How Bar Exam Essays Score

You’ll spend about two months, take dozens of practice essays, and spend a good two or three days on the bar exam. That’s a lot of time to spend on the exam, and how much time do you think the raters will spend reading your essays? Three to five minutes per trial, maximum.

At least once before the exam, it is a good idea to try the exercise of putting yourself in the shoes of the person who will carry your destiny:

1) Set the timer to five minutes

2) Click here to go to a sample essay response on the calbar website

3) Read a real essay exam answer

4) Come back when you’re done

See, it actually doesn’t take that long to read an answer. Note that the exam answer you just read is a ‘model approval’ answer, and believe me when I say this, it’s an incredibly well-written answer! You don’t need to be even close to writing like that to pass. But hopefully, you’ll see how CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT it is that your essays are structured, organized, legible, and use headings (that topic is for a different post, coming soon). For a grader to complete their essay in this short amount of time, it will need to be highly readable.

Now, if you really want to feel like a bar exam grader, repeat the exercise dozens of times at 10:00 p.m. You’ll be in a very similar situation to what the grader has to do, after spending a full day at work. , back home to his family and now he’s trying to meet his reading deadline of 100 bar exam essays this week. You don’t have much time and you need to be very efficient and methodical in your reading. The easier you make it for him, the better.

Bar Exam Qualification Process

Here is a rough review of the process raters go through when grading your exam.

Bar Exam Raters are attorneys who have passed the bar exam and signed up to be raters. They are paid a stipend (which is probably much less than what they earn at their jobs).

After taking the bar exam, a group of raters get together and take the same essay you just took. They write a complete essay, including all the rules and analysis. The raters then get together, look at what each of them wrote, and create a ‘model’ answer.

Next, the raters gather with the student responses, and each will rate the same student response, giving their opinion on what the response should receive. They will then compare their opinions, discuss the reasons and, after several repetitions, give a breakdown of how many points each problem is worth and a score of what they think the test answer would be worth.

They then score a second essay, running it through the same scoring process and model they had created for the first essay, recalibrating any necessary point adjustments. Eventually, they find a response template and scoring system that all raters can use. Although scoring may seem subjective to each rater, believe it or not, if fifteen raters are scoring the same exam using this calibrated point system, each rater will generally be within five points of each other. This is to ensure fairness, equality, and eliminate personal subjectivity among anyone scoring the exams. Any qualifier whose scores are consistently five points above all other qualifiers is generally eliminated.

In California, if your total score for the achievement test, essays, and MBE is greater than 1440, you pass! If your score is below 1390, you do not pass. If you fall between these two numbers, a different set of raters regrades your exam. Hopefully you are awarded more points as you will still need to hit the 1440 mark to pass. For more information on the calibration process and reclassification system, click here.

I hope this gives you some comfort and gives you an idea of ​​what your test will go through after you finish uploading or turning it in on test day.

Good luck in passing your bar exam!

“This name appears on the pass list”