When you can't meet your own standards, lower your standards
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( Apologies to Snotty Philistine — I didn’t see your comment until after I posted this)
The bar exam is a pretty simple test of minimal competence, so it’s not surprising that some of our most illustrious politicians couldn’t make the grade, including Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Robert Kennedy Jr. Those personages all found success eventually, but what about the abject illiterates who don’t have other options available to them? Help is on the way.
Washington joins other woke states like Oregon and drops its bar exam requirement
Prospective lawyers will no longer have to pass the bar exam to work in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders authorizing alternative pathways to licensing.
The exam "disproportionately and unnecessarily blocks marginalized groups from entering the practice of law" and is "at best minimally effective for ensuring competent lawyers," the Bar Licensure Task Force determined.
How large is that disparity? Huge:
According to data released Tuesday by the American Bar Association's Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, 87.65% of the white candidates who took a bar exam for the first time in 2020 passed. For people of other races or ethnicities, the first-time pass rate ranged from 66.28% to 79.92%.
According to the data, in 2020 there were 19,453 first-time test-takers who were white. Among other first-time test-takers:
The pass rate for Asians was 79.92% out of a total of 1,972 candidates.
The pass rate for Native Americans was 78.02% out of a total of 182 candidates.
The pass rate for Hawaiians was 77.5% out of a total of 40 candidates.
The pass rate for Hispanics was 75.59% out of a total of 3,638 candidates.
The pass rate for Blacks was 66.28% out of a total of 2,328 candidates.
That’s nationally; some states like California do far worse. Despite lowering its minimum passing score from 1440 to 1390, minorities continue to flunk : Racial Disparities Persist In California Bar Exam Pass Rates: White: 72%, Asian: 66%, Hispanic: 61%, Black: 31%
Black and Hispanic law school graduates saw marked year-over-year improvements in pass rates on California’s February 2021 bar exam, according to statistics released Wednesday by the state bar.
Thirty-five percent of African American test-takers who sat for the exam for the first time in February passed, up from 17.6% the previous year. The percentage of Hispanic test-takers who passed rose from 25.2% to 45.4%. The overall pass rate for first time test-takers was 53.1%
Despite the improved pass rates, a significant disparity still persists between white test-takers and applicants of color. Almost 69% of white test-takers who sat for the exam for the first time taking the test for the first time passed. [Pass rates for first-time test-takers from California ABA-accredited Law Schools were: White: 72.4%, Asian: 66.0%, Hispanic: 60.9%, and Black: 30.8%.]
The numbers reflect an across-the-board, year-over-year increase, which comes after a California Supreme Court order last summer reducing the passing, or cut, score from 1440 to 1390 starting with the October 2020 exam.
(California’s abysmal pass rate is due at least in part to the quality of its law schools: The state hosts a large number of non-ABA-accredited law schools: “CALS” and “unaccredited”, neither of which require entrance examinations or test scores), and their graduates drive down the pass rate considerably.)
For further reading, if interested, Wikipedia has a decent history of the Bar Exam:
The first bar examination in what is now the United States was administered in oral form in the Delaware Colony in 1783. From the late 18th to the late 19th centuries, bar examinations were generally oral and administered after a period of study under a lawyer or judge (a practice called "reading the law"). The trend in the 19th century was toward more casual examinations and options for exemptions.
After the emergence of law schools in the 1870s onward, bar examinations became even less common as many states offered diploma privilege to local law school graduates. Between 1890 and 1920, most states replaced oral examinations with written bar examinations. Written examinations became commonplace as lawyers began to practice in states other than those where they were trained.
In 1921, the American Bar Association formally expressed a preference for required written bar examinations in place of diploma privilege for law school graduates. In subsequent decades, the prevalence of diploma privilege declined deeply, and bar examinations became a standard requirement of admission to the bar. By 1980, all but five states required written bar examinations; as of 2020, only Wisconsin allows J.D. graduates of accredited law schools to seek admission to the state bar without passing a bar examination.
