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Asked about cognitive ability, Trump brings up Harris' bar-exam results
(www.usatoday.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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According to a friend of mine in California who went through the process. Grading on the bar exam there is simple. On every test, 50% pass and 50% fail. You either make the cut or retake the test. Somewhere around 70-80% of people fail to pass on the first try if I recall correctly.
He was not much fun to be around when he finished law school and was cramming for the bar. He passed it on the 2nd attempt.
70-80% fail on their first try, and on every test, 50% pass and 50% fail. ???
So a bunch of people who fail on their first attempt, and they pass the second (or third) time. So, of all people who eventually pass, 70-80% took the test twice or more.
Corollary: in any given exam, 20-50% of all exam takers are there for the second (or more) time. So the total number of first-timers is considerably less than 100% and I'm guessing that their failure rate is greater than 50%.
A bunch fail on their first attempt, fewer fail it on subsequent attempts because they know what the test looks like and how to prep for it. If a test has a 50% pass rate but some of the test takers have taken it before and are more likely to pass, then the first time test takers will fail more than 50% of the time. Basically, the people who are on their second or third attempt will skew the results against first time test takers, because they’re eating up all of those “pass” spots.
California is considered to be a more difficult bat exam that other states because it has a notoriously low passage rate. Note, there are some caveats to that because California is the only state where ANYONE can take the exam, JD or no, so that obviously has a depressive effect on pass rates. Moreover, you are less likely to pass all bar exams the more you retake and the global pass rates for the exam don't factor in retakers, so it's a weird stat that is not as informative as a lot of people make it.
Nevertheless, bar exams (and really almost all exams in law school) are curved. It isn't targeting a 50/50 rate, I believe, but the stat you're looking at is total pass rate per exam versus pass rate for first time test takers. You get many repeats per exam.