A Former Law Examiner Comments On the NextGen Bar Exam
Final week, I wrote concerning the obvious efforts to make the NextGen Bar Examination far easier that the present examination. I obtained an electronic mail from an individual who labored as a state board of regulation examiners. With permission, I reproduce the e-mail, stripping any reference to the individual’s state.
I used to be an Assistant to the *** Board of Legislation Examiners when the *** Supreme Courtroom determined to undertake the UBE [Uniform Bar Exam]. The gross sales pitch for the UBE from the NCBE, as offered to the group of assistant bar examiners I used to be amongst, was threefold. First, it will not be any worse that the present bar examination. Second, it is going to be higher for the candidates as a result of they’ll have extra flexibility in deciding to which state they need to transfer. Third, all people else is doing it. None of these explanations helps such a dramatic change in public coverage because the adoption of the UBE and the abandonment of a state-specific essay check. In my view, I requested two questions: If the UBE shouldn’t be an affirmative enchancment over the established order, why ought to we alter? Why ought to the *** Supreme Courtroom elevate the candidates’ pursuits in residential flexibility over making certain that ***’s new legal professionals have demonstrated some degree of competence in *** regulation? I didn’t obtain passable solutions to both query. The Board and the opposite assistants appeared inclined to blindly defer to the so-called experience of the NCBE and customarily unwilling to think about the implications of the coverage change.
Within the years main as much as that travesty, we, the assistants, obtained annual coaching from NCBE [National Conference of Bar Examiners] on how one can write an essay query. The sum whole of that coaching was that we should always keep away from something that may make the essay troublesome. They skilled us to keep away from together with a number of points in a single query and to keep away from advanced factual eventualities. The Board and the Assistants utilized strict scrutiny to every essay query, eliminating something that may truly check the candidates’ skill to see fine-line distinctions and discern issue-critical info. In consequence, the essay questions that I wrote for the bar examination bore solely passing resemblance to the essay questions that I answered *** years earlier. When the query of adopting the UBE got here up, I opposed it as a result of it represented the elimination of the requirement that newly licensed legal professionals in *** start with a base degree of understanding of *** regulation. The Board and the NCBE consultant defined that memorization of primary authorized ideas was now not essential as a result of, in follow, legal professionals look issues up in a guide or on Westlaw anyway. To that, I requested if the check should not be an open guide check or if we should not simply revert to diploma privileges. What’s the function of a check, if it doesn’t require its takers to reveal mastery of the subject material? The one response was that solely minimal competence is required. However the could not outline what that was, besides to say minimal competence is minimal competence.
In my opinion, the UBE, and the *** Supreme Courtroom by its adoption, dropped the usual of “minimal competence” to an alarming degree. I couldn’t, in good conscience, proceed to serve and resigned. The NextGen Bar Examination represents the entire abandonment of competence as a typical. I sincerely hope that the *** Supreme Courtroom doesn’t undertake it. Sadly, they’ll most likely blindly defer to the “consultants” on the NCBE.
Even since *** adopted the UBE, I’ve been hoping that it might not show to be the catastrophe for skilled competence that I feared it might. And whereas the jury remains to be out on that time, the NCBE now needs to cast off any testing of the candidates’ talents to use the info to the regulation. Any state that adopts the NextGen bar examination could have deserted its skilled obligation to make sure that new legal professionals are minimally competent.
Extra state supreme courts ought to take a pause earlier than stumbling down this street.
