Law: An Exercise in Malpractice

One prominent bar exam discussion site described the bar exam as an exercise in malpractice. After all, any competent lawyer who doesn't wish to get sued will take the time to research a legal issue, not volunteer an answer from memory and under severe time pressure. Yet that's what thousands of test-takers have to undergo every year around the country.

That's probably why the actual passing requirements, at least in Florida, are so lax. You can usually miss a huge percentage of exam questions and still get through. For example, the MBE, the multistate portion of the bar exam, has an average raw score of around 2/3 correct. These MBE questions only have four answer choices. Using almost pure logic with only residual knowledge from law school classes, you can usually knock out one or two answer choices in any given question.

The trick becomes distinguishing between those last two or three choices, choices that are sometimes only separated by a very fine distinction. There really aren't too many ways around it - you just need to memorize the various rules.

That's what I'm doing all this weekend, since the bar is next week. Posting will be, ahem, light.