Passing the bar will get easier
state agency.”
“The cut score is almost everything,” said Robert Anderson, a professor of corporate law at Pepperdine School of Law, who did a study of the 10 most difficult state exams in 2013. That study concluded that “California’s is probably the most difficult” in the country.
“If California changed its minimum score to 133, which is the same as New York’s, then I would say California’s is easy,” he added. (Delaware’s passing score is 145.)
Proponents for keeping the score argue that state bars have an ethical obligation to protect citizens from ill-prepared lawyers.
But deans of law schools, which have been buffeted by declining enrollments, say setting the bar licensure standard so high serves only to shield the profession by keeping out large numbers of qualified lawyers.
In February, 20 deans at American Bar Association-accredited California law schools wrote the state Supreme Court asking it to set a lower passing score. A legislative hearing considered the issue, and a study was set in motion. The state Supreme Court soon stepped in to assert its authority. In amendments adopted June 21 but released this week, the court said that it “must set the passing score of the examination.”
Cathal Conneely, a spokesman for the court, said Thursday that the justices would decide on the cut score after they received and considered the bar examiner committee report.
Although no date was set, the justices could make that decision in September and apply the new score retroactively for those taking the exam this month, according to a Twitter post on Tuesday by Joanna Mendoza, a trustee of the State Bar of California.
Some, including Fleming’s Fundamentals of Law, a California bar exam preparation business that tracks the debate over the certification score, called the court’s change “unprecedented.”
One flash point in the debate was an announcement in April that Whittier Law School, a halfcentury old and accredited by the American Bar Association, would close.
Bar passage rates at Whittier, long an avenue for disadvantaged students to become lawyers, had plunged in recent years. Its passage rate hovered in the routine statewide range, about 68 percent a few years ago, but fell to 22 percent last July.
Some critics complained that a number of Whittier graduates had scores high enough that they would have passed nearly every other state’s bar.
The California Supreme Court also said that it would appoint a majority of the 19-member bar examiners committee, which has been criticized for including nonlawyers and political appointees.
The court’s move to assert its authority was hailed by some legal professionals.
“I see this development as bringing the role of the California court in bar admissions into the mainstream,” said Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, a nonprofit in Madison, Wis., that constructs and scores the professional entrance exam.
“Virtually all state supreme courts exercise their inherent authority to regulate the admission of lawyers more closely than has appeared to be the case in California,” she said.