Wednesday, November 22, 2006
It’s off to Seattle for the long weekend. We’re staying with our former pastor, who officiated at our wedding ceremony. We’ll be celebrating our six-month anniversary (though by now it’s closer to seventh) and having our six-month post-wedding review. Hope we pass. =P
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
There are currently 206,658 lawyers in California.
There were 174,430 dentists in the United States in 2004.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
I had to compare with other years. I couldn’t help myself. From the Metropolitan News-Enterprise:
The pass rate on the July 2006 general California bar exam was 51.8 percent, the highest in five years, the State Bar has reported.
The Committee of Bar Examiners, in a report issued late Friday, said that a total of 8,908 applicants—about 600 more than last year—took the test and 4,616 passed.
The pass rate last year, was 48.8 percent, up from 48.2 percent in 2004, which was the lowest rate for the summer examination in at least 18 years. The pass rate for 2003 was 49.4 percent; the last year in which a majority passed was 2002, when 50.5 percent achieved the required scores.
The 2001 pass rate was 56 percent.
I had hoped one friend who graduated with me and was taking the bar exam for the third time would pass, but she didn’t. As expected, the statistics for repeat-takers are disheartening:
Nineteen percent of repeat test-takers from in-state ABA-approved schools passed, compared with 17 percent of out-of-state applicants from such schools, seven percent from non-ABA schools accredited in California, and five percent from unaccredited schools. All of those figures are close or identical to last year’s numbers.
I am truly thankful I didn’t have to take the bar exam again. It doesn’t seem like a fair process. The grading can be just as arbitrary as law school course grades. I won’t be mean like the attorneys who complain that it’s so hard to pass the bar and, after passing, complain that the exam isn’t hard enough.
For any law students who might be reading this blog – if you’re not signed up for BarBri, you’d better sign up tomorrow! One of my classmates passed by buying the BarBri books for $900 and studying on his own (as opposed to $2400 for the class) but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are super disciplined and did well on law school essay exams.
I’m afraid law school classes don’t prepare you for the bar exam. They just don’t. Not any more than taking college-level chemistry, biology and physics prepares you for the MCAT. I don’t like the test prep industry, but y’gotta love it when the class lectures are delivered by nationally renowned law professors like Erwin Chemerinsky who make corny roll-your-eyes-and-groan jokes out of due process and equal protection.