Law Prof. Nancy Rapoport had an insightful concise posting on her blog about the ramifications of Bar Review, Bar/Bri and its corollary to the effects of the Bush administration’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy.
First off, it drives me insane that Bar/Bri has a virtual monoply on the bar review business and has been squeezing law students for as much as they can get. And yet we have no solution inspite of a class action that was brought against them. And good luck trying to find a legally competent law student that is willing to test your theory that they don’t need Bar/Bri to pass the bar. Half the time I think Bar/Bri is fear, like Kaplan, Kumon and Network news: If you don’t take Bar/Bri you’ll fail, if your child doesn’t go to Sylvan tutoring he’ll fall behind in elementary school and will be selling ice-cream out of truck; stock up on duct tape for when the hurricane comes or your puppy and child will fly away.
What saddens me most about bar review and the bar exam in general is that law schools now come to almost inherently rely on those classes to fill in the gaps. I have more than once heard, law professors & administrators say ‘it’s okay if you don’t take this class, you’ll learn all you need to know in bar review.’ First off, if we don’t need to know this why is it on the bar in the first place (anyone listening State Bar????) and second if law schools start to supplant their teaching to bar review, have law schools lost their way?
Is this a gross case of pedagogical passing of the buck??
For my engineering licensing exam for example, we had two parts to that beast. We had a general exam where we were expected to know some imporatant principles across the board of engineering disciplines. Therefore we were expected to know the basisc of mechanics and some chemical engineering but we weren’t expected to advanced structural analysis. In our second section we were asked to pick an area of engineering to be tested on or take another general exam which went a little further into every area. Now I know that we won’t exclude areas of law to test in the bar exam but obviously there is some disconnect with the state bar ( which is comprised of nothing but lawyers ) and law schools ( similarly occupied by lawyers ) with one group deeming a certain tenet of law important and the other group disagreeing. Obviously we’ve got a lacuna in communication. Is that really so hard to resolve?
