Broader bar exam may not improve pass rates

The pass rate on the Arkansas Bar Examination continues to deteriorate, and the Board of Law Examiners is about to join the Arkansas Bar Association in asking for significant changes in the way would-be lawyers are tested.

But there is no reason to think the changed test will improve pass rates, said Bill Bridgforth of Pine Bluff, the new chair of the Board of Law Examiners.

“It may not mean a single other person passes the bar. It may mean fewer pass the bar,” said Bridgforth, who stressed that the recommended changes and the declining pass rate are “totally unrelated.”

The results of the July exam released Aug. 23 revealed a pass rate of 49.3 percent, a new low for the summer test.

The 11-member Board of Law Examiners will file, probably early this month, a response to recommended changes suggested by the Arkansas Bar Association in a petition filed with the state Supreme Court. Bridgforth, while serving as a law examiner but before his recent appointment as chairman, chaired the task force that formulated the bar association’s recommendation.

While the wording is still in the works, Bridgforth said the response will agree with the bar’s recommendation that a new section — the “Multistate Practice Test” — be added to the state’s exam. The MPT consists of two 90-minute questions and tests the applicants’ knowledge of practice skills and organizational ability, not just knowledge of legal principals, Bridgforth said.

The additional length of the test created by the addition of the MPT would be offset somewhat by reducing the number of essay questions in the test from 11 to eight. The bar association recommended the same reduction in the number of essay questions. But, unlike the bar association, the Board of Law Examiners will not recommend that the time limit on each essay question be increased from 30 to 45 minutes, Bridgforth said.

The result will be a test that is longer than the current two-day exam and measures skills not currently addressed, he said. Much of the test will continue to be personally written and graded by members of the Board of Law Examiners.

Randy Philhours of Paragould, a member of the Board of Law Examiners, said the board will also suggest that the Supreme Court allow bar applicants to take the written portions of the exam on laptop computers using special software that can detect attempts to cheat.

The pass rate on the July exam was only slightly higher than the 48 percent pass rate recorded on the February 2000 exam, continuing a three-year downward trend.

The pass rate on the winter test has traditionally been significantly lower than on the summer exam, a phenomenon generally attributed to the fact that more of the law students who take the winter exam have already failed it at least once before. A previous failure is a strong predictor of continued failure on the test.

But in the July test, only 57.7 percent of 182 first-time test-takers passed, compared with 78 percent in July 1999 and 62.5 percent in February.

“This is the first exam where that potential explanation is not available,” said Chris Thomas, secretary to the Board of Law Examiners.

Neither Thomas, Bridgforth, Philhours nor fellow law examiner Judge Wiley Branton Jr. of Little Rock would offer any opinion on the downward trend in the pass rate.

But Bridgforth pointed out that “even with the pass rate of the last two years, Arkansas is still consistent with national pass rates,” which have been in the high 60s.

“One maybe could argue that our pass rate has been too high [in earlier years],” Branton said.

As for suggestions that the proposed changes are an attempt to “dumb down” the bar exam in order to raise pass rates, Branton said, “They certainly can’t accuse us of that on the last bar exam. I think there’s probably more criticism that we are too tough.

“It’s not an issue of trying to dumb down the test. It is an issue of trying to be fair and come up with an appropriate measure to determine who is fit and competent to practice law as opposed to who is not.”