The New Bar Exam Puts DEI over Lawyer Competence

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-bar-exam-puts-dei-over-competence-ncbe-family-law-schools-9c0dd4e8

by forgingahead • 3 years ago

31 25 3 years ago

saxonww3• 3 years ago

hrunt• 3 years ago

Lately, these archive links have been broken for me. DNS is not resolving for them. Is anyone else seeing this issue? I've seen it in the past few days with both archive.is and archive.ph

saxonww3• 3 years ago

These links will not resolve if you are using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1, etc.).

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-...

pierat2• 3 years ago

Standard republican newspaper fear-mongering. This is classic Rupert Murdoch culture war crap guaranteed to rile up the base.

There's also quite a few articles, all with hard repblican bent, that are saying the same thing. I wonder why? /sarcasm

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/05/20/justice-mitchell-alabam...

Basically, do your own research, rather than listen to these conspiratorial rags. Or at least acknowledge their obvious bias.

orangepurple• 3 years ago

I just read your article and the situation is every bit as bad as the other poster makes it sound.

georgeplusplus2• 3 years ago

WSJ is not predominantly right leaning.

The only thing that wreaks of bias is you.

At least acknowledge how dismissive you are to this.

ModernMech2• 3 years ago

Isn't the WSJ owned by Rupert Murdoch, who just had to pay almost a billion dollars to settle a lawsuit about one of his media companies knowingly, repeatedly, gratuitously lying on air? Why should anyone trust anything coming from his media empire ever again? They won't even admit fault or commit to changing their practices.

saxonww3• 3 years ago

This is an opinion piece, so I wouldn't necessarily attach the organization's journalistic credibility to it.

uxp100• 3 years ago

This is in WSJ Opinion. It’s right leaning.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

Note that this is in the Journal’s opinion section.

georgeplusplus2• 3 years ago

This is really important to talk about. Its happening at my workplace too. It matters less about what you did and what DEIA checkpoints you ticked to move up in the company. Doing something above and beyond your call of duty gets you less opportunity and recognition than organizing a woman in coding meeting. Can't speak up because we will be fired or moved off projects.

George83728• 3 years ago

The idea seems to be that any differences in group outcomes must be eliminated—even if the only way to achieve this goal is to water down the test.

Can somebody explain to me how watering down tests, to lower the competence bar, could possibly address differences in group outcomes? Obviously these different groups don't have different levels or distributions of competence, so how is one meant to relate to the other?

On top of all that, an American Civil Liberties Union representative provided conference attendees with a lecture on criminal-justice reform in which he argued that states should minimize or overlook would-be lawyers’ convictions for various criminal offenses in deciding whether to admit them to the bar.

This part I get. Cops are biased and arrest some groups at a higher rate than others. A prior criminal conviction for smoking dope shouldn't have any bearing on the quality of a lawyer, when the competition also smoked dope and simply didn't get caught. This all makes sense. But watering down the tests? What the hell...

ModernMech2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure the author has established the test is watered down, or that the current test produces competent lawyers. Looking at the cadre of lawyers who were the principal architects of the 2020 legislative-coup (separate from the insurrection, the legislative coup involved lawyers interpreting the constitution to mean that the VP could choose from a slate of electors, all illegal), it occurs to me that maybe we should focus more on creating ethical, socially conscious lawyers rather than the kind we've been producing for decades, who have failed the legal profession.

Kaibeezy• 3 years ago

Uniform Bar Exam should be capitalized, as it is a product of NCBE, a wealthy private non-profit with over $120 million in reserves. Any organization that could fight that headwind and build credibility with the state supreme courts could create a bar exam too. Anyone seriously interested in doing so (VC?), let’s talk.

NCBE is, as part of this project, also jettisoning the existing software providers and procedures for taking a bar exam. Yes, 3/4 of them have had high profile flameouts, but overall the laptop bar exam has been a quiet success for 20+ years. All those details will be lost.

Complete overhaul of the bar exam — pedagogically, technologically, procedurally — in one go. What could be behind that decision?

anonymousiam• 3 years ago

Also discussed here: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/05/20/justice-mitchell-alabam...

A_D_E_P_T2• 3 years ago

The article doesn't really indicate _how_ the new exam puts DEI over competence.

All it says is that they've made the test easier, and...

perhaps the biggest concern is the NCBE’s use of the NextGen exam to advance its “diversity, fairness and inclusion” agenda. Two of the organization’s stated aims are to “work toward greater equity” by “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” and to “promote greater diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.” The NCBE reinforces this message by touting its “organization-wide efforts to ensure that diversity, fairness, and inclusion pervade its test products and services.”
What does all this mean—and how does it have any relation to the law? Based on the diversity workshop at the NCBE conference, it means putting considerable emphasis on examinees’ race, sex, gender identity, nationality and other identity-based characteristics. The idea seems to be that any differences in group outcomes must be eliminated—even if the only way to achieve this goal is to water down the test. On top of all that, an American Civil Liberties Union representative provided conference attendees with a lecture on criminal-justice reform in which he argued that states should minimize or overlook would-be lawyers’ convictions for various criminal offenses in deciding whether to admit them to the bar.

...That's a lot of chaff, not much wheat. Basically, the ACLU hopes that it might become easier for people with prior convictions to join the bar.

There's nothing that says, e.g., that any ethnic group is prioritized, or that there are quotas.

So it seems like a bunch of hand-wringing. "Oh no, our regulatory moat is being eroded!"

That aside, there are two points that might be worth consideration:

1. Any changes won't kick in until 2026, and Chat-GPT is already such an outstanding lawyer that the field might be (and hopefully will be) irreversibly changed by then.

2. There has been a tremendous amount of lawyer overproduction in recent decades, so arguably the test should be made harder -- or, preferably, legal services should be democratized, as is already the case in small claims court, and all men should have standing to represent themselves and others in court. When every man is a lawyer, no man is a lawyer. (Rome, Greece, etc. were very much like this. "Lawyer" wasn't a profession; it was a temporary role or a form of community service.) Arizona has been making baby steps in this direction, if I'm not mistaken.

thesuperbigfrog• 3 years ago

> Chat-GPT is already such an outstanding lawyer that the field might be (and hopefully will be) irreversibly changed by then.

ChatGPT cannot tell fact from fiction.

Anyone who would trust the current versions to replace their doctors or lawyers is foolish.

orbz• 3 years ago

ChatGPT is definitely not going to replace lawyers, doctors and other specialized knowledge workers.

The custom trained LLM models based on the proof of concept that ChatGPT was absolutely will augment them however. If used correctly you’re going to have a single human knowledge worker with the output of a dozen similarly trained peers with higher accuracy.

A_D_E_P_T2• 3 years ago

With simple guidance, you wouldn't believe how good Chat-GPT is at drafting motions, writing complaints, writing responses to complaints, writing patent applications, sorting through documents in discovery, etc. That's 90% of the legal profession, right there.

The "written" component of lawyering, which is effectively everything that cannot be done face to face, is right in Chat-GPT's wheelhouse.

It's not perfect. It lacks in research capabilities, so it needs its hand held from time to time. And it isn't great at thinking up "creative" strategies -- but this is arguably a feature, not a bug. Creative lawyering, like creative accounting, tends to be a net societal harm.

leaving• 3 years ago

You folks need to break your very bad habit of using acronyms without expansion. First you must spell it out; then you may use the acronym.

Not that it would be a valid excuse, but the article never even explains what "DEI" is. In fact, the word "equity", which may be the "E" in DEI, only appears once in the article, and never as an expansion of the acronym.

The only thing in the article that could be construed to be an explanation of the acronym is the phrase, “diversity, fairness and inclusion”, which could presumably be abbreviated "DFI", not "DEI".

I don't know why unexplained acronyms have crept into daily usage, but the only way it improves communication is by telegraphing "I'm too cool for words". This tells me a lot more about the writer than the subject.

Ad maiorem DEI gloriam, please expand your acronyms the first time you use them!

ss108• 3 years ago

The bar exam is stupid and a joke anyways, and is not a test or predictor of "lawyer competence"

MollyRealized• 3 years ago

Attempt to sift out those facts within the op-ed:

* The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) is planning a nationwide overhaul of the bar exam, which they call the "NextGen" exam, planned to roll out in 2026.

* Certain topics, including family law and trusts and estates, won't be tested at all in the NextGen exam.

* The exam will introduce new client-interaction exercises, the details of which are currently unclear.

* The NCBE has outlined an agenda that includes advancing "diversity, fairness and inclusion" and working towards greater equity by eliminating any aspects of the exam that could contribute to performance disparities.

* The NCBE's efforts aim to promote greater diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.

* The NCBE's diversity workshop at the conference put emphasis on examinees' race, sex, gender identity, nationality and other identity-based characteristics.

* The NCBE is encouraging an approach where states minimize or overlook potential lawyers' criminal convictions in deciding whether to admit them to the bar.

* The first graduates to take the new exam will be students entering law school in the fall of the same year it comes online, 2026.

* If implemented, law schools would have to begin adjusting their curricula to match the subjects tested by the new evaluation.

* The NCBE is expected to disclose more information about the content, scope, and scoring of the NextGen exam before the start of the next academic year.

The New Bar Exam Puts DEI over Lawyer Competence

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