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ABA Moves Forward on Revised Accreditation Standards
September 10th, 2016 / By Kyle McEntee
The ABA Section of Legal Education’s Standards Review and Data Policy Committee voted unanimously today to recommend that the Section’s Council approve revisions to Standards 501 and 316.
This comes on the heels of a multi-month notice and comment period, which saw a number of comments about the revisions.
The committee recommended that the revised standards be adopted as proposed.
By taking this action, the committee acknowledges that its primary responsibilities are protecting the public and students, not law schools.
The True Cost of the Georgia Bar Exam Error
September 8th, 2016 / By Renee Allen
To many, late October signals nothing more than fall in full swing, pumpkins, or costumes. In late May, we look forward to the Memorial Day holiday and long weekends. Yet, the last weekend of every October and May, Georgia bar takers anxiously await exam results. Some stalk the postman. Most spend the day refreshing a webpage, hoping and praying their name appears on the public pass list.
The stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are experienced by one who fails a state bar exam. Imagine discovering that a family member is alive after grieving their death for ten months. This week, 90 Georgia bar takers—45 from July 2015 and 45 from February 2016—were informed that the thing they grieved was, in fact, alive. Though their names failed to appear on that very public pass list, they indeed passed the Georgia bar exam.
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The Latest Change in the MBE
September 5th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
In the memo announcing results from the July 2016 MBE, Erica Moeser also notified law school deans about an upcoming change in the test. For many years the 200-question exam has included 190 scored items and 10 pre-test questions. Starting in February 2017, the numbers will shift to 175 scored items and 25 pre-test ones.
Pre-testing is an important feature of standardized exams. The administrator uses pre-test answers to gauge a question’s clarity, difficulty, and usefulness for future exams. When examinees answer those questions, they improve the design of future tests.
From the test-taker’s perspective, these pre-test questions are indistinguishable from scored ones. Like other test-makers, NCBE scatters its pre-test questions throughout the exam. Examinees answer each question without knowing whether it is a “real” item that will contribute to their score or a pre-test one that will not.
So what are the implications of NCBE’s increase in the number of pre-test items? The shift is relatively large, from 10 questions (5% of the exam) to 25 (12.5% of the exam). I have three concerns about this change: fair treatment of human research subjects, reliability of the exam, and the possible impact on bar passage rates. I’ll explore the first of these concerns here and turn to the others in subsequent posts.
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