One of the challenges of the bar exam, curses upon its name, is grabbing blindly at personal jurisdiction concepts you haven’t really thought about seriously since 1L year under timed conditions. This goes just as well for the elements of battery, the mirror image rule, and all the other stuff you need to show you know before you go on to do transactional work and never touch the stuff again. With careers and abilities to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt on the line, test takers pray for more time to prove their minimum compentency. Thankfully (?), a growing number of those prayers are being answered. The Wall Street Journal has coverage:
More aspiring young lawyers are asking for—and getting—extra time to finish the bar exam, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
In California, for instance, where more people take the bar than in any other state, 14% of the nearly 8,000 test takers last July received accommodations, up from 4% a decade earlier, according to the state bar. In Washington, D.C., the number has exceeded one in seven.
The development follows one already coursing through high schools and colleges: More students have diagnoses for disabilities like ADHD and receive extra time for classwork or the SAT. Now, as this generation enters the workforce, the phenomenon has reached professional licensing exams—and law firms are adapting, launching programs to support young associates with diagnoses.
I am generally all for accommodations — so much so that I think people who think they’re totally fine should still get check-ups every once in a while. One of the funny things about having a disability is that you don’t need to know you have one for it to impact you. Speaking personally, I thought that stop sign lights were supposed to look like Christmas lights before I got my first pair of glasses in kindergarten. I was lucky to get the help I needed early in my education; a member of my cohort found out that they needed glasses to see the board in law school! Their experience isn’t uncommon either. While it can be hard to pay attention to assigned readings, it shouldn’t be that hard; there’s a community of adults who found out that they have attention deficit disorders and the like as they were going about their studies. And they should get accommodations during the test, that’s what they’re there for, after all. But there is a concern that wealthy people who don’t actually need them are faking the funk to get extra time on their exams.
Perry Zirkel, a disability-law scholar and former Lehigh University dean, said the need for testing accommodations for truly disabled students is real, but he worries about unfairness. Savvy families that can pay thousands of dollars for private disability assessments, he said, gain advantages by gaming the system.
“This gives a benefit to those who already have power and privilege, and once they get good at it, they just simply keep playing the game,” Zirkel said.
If you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired of expecting meritocracy just to find veiled plutocracy, you aren’t the only one.
The numbers, though inconclusive, make for an interesting story:
At some affluent high schools today, more than 30% of students have disability diagnoses and receive testing accommodations. Some colleges reflect this surge: At Hampshire College, Pace University and Smith College, more than one in three students claim a disability, according to federal data. By contrast, less than 3% of students at Springfield Technical Community College, 20 miles from Smith, claim disabilities.
Does that mean that a third of students at Hampshire, Pace, and Smith are big fakers and community college attendees know some secret to keep disabilities at bay? Of course not! The numbers could be telling us that people with more monied backgrounds are better able to get diagnostics tests or even that they are more likely to disclose disabilities if they are aware of them. There aren’t any deductions to make, but the inference that students coming from money can fib test results and game the system in ways that less well-off students can’t is entirely plausible. And who knows! The rising trend might be explained in part by the brain damage virus we all pretend stopped so the market could pick back up.
If anyone is concerned that the rich can cheat the system to exploit time exam limits on the bar, I’d like to remind everyone that they can’t exploit the bar exam if it is abolished.
The Number of Law-School Grads Getting Extra Time for the Bar Exam Is Surging [Wall Street Journal]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at christopherrashadwilliams@gmail.com and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.
The post Rising Number Of Law Grads Getting More Time For The Bar Exam appeared first on Above the Law.
