tickets to a lottery labelled A, B, C, and D. One will be picked and you'll win a dollar. You can buy one ticket for 20 cents, or you can buy all four tickets for 80 cents. You choose to buy all four. Ticket B is picked and you win a dollar. Is that evidence that you shouldn't have bought tickets A, C, and D?
Wouldn't that save money for taxpayers and, in fact, be a more useful way for potential clients to figure out whether their lawyer was qualified?
2. we need to limit bar admission somehow. there are too many lawyers for the market already . however, i think we should do that before going to law school not after.
The mechanism for limiting admission "somehow" is market forces. If there are too many lawyers (which I highly doubt), their pay will drop, some will leave for other professions, and others won't go into law in the first place. There is no reason to believe that the bar exam does a better job than market competition in determining the optimal number of lawyers.
It comes down to how high a chance of passing you have if only buy 1 lottery ticket, and how much buying more costs. In my view, following my approach gives you a high chance of passing on the first try (probalby well over 90%), while studying a lot more costs a lot of time and aggravation. And if worse comes to worst, it won't damage your career that much to pass on the second try.
If you say "guys, it is easy, don't study too hard" people will get nervous, too, because they feel more pressure put on them because if they happen to belong to the unlucky 10% (if you are Harvard) who DO fail, most people will think that they are big loosers.
Anyway, thank you for the link to "A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar", interesting topic for a documentary, will have a look at it as soon as my next masochistic mood swing kicks in. ;-)
I guess your classmate never heard of the concept of a safety margin. How would you feel if the engineers who designed the plane you ride on had that attitude: Any money spent on an engineering safety factor is money wasted?
You've got less than a month before your bar exam. Go to the classes, do the workbooks. You already paid for them. It's cheap insurance. I graduated near the top of my class and I went to nearly all the classes and did lots of practice tests. It was time well spent because i didn't worry about failing.
Monday morning musing: Surely that would be an argument against imposing the exam requirement were it not already in place. We have today, however, a situation where society has offered the promise of monopoly rents to those who undergo the ordeal of law school. Since they have almost universally incurred a crippling load of nondischargable debt, it seems like going back on a bargain to destroy the value of their investment with the stroke of a pen. To those affected, it may be a greater injury than a Kelo-style taking.
This public-policy argument affects intellectual property law as well. When the state offers monopoly rents as a lure for taking particular actions, the Law of Unintended Consequences takes hold almost immediately. Both preserving the monopoly and destroying it lead to economic ruin for somebody.
No easy answers.
Not to mention, I am trying to study with a month-old baby in the house. So really, who's the fool and moron here?
I disapprove of the ABA accreditation process, but the fact remains that its market dominance (and monopoly in many jurisdictions) means that the most qualified law students will almost invariably go to ABA-accredited law schools.
Thousands of applicants take the California exam without having gone to an ABA-accredited law school. Other states don't permit these people to take the exam. The majority of such people flunk the exam, and then take the exam again repeatedly, flunking repeatedly. (The film Amber saw details one such person who flunked the bar 42 times, and still isn't a member of the California bar two years later.) The disproportionate number of people repeatedly taking the bar exam who simply have no chance of passing the bar reduces the pass-rate. Repeat takers who went to an unaccredited law school have an 8% bar passage rate in California.
If one looks at just the stats of first-time bar-exam takers from legitimate law schools, California's bar passage rate isn't that bad: 61%.
In my case, I took the California bar with a 102-degree fever, and so physically ill that I had to leave each three-hour session an hour early and plan my test-taking accordingly. I then slept for the 15 hours between daily sessions. Nevertheless, I passed on the first try.
I'm a non-lawyer who has not (yet) needed the services of a lawyer. If I should need a lawyer, I would like to at least know if that lawyer has met minimal qualifications. From all I've heard, and it seems reasonable, passing the bar does not necessarily mean someone is qualified to be a lawyer. But success in "market competition" seems to me quite imperfect as well. Maybe the successful lawyer is successful because he cheats his clients and is so good at it he can't get caught. I don't know what the solution is, but neither bar exam scores nor market competition would put my mind at ease when having to choose a lawyer.
One thing that's nice (for the candidates, anyway) about states that have a work requirement for CPA licensure is that it allows candidates to take the exam multiple times without (severe) consequences. If you can't until you've worked one or two years, that means you can take the test with minimal studying to see how you do. If you fail, you know how close you were to passing and can adjust your studying accordingly.
Of course, that doesn't stop many people from over-studying.
That said, I've passed two bars (including the dreaded California) without BARBRI and am about to take my third state bar exam, also solo. In my mind, spending six weeks in BARBRI's pressure cooker atmosphere outweighs any benefit.
My advice would be ace the MBE, aim for basic proficiency on the essays, and you'll be fine.
I don't know how things work in law school but in my experience TAing mathematics at Berkeley it's the students who drive the useless test prep. Review sessions tend to encourage rote memorization, and quickly forgotten cramming not to mention undermining (by dropping hints about what will be on the exam) the effectiveness of tests to both assess and motivate students to understand the material. Worse, in the long term holding review sessions reduces the ability of students to learn on their own. Given that most classes are effectively graded on a curve it can't be that holding a review session for the whole class is in most student's interests. Yet this doesn't stop virtually all students for asking for them to be held.
Then again students seem utterly unable to understand how a curve works. No matter how many times I tell them that section grades will be curved to some fixed average it doesn't stop them from begging for extra credit. I can even explain that with a curve not getting the extra credit is no different than getting the problem wrong but it doesn't help and they still get sad about a 60% even if I assure them they are doing well compared to other students.
To be fair it's not really their fault. It's not that they don't understand it's that highschools spend years grinding this sort of behavior and it takes time to unlearn. But anyway my point is that it takes a good deal of effort to FIGHT student's proclivity to do useless review.
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Then again it's a very very rare teacher/professor who has ever sat down and thought through what they are trying to achieve in their teaching. Most just make sure the students are better at jumping through the hoops they did when they were in school. Though hoop jumping does make a good predictor of usefullness as an employee.
And every minute you do spend studying is wasted if you score one point below the minimum. If your chance of failing is non-zero--and every school has people who fail the bar exam--then why wouldn't you do everything you can to make sure you pass? Learned Hand would agree that the calculus of risk depends not only on the chances of the undesired event taking place, but also on the magnitude of the loss. Top students at a top schools, who have the lowest probability of failing, also have the farthest to fall should they fail.
Maybe rising stars in the academy would not suffer any tarnish from failing--after all, it's not like teaching is practing law and requires that you have a license to do so--but in private practice failing the bar would not only be highly embarrassing but would also limit your ability to work.
The suggestion that people study too hard and worry too much about passing has a "let them eat cake" ring to it.
Then again, I can be blase about it because I chose to go to Marquette, the other school in the country with diploma privilege.
Personally, I absolutely needed BarBri to pass the Bar. But that's because (a) my school stank at teaching any kind of Bar-prep classes, and (b) I decided to return to my home state after going to law school elsewhere, so I had to learn such Texas-specific things as oil &gas law and community property solely from BarBri. I don't recommend it. :) But still, I didn't spend all my time studying, and I passed first time (despite an out-of-state passage rate at around 50% at the time).
1. A JD is essentially scrap without passing the bar. Failing the California bar is a huge stigma. And everyone at your law firm will know it.
2. How can you discuss studying for the bar without bringing up debt load? Grace periods only last so long. Many people have $140,000+ in debt, and need to start making interest payments immediately.
3. For all the complaints, bar studying is really only two months long. That's two months of intensity. Big deal.
4. Barbri isn't just about cramming material down your throat. It's about enforcing discipline, constant practice, and reassurance. I would be more likely to overstudy if I was outside of Barbri because I would have no idea when to stop.
Why does deference to the revealed preferences of law students go so quickly out the window? Barbri is enormously popular. Studying extremely hard is enormously popular. Law students are well aware of all the material facts to making a rational decision. Ergo, maybe there's a reason for it all.
Ted~
I'm not sure if this was your intent but as a current studyer, you're story actually made me feel better than anything Prof. Somin said.
Thank you.
Damn. That is just impressive.
Barbri helped a lot, although I'll confess my formula was to be religious about lectures and review while only doing about half the practice exercises. I know how to take tests, once I know the material that will be on them.
Some people did over-study and over-think the whole thing, and they tried to spin everyone around them up to the same level of frenzy. This is very annoying, and everyone should stop it right now. And a few made very little effort and spent the summer drinking, but this seemed to be a smaller group than the ones who tried to create a frenzy. This suggests that law students as a group are more likely to make the former mistake than the latter, so advice to ease up might be appropriate. But not equally so for everyone.
2. Even for ABA accredited schools, being successful in school matter. Berkeley's Dean told their students that 100% of the top third of the class passes the bar the first time. 94% of the middle third does. Only 51% of the bottom third does.
3. I can't credit the "advice" to spend less time preparing. The costs of failing are so high that a "just enough" strategy seems a poor one.
The "extra" time studying is a concept called insurance.
Probably just a coincidence, but when I took that bar, over 95% of the BYU grads were in the BAR/BRI review class with me.
When I took my first Bar Exam, I passed by a wide margin. A few years later I took a job that required me to take a second bar exam, and the next sitting was in February, so that the vast majority of my fellow test-takers -- unlike myself-- were previous "fails" going for a second try (which, let me tell you, you can feel in the room). I studied the same amount, but on the days of the exam I had a terrible head cold/ headache. Also, the room had a faulty HVAC system that made it unbearably hot (in February) and made weird noises at random intervals that made me feel like I was taking the test in the world of Harrison Bergeron.
I passed that Bar by a relatively narrower margin.
Part of the process is preparing such that you have a margin of error for illness/ poor conditions/ misunderstanding the whole point of the "Riparian Rights" lecture.
I attended night school on New Jersey Ave. in DC, and took the bar in Roanoke. Without Bar/Bri (or similar substantive direction) I would've certainly failed, as the exam writers took great pains in testing the state-specific issues. Apparently Louisiana isn't the only exception to 1L rules. I don't think the subject of jurisdiction in an equity court, for instance, came up in school, but there was sure an essay question on it.
I also recommend bar prep class as an excellent scheduling tool to my fellow night-school students who'd rather tough out a couple summer months than go into debt so they can study for the exam poolside.
You also have to factor in the cost of failing. For example, I have a firm job offer that is rescinded if I fail the bar exam. Not putting in extra effort to prepare seems to be an imprudent flirting with risk.
1) I did take Bar/Bri.
2) I studied for the bar exam the same way I studied for law school exams (my point being that I continued using the method that had worked well for me in the past rather than try to come up with a new model).
3) I passed the exam on my first attempt.
As someone who foresees the possibility of retiring to the Couer d'Alene area of Idaho and taking the Idaho and Washington bars in the next 10 years or so (to keep busy in retirement), the one thing I am dreading is having to study for the bar all over again.
1. Not only are those "Top % of Top Y" students already smarter than the average law student, they're also the ones getting into BigLaw firms who pay for their bar review classes, meaning that they're more likely to be in BarBri because it's essentially free. That's why I'm taking the BarBri course.
2. Unless you had a very strange law school curriculum, at least in New York, you need a bar review course to make up for the fact that you didn't take most of the 18 subjects that make up the New York Bar. Wills &Trusts? New York Practice? Heck, I didn't even take Evidence (though I did do a clinic.)
3. The patent bar is a much better model for professional certification than the state bars--open statute book, a set percentage passing cutoff, you can take it whenever you want, the questions aren't designed to trick test takers...
4. The New York bar, at least, for most lawyers, tests nothing relevant to their profession. Among my best friends from law school, I'm doing Patent &Trademark, another is doing soft IP, and another is doing tax. The only subject with any relevance for any of us on the New York Bar is evidence, and that's only for the litigators (not even New York procedure is relevant, because we're practicing in areas completely preempted by federal law.) I'm sure my friend's corporate tax clients are very happy to know that their lawyer can rattle off arcane elements of tort law and the conditions for joint tenancy.
Query, should people this dumb be kept from being lawyers?
Seeing as how many first year associates make more than that as a starting salary, I'd have to say no. It's a much better investment than most debt incurred for undergrad.
The first time around I didn't study all that much and passed on the first try. This time I am studying harder. I don't want to fail.
Most important, I am actually learning or relearning some law. I would think a law professor would find that a worthwhile goal regardless of the bar score.
To me, this means the bar requires more studying than other exams. Isn't it a lot harder (and requires more time in advance) to memorize stuff than to analyze it? Maybe that's just me.
One of my friends gave me good advice about the California bar: study for it, take it, and continue to review the material until you get your score. Some states report pass/fail early enough so that people can put in more studying the second time around; California, however, doesn't report until November, which leaves precious little time (esp. with Christmas, New Year's, etc) until the February bar.
The only two subjects that are new to me are wills and trusts. I got Community Property from my Property class (we covered an insane amount of material) and Family Law.
Another way of putting it is that I'll be "slacking" to some extent. And I'll be doing more slacking than I would if I were in a department that was stingy with its tenure grants.
So just because it's an important process that not everyone passes doesn't mean that it's automatically worthwhile to pour your all into it.
The Bar/Bri course is offered as a homestudy with all the lectures from the last preceding bar exam on an iPod. This was great because I could listen to the lectures multiple times, and there was plenty of opportunity for that because I was driving back and forth between Denver and Jackson, WY on a regular basis.
On the two days of the Bar Exam I learned that I had done the right thing by not relying exclusively on Bar/Bri but also reading a lot of Wyoming Supreme Court cases on water law, oil and gas law, landlord/tenant, administrative law, criminal procedure, evidence, etc. because the Wyoming Bar Examiners seem to be quite proud of those points of law in which Wyoming is something of a maverick. There was a lot of that on the Wyoming essay. Recent grads of the University of Wyoming Law School are well prepared for it, but an outsider like myself must go beyond Bar/Bri.
If I had failed I suppose I'd be of a different opinion, but I actually had fun studying and taking the Wyoming Bar. It helped me to have a reason to read all those Wyoming cases and get familiar with the Wyoming quirks, er, I mean "distinctions."
Though, I still got 8 hours of sleep every night that summer just as I did in law school. I treaded studying for the bar not that differently than law school -- including class hour time, I tried not to work more than 40 hours a week.
I have taken two exams. Studied my ass off. Paid Bar/Bri and left the exam room secure in the knowlegde that I had passed with room to spare. I don't regret a single moment of "too much studying."
I also found BarBri's study schedule helpful (when taken with about a cup of salt), so if you can get hold of one, do.
Or you could just get the actual bar exams from the last 6 years or so (if they are released, I think I heard somewhere that not every state releases them, but I could be wrong) and buy the BarBri books used like I did, and save the 2 grand. Just study your you-know-what off and get it done. I know a few guys from law school whogot arrogant and thought they knew all of everything and barely studied. Of course, for the second try they had a much different attitude, and passed. Save yourself the trouble.
Point taken. But at the same time, I don't think you are going to have the attitude "every vote beyond the 51% (or whatever threshold it is) that I get on the faculty reflects spending too much time on work to obtain tenure." I agree there is a work-life balance in Bar prep and in tenure, and I agree that some people are too hardcore; I just think that Ilya is going too far on the other side (maybe not for him, but certainly for some of the people reading the blog).
THAT is why you work your butt off. Most people who got into a top law school did not get there by schluffing off and doing the minimum.
People who talk about spending 9-12 hours per day studying -- and I've seen that advice before -- are insane.
my hat is off to you. Might I ask for the thumbnail version of how you came to take so many bar exams?
I don't know if Colorado releases any essay questions. Back in 1977 when I took the Colorado Bar they apparently did not because BarBri at that time asked everybody to try to remember one of the questions and write it down after the exam. Wyoming frustrates anyone trying to do that by using long-worded essay questions.
Several of the BarBri lectures that I listened to warned against studying too much.
There is a tendancy to overthink this ridiculous exam so I generally agree with the post. The multistate exam aside (even though there are plenty of tips and tricks to master this portion of the bar), one must keep in mind that the essay questions are hand-graded by lawyers who don't have the time to critically read an essay answer in its entirety. Spotting major issues with a modicum of analysis is enough to pass muster with the examiners.
A former law school classmate of mine was shocked one fine summer evening when he spotted a lawyer grading exams at a NY Yankees game. When asked what exams they were, the lawyer responded that they were NY bar exam essays. While I am happily licensed in two states, as the old saying goes, "I wish I knew what I know now"....
A collection of comments and testimonies from people who failed the bar exam are here, along with study strategies that worked the second time:
Failing the Bar Exam
Very true. Or at least it was true when I was grading them (I don't mean that was my practice, I mean that was the stated goal). It's an issue-spotting exercise.
Il y a's French for "There are." Like in A Fish Named Wanda: "Otto is a Italian name. It means eight."
And there I was thinking that this was a decision to be made by the market. Are there any people in America more protectionist than lawyers? At least when it comes to themselves?
I guess nobody watches the Man from U.N.C.L.E. anymore.
If you could bottle and sell that fever, you'd be able to pack in the law business.
Question for the audience - would it be better to keep the bar exam and do away with the college requirements, or to do away with the bar exam and mandate the college requirements?