Attorney survey will inform changes to bar exam content

The State Bar will survey newly licensed attorneys on the skills needed in their day-to-day jobs to evaluate the relevance of the bar exam’s content.

The working group overseeing the study, called the California Attorney Practice Analysis, met for the first time Wednesday. The study is expected to be completed by December 2019. It will provide foundational empirical data from which the State Bar will consider changes to the exam’s content, format and cut score.

The study is funded by a $515,000 grant from the AccessLex Institute and will be conducted by licensure company Castle Worldwide.

“This project will give us more current and relevant data and help us better determine whether adjustments may be needed on the content or other aspects of the bar exam,” said State Bar executive director Leah Wilson in a statement.

As part of the study, attorney focus groups will help form the categories of questions on a survey. Lawyers within their first five years of practice will then be surveyed on the skills and knowledge required in their daily tasks.

In addition to the one-time survey, the project will use an experience sampling method, in which respondents are asked several times a day about the task currently being performed, in an effort to collect real-time, comprehensive data.

At the working group’s first meeting, members debated whether the survey, and consequently the exam, should focus more on skills, such as drafting and interviewing, or knowledge, such as of contracts or criminal law. At the group’s next meeting in February, it will continue the discussion and begin to form the basis for survey questions.

In 2017, the state Supreme Court decided to maintain the existing cut score, the second highest in the nation. Based on recommendations from studies conducted in 2016 and 2017 in response to declining bar pass rates, the bar did not seek immediate changes to the content of the exam.

Exam administrations in February and July, however, resulted in record low pass rates of 27.4 and 40.7 percent, respectively. Earlier this month, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said the court is waiting for the results of two State Bar studies, this practice analysis study and a soon-to-be concluded law school student performance study, before reconsidering the exam’s pass score.