By Stephanie Schorow
innovation
Return to Table of Contents
Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
winter 2023
Yes. There has been a lot of movement in reimagining the bar exam and the licensing of lawyers. With regard to the bar, there is an increasing recognition that it covers so much material that it has essentially become a memorization exam rather than an assessment of the knowledge and skills that lawyers need to practice law.
The National Conference of Bar Examiners itself has recognized this problem and is creating a “next gen” bar exam that is expected to be administered starting in 2026. The exam will cover much less doctrine and will focus more on assessing a wider array of skills than the traditional exam. I was fortunate to serve as a member of the NCBE’s Content Scope Committee and was able to offer my input on what topics should be covered on the new exam.
Another related development is that states are increasingly looking at methods for licensing lawyers that don’t involve the bar exam at all. One example is New Hampshire’s Daniel Webster Scholars Program, which offers a curricular pathway to licensure. The idea is that, during law school, students are placed into a specialized curricular track where they are required to develop far more practice skills than is typical in law school. If students satisfactorily complete the rigorous, practice-based curriculum, they are automatically admitted to the bar without taking an exam. Other states are experimenting with what is known as supervised practice pathways, where graduates practice under the close supervision of a licensed lawyer to demonstrate, via various benchmarks, that they have developed the skills necessary for licensure.
In October 2020, you told Bloomberg Law that jurisdictions would start considering new options for admitting lawyers to the bar. Do you think this prediction has come true?
These two developments are closely related. Standardized tests, whether the LSAT or the bar exam, favor those who already have the resources to take the extra time to prepare for high-stakes exams, including hiring tutors. The tests also benefit those who have had a variety of educational advantages throughout their lives that don’t necessarily correlate to being an excellent lawyer. We need other ways of teasing out who is going to be successful.
The ABA recently announced a possible proposal that would allow law schools to admit students without any standardized test scores. Is this development related to the concerns involving the bar exam?
People like numbers and believe that they offer an objective measure of quality. If you can say this person got an LSAT score of 160 or somebody got a score of 270 on the bar exam, we want to put weight on it. When you move away from a standardized test, there is a tendency to think that we are making subjective judgments about quality and that we will be admitting people to law school and the legal profession who don’t have the capacity to practice law.
In fact, standardized tests—whether the LSAT or the bar exam—are valuable only to the extent that they are actually telling us who is capable of succeeding in law school and in law practice. Although the tests do have some predictive value, we also know that they are quite incomplete. I have met many people who have done extremely well on standardized tests and are not particularly good lawyers. I’ve also met many lawyers, extremely successful, who told me how poorly they’ve done on standardized tests and how they needed to take the bar exam multiple times before they passed.
We are missing out on promising talent by relying too heavily on standardized tests. This is not about watering down the requirements; it’s about finding promising talent that might otherwise be overlooked.
What is the barrier that’s holding back change?
To be clear, we shouldn’t throw standardized tests out the window. They’re still important, and they should still play an important role in our admissions process. But we should also make sure that the standardized tests are serving the purpose that we intend.
Suffolk has had a longstanding commitment to giving promising students from every possible background and circumstance an opportunity to pursue a transformational legal education, so we have a special obligation to ensure that we are not artificially precluding people from pursuing that opportunity by relying too heavily on standardized tests.
We’ll certainly be studying the question going forward, all in service of the ultimate goal of Suffolk Law’s mission of attracting and admitting talented students and giving them a life-changing educational opportunity.
If the ABA drops the requirement that law schools must use a standardized test, will Suffolk continue to require it?
