Bar Exam Pass Rates ...

I think I would have had to sit for it again. Got lazy and stupid. Never really hurt me, except some temp doc reviews I used to do in the summers insisted on nj bars, so I had to commute to the city.

 

Alan Page failed the Minnesota bar exam the first time he took it. Minnesota (at least back then) had a very high pass rate. No surprise, it didn't stop him from getting a job with a big law firm and eventually being elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

I remember the bar exam as being a test of endurance and how much crap I could rememorize from first year. I had three close friends in school. I thought two were a lock to pass, one was unlikely and I probably would squeak through. The only one of us who didn't pass the first time was one of the locks.

It isn't a test of how smart one is and, at least when I took it, had nothing to do with how well prepared one was to practice law. I have always credited the legal secretaries at my first job for teaching me how to do lawyer stuff like draft pleadings and orders.

 

The bar exam is stupid. It's one last way to haze law students, and also a way to keep Yale and Chicago from offering a curriculum entirely based upon the esoteric whims of its professors.

 

What's the bar exam, two (maybe three) days? It ain't got shit on the architectural registration exam. A solid week, with an all-day session on Friday. At that session, you're given a "program" (architect-speak for the scenario and the requirements) and you have to deliver some number of drawings, conveying certain things.

The good news is that even if you don't pass every part, you get to carry forward those parts you do pass. The bad news is that some of those parts are offered only once a year.

My wife had to take parts of it (including that Friday part) three times. The day that last letter came, she was at work when the mail was delivered. After work, we were heading out of town on vacation. I knew if she'd passed it would make for an even better trip, but if she'd flunked it'd be a huge downer. I thought about hiding the letter till we got back, but knew it'd eat at me all that week. So, I steamed it open and saw she'd passed. I was so excited I jumped up and down and clanked into a table, scraping one shin pretty badly. Didn't much care as I carefully resealed the envelope. Later, after we were gleefully on the road, she asked me about my shin. "I don't know how I did that. Must have been while I was loading the car."

Many years later, when I told her the truth, she laughed and callEd me a dumbass. She told me that had I asked her about it before the letter came, I'd have known that a thin envelope meant pass. A big, thick envelope meant fail, because it'd have the registration stuff for next time.

 

I learned very little for the bar, virtually nothing of the local section, despite going to school in-state. I took a prep course and studied. That's all it was. No relation to being ready to practice, little to what we just spent 3 years doing.

 

But you had some background in evidence, torts, property, etc. That's what I'm talking about.

But, yes, as I told someone while I was prepping: The dirty little secret of law school is revealed through the bar exam, which is that you can learn anything form secured transactions to criminal procedure in two days.

 

IMHO, just as the law school curriculum bears little resemblance to what I do day to day, the bar exam provides very little preparation as well (looking back 26 years). However, what it does, like law school, is test one's intelligence. Is t a weeding out process? Probably, but it does reveal one's abilities.

 

I've heard it described as the scouting combine for lawyers.

 

Quant, your experience is like college admissions notifications. Acceptance envelopes are thicker.

 

Actually, it's my wife's experience, and it's the reverse. Good news from the architecture exam comes in thin envelopes.

 

I hear you about bad news putting a damper on a trip. Dealing with that now.

 

I took the NY bar in Albany then drove back to Boston for the multistate and took Mass the following day. I knew I passed Massachusetts and that I did OK on the multistate but I was sure I failed NY. My NY results came first and I was utterly stunned to hear I'd passed. It had to be on the strength of the multistate. The crazy thing is that NY is the one I specifically prepped for (if you're taking two, they tell you to prep for the harder one) and when I went in and took it I felt completely unprepared. On the other hand, I felt completely prepared for Mass, even though the extent of my Mass- specific studying was looking the night before at the 1-page outline of distinctions that Bar-BRI gave out to those of us taking both states. The question is whether I should let NY lapse. It's been almost 20 years, and I have to pay a few hundred bucks every other year to keep it going (they don't have an inactive option for non-practicing lawyers like they do in Mass.) and I can state with almost 100 percent certainty that I will never practice law in NY.