Posted on 03/14/2017 7:38:53 AM PDT by george76
The State Bar of California has agreed to launch a comprehensive assessment of whether the minimum score needed to pass its bar examination should be lowered to allow more prospective attorneys to pass.
In recent weeks, a growing chorus of voices — from state legislators to law school deans to court officials — have registered urgent concerns that the lowest score needed to pass the exam, commonly referred to as the “cut score,” is too high, flunking would-be attorneys who would qualify to practice law nearly everywhere else in the country.
That sense of urgency has increased since November, after it was revealed that the passage rate for the state’s latest bar exam had tumbled to a 32-year low, with just 43 percent making the grade — nearly a 3 percent slide from the previous exam.
California’s bar exam tests law school grads with a mixture of multiple-choice questions, essays and a performance exam that assesses practical skills, like writing a legal brief or analyzing a contract.
...
Critics also say that the state’s high cut score is warping legal education to emphasize passing the bar exam, rather than promoting practical knowledge and legal skills, and that it disproportionately disadvantages lower-income and minority law students.
“Having an appropriate standard for who can become an attorney is important because it means we have the broadest number of people practicing law as possible,” said Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Monterey Bay, who chairs the Assembly Judiciary Committee.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfchronicle.com ...
Why even have a test?
I guess there’s still a lawyer shortage as for a while California only had one lawyer and that was Gloria Allred.
The article compares the scores from different states, as if the tests are the same?
Are they similar?
The money quote: “Critics also say ... that it disproportionately disadvantages lower-income and minority law students.”
It always boils down to class warfare with the Left.
Screw diversity; celebrate excellence!
Because it is much harder, California has never had reciprocity with other states. As a result, even though my bar exam was much harder, I can't practice in other states without a special temporary admission. All the Northeast states have reciprocity with each other, and all the other states have reciprocity with neighboring states.
So raise the required score everywhere else to match yours. We have too darned many liars...I mean lawyers, anyway!
I'm pretty sure that most liberals have no idea what an engineer does.
As far as Doctors... liberals just think that Doctors should work for minimum wage; just like their housekeepers and gardeners.
There were other black guys in my class who were very smart, and who have gone on to successful careers. Affirmative action has done them a disservice, if people assume they were affirmative action and not as smart as the other graduates of our school.
Definitely hurts the genuinely smart ones, who often get caught in another trap: The black high school grauduate qualified for a county college gets bumped up to the state school, the black student that qualifies for a state school gets bumped up to a more selective school, and those that genuinely qualify for the more selective school get bumped up to the Ivy League - and in ALL cases they end up being behind their classmates.
Those same programs make ALL of them suspect.
We can’t have a shrinking pool of democratic donors now can we?
Is it still in English?
The exam I bet is missing common sense.
Explains why anything from an attorney is so convoluted.
The malprac insurance premiums will skyrocket, but hey, insurance companies need to profit as well!
If the ones I have seen can get in, the standards are already low, and shouldn’t be lowered further.
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Proving that is so, is the fact that Congressman Hank (Guam is going to tip over) Johnson Passed a bar exam somewhere.
Cops, firefighters, army, teachers and now lawyers. What’s next to lower the standards of?
This is about minorities, who otherwise can’t pass it.
My pet peeve is that CA requires one to attend law school, whereas if one took the bar and passed, why should they have to mess with that?
One would even think that charging such challengers would be a good way for the State to raise revenue as relatively few would pass without some legal background.
But, still....
E. Shout “I’m fighting for your rights!”......
Good God no man! Every Tom, Dick and Harry would feel like a woman and Californ-I-A would jump right into that misogynist love fest and free for all. We are talking abolut snowflakes and lawyers right?
The engineering licensing exam is the same test nationwide. After the test the entity that created the test does a statistical analysis to sniff out any bad/ambiguious questions and eliminates those questions -refining the score is an appropriate manor. Then the results are handed over to the individual states and those states determine the cut off score. (I took it in New York, among the highest cutoff scores.). It theory you have reciprocity to get licensed in other states, THOUGH high cut off states can and do challenge reciprocity from low cut off states.
The problem with the bar exam is it’s base, partly, on State law. Therefore the test is unique in each State. There is no reciprocity for lawyers across state lines.
LOL! How low can they get?
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