Hopeless

Today, I received an anonymous comment from someone, saying:

“Is there anything I can do without passing the bar but having graduated from law school? I’m going to fail and am not sure what to do next…”

How awful it must be to feel this way – I can only hope this person is vastly under-estimating his or her ability, but the fact remains that about 50% of applicants will begin to fail the California Bar Examination in about 16 hours – not a very comforting thought for anyone…

If you don’t pass, you can always take it again – or take it in another state. Every single other state has a higher pass-rate (and presumably an easier test) compared to California. Or be glad that you’re not going to be a lawyer for the rest of your life – you should know by now that it’s not the greatest thing in the world.

For those of you about to take the Bar, remember: just make shit up!

blog criticism

I am shocked to see how snippy and quick-to-judge some of this blog’s readers are!

Like the rest of them, I have been busy studying for the bar, which is t-minus five days, 22 hours at this point. And yet they clamor for essay statistics and predictions…

Truth be told, I would have posted the data long ago, but I lost it (somehow). And I haven’t found the time or inclination to do the work again. Perhaps I will today…

fastest-growing bar study blog!

Hooray! This blog went from little to quite big – made #31 on wordpress’ list of growing blogs! Check it out: http://botd.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/growing-blogs-441/

*EDIT* As of July 26, it made #22 on the list!

Yesterday, I performed a statistical analysis of the subjects covered on the last twenty-six California Bar Exams, and determined which topics were most likely to be featured on this year’s exam.

I will probably post these results soon… but actually, one of my close friends and bar study-mates recommended that I not post them, so as to keep the secret between us amigos, I suppose…

I know what you’re thinking: it’s stupid to try to outguess the bar examiners. Au contraire, I will tell you! Whereas it is stupid to ignore certain subjects for any reason, it is actually a great idea to determine the statistical likelihood of any particular subject appearing on the bar, and then factor in a number of other considerations (such as whether it’s been untested for a while, or whether it’s a subject that’s getting a scope increase, aka evidence and civ pro), and then tailoring your studying to put greater emphasis on the subjects with a greater likelihood of appearance.

Incidentally, and to my dismay, the statistics predict that Criminal Law will not be featured on our upcoming exam…

Bar encouragement

Talk about what matters.

That is all.

xoxohth

Looks like the gang over at xoxohth got wind of this blog…

It would be really great if they could do as Sarge asked, and create an orderly thread listing peoples’ MBE raw scores vs. percentiles. That might help shed some light on whether my calculations were on target, but one poster reports 142 = 96%ile, which seems to bear out correctly!

In other news, I’m going to need to finish reading Wills today… and then re-read Wills… dammit…

And in even other news,

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Suck it, AACS!

Performance Test

So, I did a performance test this evening, and it confirmed once again my suspicion that it is designed to exclude corpses from the list of licensed attorneys.

Of course, it’s rather unfair of me to say this – I can see how a performance test would be a formidable challenge to someone who had never been presented with a case file like this. But, for those who went through law school taking advanced legal writing and trial advocacy courses, and got practical experience through jobs or internships where they worked on actual cases (and performed many of the same tasks featured on the performance test), the thing should be a cakewalk, as long as you can focus and “get her done” in three hours.

It’s certainly not the most fun thing one could do on one’s Tuesday and Thursday afternoons – but one should be able to knock this thing out of the park with some concentration!

Statistics, reverse-engineered and used for MBE percentile calculation

(This should all be prefaced with “as far as I can tell…”)

It turns out that with a data set consisting of pairs of scores and percentiles, you can abuse a normal percentile calculator to approximate the percentile of any particular score (and vice-versa).

Problem is, I have a rather pitiful data set to go from – only six pairs:

• 141 = 95th percentile
• 140 = 94th percentile
• 131 = 86th percentile
• 130 = 85th percentile
• 129 = 84th percentile
• 108 = 47th percentile

However, from this we can (roughly) extrapolate the average of the set: somewhere a bit above 108.

Additionally, since 95% of scores will be within two standard deviations, we can approximate the standard deviation. If 141 is the 95th percentile, it’s not a stretch to think that 148 is approximately the 97th percentile. This means that 47% of all scores are between our mean and 145, and the standard deviation would be half of this number.

Our mean, remember, is somewhere a bit above 108 – maybe it’s 114? So, a standard deviation of 16.5 might work well. If we plug in these numbers, we see that it seems to match our data points pretty accurately.

I guess my conclusion is that 148 raw should be about the 97th percentile. Which was pretty much my conclusion before I did any math at all other than just looking at the other data points and thinking for about two seconds.

Or maybe not… um… I feel pretty sleepy…

Results of the Bar/Bri simulated MBE

As you probably already know, I am not (and would never be) in Bar/Bri. In fact, if in any other dimension I were to be in Bar/Bri, it would only be for the purpose of participating in a class-action suit against their piece-of-shit monopolistic asses. That having been said, there is a mighty-fine woman in my life who IS taking Bar/Bri and, as a result, I was able to take the same simulated MBE test that all those thousands of others took in the past weeks.

I took it today under conditions (and certainly time-constraints) that reasonably imitated actual testing conditions. Result: 148 raw.

Having refrained from math classes since calculus back in high school, I have no idea if it’s possible to extrapolate a percentile from this when the only data I have is a limited number of other raw scores with attached percentiles. But, I know that 141 is in the 95th percentile. I think the main lesson here is that I should probably do some essays.

In other news, rumor has it that negligence will be tested on this July’s California bar…

Additionally, I’ve been hearing it float around (and not just in my own head) that the Performance Exams are really just a tool for excluding corpses from the bar.

Lastly, “Death to the grain plutocrats and their government allies!”

Bar pass statistics

People are freaking out – and they are people who needn’t be freaking out. I’ll be discussing the bar exam pass statistics complied by the State Bar of California after the July ‘06 exam results were in – things shouldn’t be much different now.

The stats themselves are here.

Here is a list of the types of people who actually should be very worried:

• Repeaters – you pass at a rate of under 15%; I hate to tell you, but you’re basically screwed.
• Graduates of law schools without ABA-approved schools – overall, your pass rate is 23%.
  And even worse, if you’re a repeater in this category, your pass rate is under 6%.

Here is a list of the categories of people who actually do not need to worry so much:

• First-timers from ABA- & CA-accredited schools: your pass rate is 73.7% – and if you’re white, this rises to 79%!
• First-timers from out-of-state ABA approved schools: you still have a 68.3% chance.
• Slight advantage to males.

Sleep easy tonight!

Is it just me?

Is it just me, or are a lot of the rest of you “not particularly worried” about this whole business?